a female Faust (she/her) has collaborated with World Entertainment War, IAO Core, & the Ambient Temple of Imagination (with the latter giving rise to "A Feast of Fire," a song based on her translation of the last verse of Goethe's Faust).

what a female Faust is includes (in no particular order): a Taino & African & Italian Jew from the South Bronx; an Enochian ceremonialist; a scholar; a divinatrix & augur; a scientist; an herbalist; an alchemist; a poly freak; a citizen journalist; a sometime hacker; a feral mathematician; a damned good cook; a citizen journalist; an activist fiercely committed to peace; a poet first, last, & always.

Experimental and extreme sounds since 2009. Testing the limits of sanity thru audio/video mischief.

Carl Stone is one of the original pathfinders in live computer music, and has used laptop in live performance since 1986. He has been hailed by the Village Voice as “the king of sampling.” and “one of the best electronic composers living in (the USA) today.”. RELIX has written that “Stone makes music that can hit your ear holes like a DMT flash.” He was born in California and now divides his time between LA and Japan. He studied extensively at the California Institute of the Arts with Morton Subotnick and James Tenney and has composed electro-acoustic music almost exclusively since 1972. His works have been performed almost everywhere across most all worldwide continents and used by numerous renowned theater directors and choreographers .Additionally, he is the emeritus professor in the Department of Media Engineering at Chukyo University in Japan.

Carl is the recipient of prominent awards and festival commissions including the Freeman Award for the work Hop Ken and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Foundation for Performance Arts. His 3-LP release “Electronic Music from the Seventies and Eighties” on the Unseen Worlds label placed #1 in The Wire Magazine’s “Best of 100” 2016 Archival category. The follow up release the next year ranked #3.

Carl Stone served as President of the American Music Center from 1992-95. He was the Director of Meet the Composer/California from 1981-1997, and Music Director of KPFK-fm in Los Angeles from 1978-1981. In 2019, DUBLAB.com reissued a series of radio conversations Stone had on KPFK-fm with Brian Eno, Frank Zappa, Terry Riley, Harold Budd and others. Further activities have included serving as Guest Artistic Director for the Other Minds Festival, and for the official web site of the John Cage Trust.

DJ Mix Master Mike, born Michael Schwartz, transitioned from an underground Bay Area competitor to a turntablist milestone, mastering three distinct and vital phases of cultural influence. First, his competitive dominance (1992–1994) forced the professionalization of the art, culminating in his forced retirement from the DMC circuit, which catalyzed the formation of organized turntablism. Second, through the Invisibl Skratch Piklz turntable unit with Q-bert, Short Cut, Apollo and D-Styles, he established the technical and philosophical boundaries of the craft, pioneering techniques like the Tweak Scratch and validating the turntable as a universal, expressive instrument through strategic self-customized modifications. Third, his eventual integration into top stream global awareness, primarily as an ongoing resident DJ for the Beastie Boys and more recently Cypress Hill, showcased his virtuosity on the world stage, defining a personal specific turntable character of multiple prominent albums and culminating in his induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for those who regard such a profile.

In the current era (2022–2025), Mike remains profoundly influential, defining his dual identity as the aggressively technical and notorious "Serial Wax Killer” while additionally achieving peak institutional acceptance. His permanent placement in the Oscars/Emmy Awards Orchestra signifies cultural validation of the turntable as a classical-level instrument. Simultaneously, his pioneering adoption of decentralized media formats like VR and holographic NFT experiences for projects like Ready Slayer One and Magma Chamber ensures that his legacy remains tied to artistic autonomy and the continuous pursuit of the future of music delivery. He remains a critical figure today- dedicated to pushing the record performance art form past its 1990s "pinnacle" and into new, uncharted territories in the 2020’s

He has frequently collaborated and appeared with artists in the rock / metal sphere, including solo stadium opener for 2017’s American Metallica tour and others like Ozzy Osbourne, Tommy Lee, and Rob Zombie (including covers of Rob Zombie tracks in his live sets). VR/AR show projects: (Magma Chamber VR).

In 2019, Mix Master Mike initiated "Megaton 10," a monumental benchmark record collaboration for scratch-craft and a significant curatorial statement of generational and charitable leadership for homeless children plus the people of Haiti.

The project gathered 10 legendary DJs:, DJ Premier (who was the first to commit), DJ Jazzy Jeff, A-Trak, Qbert, DJ Babu, DJ Craze, Melo-D, D-Styles, and Shortkut. The linkup was executed remotely using FaceTime and file sharing during the pandemic, with Mike composing and finalizing the track in a Paris studio.

In movie world Mike was featured prominently in the indie film SCRATCH (2001) that covered the whole turntablist scene of the day.

