Crowbar Corner is a music studio with a unique collection of instruments both vintage and modern, high end monitoring and I/O, focusing on electronic music. It has been the laboratory for acclaimed electronic music releases on labels such as Four Tet's Text Records, Hyperdub and Honey Soundsystem, as well as cutting edge sound art and large scale electro-acoustic performances at the Gray Area Theater.
Members of Crowbar Corner are currently: Ryan Smith, Marc Kate, Jacob Sperber. Crowbar Corner, with Gray Area and ZERO1, have also partnered up to provide the Grand Creative Resource Library, putting creative power into the hands of fellow community members who want to express themselves in innovative new ways.
A long time touring musician with the band Caribou, Ryan also produces futuristic techno music under the moniker Taraval, makes modular ambient music in the live electronic duo Bathing, and has a long running collaboration with Jeremy Greenspan of the Junior Boys, both producing experimental electronic music and running the label Geej. He produced a collaborative performance of a 1973 graphics score by avant-garde composer Frank McCarty called Tactus Tempus, a controlled improvisational process for 9 audio visual performers live at Gray Area. He is an expert level user of Ableton and Max For Live, VCV Rack (virtual modular synthesis environment), numerous hardware instruments and an accomplished guitar player.
Originally trained as a filmmaker and visual artist, San Francisco based producer and composer Marc Kate applies cinematic and conceptual approaches to music and audio production.
As a response to the tech culture assault on San Francisco (and the world), Kate takes up the tools of the trade — computers and synthesis — and slyly counter-attacks, imbuing humanity precisely where humanity is being evacuated. He creates a counterpoint to tech’s speed and greed — slow, immersive, materialist, drifting.
But Kate also draws from his history in San Francisco’s synth-punk and techno scenes, emerging to create stripped-down, static experiments in synthesis.
He leads the electronic post-punk band Never Knows and has released solo material on over two dozen labels including Jacktone, Loöq, Air Texture and Dragon’s Eye Recordings and his own imprints Untitled & After and Failing Forms. In 2018, he formed the Synth Doom project My Heart, an Inverted Flame with drummer Andee Connors.