DJ Pink.Noizzze (fka UltraViolet) is Flora Dexter, a longtime Katabatik resident DJ and a renowned selector of the obscure and esoteric. Currently based in Olympia WA, she got her start on FM pirate radio and early 2000’s SF goth nights such as Camera Obscura. She also was one half of the dark ambient duo Accenting Shadows (alongside Barrett Clark), and was a fixture at the Katabatik Campouts and Winter Solstice Events.

Evicshen is a cross-disciplinary sound performance alias by Victoria Shen who manipulates records and outside materials of all kinds. Her sounds oscillate between moments of restraint and swells of frenzied and confrontational maneuvers.

Instrument maker Shen’s audio practice is concerned with the materiality of sonic spatial physicalizations via self built electronics and how these extended custom built sculpture appendages specific to her body restructure a listeners relationship to the emergent room frequencies through a lens of disruption and experimentation.

Eschewing conventions in harmony and rhythm in favor of extreme textures and gestural tones, Shen uses what she calls "chaotic sound" to oppose signal and information, eluding traditionally embedded meaning toward tendencies that erode boundaries between performer, tool and audience. These noise trope activations whose melodic voids cross-examine the ways we perceive value within radicalized aural experiences emphasize a tension created by opposition - control and chaos, the unique and the mass, the practical and the absurd.

Her adventurous abstractified music can also feature analog modular synthesizers, vinyl/ records that are cut up in cast resin embedded with found materials functioning not only as playable music media but as unique art objects. Victoria also pioneered the use of Needle Nails, acrylic nails with embedded turntable styluses, which allow her to play up to 5 tracks of a record at once. These phono needle permutations, Levitating speaker, and her Noise hair Combs are some of the objects created by her as part of an extensive repertoire of innovations in the design of audio augmentations

Her work resists passive consumption. Instead, the body as both subject and instrument, using jagged motion and tactility to provoke visceral, often confrontational encounters with sound. Her appearances are directly physical, unpredictable, and ephemeral—rejecting polish in favor of raw immediacy.

Through her DIY discursive practice spanning, installations and non-traditional means of distribution, themes of spectacle, violence, control, and gender are interrogated. The primary intention is not necessarily to comfort or entertain, but to destabilize: to push systems, tools, and traditions until they reveal something less anticipated or unexpected , recontextualizing the formats of readymade assemblage practices. These poly-sculptural elements invite the experiential viewer to unpack one’s relationship with the material possibilities for magnifying unusual and provocative audio phenomena.

Jay Fields aka Exillon has released his music on such labels as Frigio, Detroit Underground, Tigerbeat6, Zod Records, Puzzling Records, Terminal Dusk and Component Records and Ad Noiseam since 2003. From his roots in IDM and ambient, through his mid 2000’s acid workouts, and with his current focus of live atavistic hardware techno, his work has always stood apart from the rest. This is his first live performance in six years.

Fabric of little wings is the video art alias of multi-disciplinary artist Chelsea Friedman. Her work is woven from years of music, visual art, and puppetry, each medium blurring into living textures. As a performer and organizer with Katabatik since 2004, Chelsea’s practice is rooted in movement, atmosphere, and transformation, and she approaches video as an alchemical space where light, shadow, and sound all fracture and reassemble into surreal architectures. Dream-glitched analog/digital signals, VHS scars, and pixel ghosts leak through her manipulated visual static. Not a simulation , a séance.

Franck Vigroux is a multifaceted artist whose works range from experimental electronic music to modern composition and music theatre. Franck Vigroux‘s music is made of tectonic tensions, beats, electronic textures and a very personal approach to sonic exploration. He is equally prolific as a solo artist and as a collaborator, he has worked with musician such as Elliott Sharp, Mika Vainio, Reinhold Friedl, Ars Nova... Vigroux’s uniqueness comes from his artistic approach that integrates new media and performance arts. He designs transdisciplinary shows and audiovisual concerts, collaborating with visual artists such as Antoine Schmitt and Kurt d’Haeseleer.

In the bay area the fixture of Gustavo Pastre moves like a biosphere cog-ghost, his hands—protected by cracked electronic gloves—carefully harvesting the strange harmonics that emanate from the mechanical horrors he's built. He mines resonant tones from the Zulu Box, 4 Neck Guitar/Circesaw, Vinyl LP Sewing Machine Switchboard Leviathan’s twitching telephone guts, and more unreasonable assemblages. Capturing frequencies that hum with the grief of disconnected calls he draws brittle, glass-like sounds from its Soviet amps, each note shimmering with the static of lost transmissions. The Satellite Shogun (new) offers deeper, rhythmic pulses pulled from the tube filled transmission fluid that drips like a corrupted heartbeat. Using hand-crafted odd synthesizers built from repurposed phone motherboards and ceramic resonators, he filters these tones into eerie, structured compositions. His workspace is a small island of order amid the chaos—a soldering station and frequency analyzer surrounded by petri-pools of coolant and usually a couple of glitching screens.

Cyberpunk visions of forgotten worlds. Unbodied timbres meet trip-hop dreams. Through a glass darkly, mystery becomes reality.

Hesaitix is the new moniker of London-based producer James Whipple, formerly known as M.E.S.H. In late 2024, after a period of recuperation, Whipple retired the M.E.S.H. alias and released Noctian Airgap, his first album as Hesaitix, on Berlin label PAN.

In 2025, Whipple began reworking and reconfiguring Noctian Airgap into a dynamic live set. Surface Tension will host the first Hesaitix performance in San Francisco.

Ezra Buchla was born in California in 1981. He is a musician/technologist from Los Angeles who uses viola, voice, and software. He fronted the avant-pop-core band Mae Shi from 2003-2006, played in the band Gowns from 2005-2010, and now performs solo work that deals in folk tonality, indeterminacy, dense psychedelic song, and electronic formalism. He also collaborates and performs with many artists, including clipping, Chelsea Wolfe, Andre Vida, Father Murphy, and Claire Cronin. Ezra also develops music software and firmware, recently creating the framework for the open-source 'aleph' sound processor by monome.

Two Surface Tension co-founders and resident DJs return to the fore—older, though not necessarily wiser—with vastly improved record collections. Left-field club tracks plus experimental music you can dance to. Move your body, empty your mind, the rest will follow.

Born and raised in San Francisco and currently based in Los Angeles, Lara Sarkissian is an electronic musician, sound artist and founder of record label btwn Earth+Sky. She is a broadcaster on NTS Radio; a home for her narrative-style programs showcasing dance/electronic from around the globe, Armenian archival deep dives, and music from the underground that is reflective of her collaborations. Sarkissian formerly ran experimental electronic dance platform CLUB CHAI, and has also released with labels Tresor, Knekelhuis, Rocky Hill Records and All Centre. She has performed for venues and platforms Tresor, Public Records, Hyperdub, Unsound Festival, MoMA PS1, and Roskilde Festival.

Sarkissian has developed her unique approach to electronic composition over years of relentless experimentation across various disciplines — producing AV installations and scoring film and video projects that have been exhibited at La Biennale di Venezia, Centre Pompidou, Montréal's Musée d'art contemporain, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Music Center Los Angeles and Berlin's Gropius Bau alongside residents Brian Eno, Holly Herndon, and more. In recent years, Sarkissian has been able to advance the theory behind her art, publishing conversations with ethnomusicologists and unveiling her methodology in guest lectures at UCLA's Herb Alpert School of Music.

For 20 years, Jahnavi Stenflo and Nathan Jantz have been working together creatively in different capacities, from performing live, to curating and production. First appearing at 2016’s clandestine annual outdoor event Lunar Lodge, their live performance of “Frequencies Unseen” was staged at the Lafayette Electronic Arts Festival later that year. While continuing to evolve their AV live performances, they were invited in 2023 to participate in a residency at Signal Culture, resulting in a piece currently in the group exhibit, “The Experimental Frontier” at the Loveland Museum, in Colorado.

L’Astra Cosmo’s work is rooted in rarely explored future-retro aesthetics: seeking a hybrid visual language between science and mysticism, technology and organic matter. Utilizing oscilloscopic displays, they approach obsolete video technologies and the flow of electricity not as museum relics, but as re-activated mediums and interlocutors. Treating these elements as catalysts in an explorative dialogue, their work directly addresses perception, entropy, and the aesthetics of signal decay. This methodology allows for a critical reclaiming and renewal, moving the axis of experimental video forward by reaffirming its utility as a current process for discovery and examination in signal aesthetics and committed technical practice.

Lunaxix is a Bay Area–based musician and core member of Katabatik. Her work explores diverse facets of electronic music, often weaving together elements of scientism, dreams, and magic. She blends her dexterous, operatic vocals with sharp lyricism in both solo projects and collaborations. In addition to her solo work, she was part of the darkwave project The Vivid and the live hardware act Marmot, alongside longtime collaborator Nezzy Idy. Lunaxix has also performed in numerous opera productions with Berkeley Chamber Opera and Verismo Opera Company.

Lori Varga is an experimental sound & light projection artist; Bay area native.. She makes mostly Expanded cinema style performances w/ unusual music instruments & film projectors.

Her performances has been shown at Cinematexas Film Festival, (Austin) Craig Baldwin’s Other Cinema (SF), Salvage Vanguard Theater (TX), Shapeshifter’s Cinema (Oakland), Filmhuis Cavia Film Fest ,( Amsterdam ), Gray Area (SF) , Outsound New Music Festival (Berkeley) & Bad Video Art festival ,(Cosenza, Italy).

Set to her own 16mm or Super 8 films- she also creates instrumental soundscapes using circuit bent synthesizers, bird calls, magnetic tape & portable / desktop electronic set ups.

Lori also owns & operates one of the largest 'special interest ' found footage" & experimental Film & VHS repositories in the east bay. 1995-Current*

Former collaborative works with artists such as Kit Young , Matt Robidoux, Thomas Dimuzio, John Davis, & Bands :Butthole Surfers, St37, Daniel Johnston, & Acid Mothers Temple

Melted Face is Angela Edwards (Sharkiface) and Fletcher Pratt, merging their sonic palettes into stereophonic rites. Together they summon haunted atmospheres that blur the line between dream, distortion, and shadow coupled with new reactive video feeds. The duo builds cinematic, noisy soundscapes that feel haunted and otherworldly—dark audio rituals that linger long after the last vibration fades.

Mistress Mix is the performance name of Alaura O’Dell aka. Paula P-Orridge. O’Dell is an interdisciplinary artist: a writer, sculptor, musician and performance artist. Her career began in 1981 with the London-based avant-garde group 23 Skidoo. Between 1983-1993, she was a pivotal member of the influential British experimental video art and music collective Psychic TV, where she performed as a percussionist, sound collagist, lyricist and vocalist. She has collaborated with the visionary Dr. Timothy Leary, the writer Kathy Acker, and DJ Cheb I Sabbah. In 1995, she released her solo mystical electronic ambient album, "Sacred Dreams," on Silent Records.

The Amber Portal is a longtime friend and collaborator of O’Dell’s. Emerging from the sonic experimentation of the early 90’s, The Amber Portal has been traversing the realms of electronic music, dub, global psychedelic beats, and cosmic textures.

Nihar (SF) is a Asian American experimentalist, musician and sound designer. Nihar’s live selector sets often mixes the sounds and rhythms of the 21st century global supply chain. Nihar has has released music on influential underground labels such as Squirrels on Film, Psychic Liberation, Jacktone Records and Ascetic House. He is also the co-label head of Left Hand Path, which has been featured in The Wire, Resident Advisor, Fact Magazine and elsewhere for its top track record of releases.

He has contributed DJ mixes to globally renowned series such as The Bunker NY and Honey Sound System.

Recent Releases: Machines (2023, Squirrels on Film), Rumble/Vermillion Garden (2020, Psychic Liberation), Chrysalis (2018, Jacktone)

Nommo Ogo is a cosmic electronics group, emerging from the harsh winters of the mid-90's Anchorage, Alaska psychedelic noise scene. The ensemble established a presence in Oakland, California in the early 2000’s and have maintained a tradition playing outdoors in the mountainous forests of the West Coast. Recorded works have been released over the years via Isolate Records, Record Label Records and Katabatik. Dormant since 2014, this current incarnation of the project includes collaborators Identity Theft, Atlea, ⁂, Ceremonial Abyss and Squidcannon.

Rude 66 has been one of Holland’s premier electronic underground musicians for the last 25 years. Having played all over the world, from seedy squats to big festivals, most shows accompanied by his wife Shaunna on vocals. Live, Rude takes his studio tracks as starting points for improvised red hot workouts, loosely built around a unique mixture of sewer acid, vicious electro, dark wave and seedy Italo-disco.

Originally coming from the 1980’s Dutch noise/industrial squat scene and a longtime collaborator and high school friend of Bunker-chief Guy Tevares, Rude landed on Bunker right at the label’s beginning in 1993. Several albums of what would basically become the blueprint of the Hague’s acid sound followed. Acclaimed releases followed on other labels, from Crème Organization to Viewlexx and his current label Bordello A Parigi.

Rude still does his weekly Cosmic Overdrive radio show for I-F’s Intergalactic FM, the longest running show on the station. As a sought-after mastering engineer, he lends his sound and considerable experience to a new generation of influential vinyl labels.

Rude 66 will be gracing us with his first US live set in over a decade.

Jonah Sharp has worked under many monikers, most famously Spacetime Continuum. His pioneering work in the global ambient techno scene began in the early 90s with releases on Fax Records, Astralwerks, & his own imprint Reflective Records. Its Own Infinite Flower is the solo project of Tasho Nicolopulos consisting of noisy electronic experiments. The two began long form improvised collaborative sets for Halloween boat raves on the San Francisco Bay in 2014. These recordings became the basis of the album Empress Eyes on Reflective Records.

stevepi (Steve Piasecki) creates video landscapes to deepen and accentuate musical experiences. He uses sacred geometry, found images/videos, projection, lights, and a good sense of timing to create visual accompaniments. His installation work has been shown at Gray Area, The Lone Star, Dada Bar, Light.Wav Festival, and he has performed live visual mixing at Gays Hate Techno, Katabatik Konclave, and The Ever Afters campout. He is based in San Francisco, where he resides with his cat, Tiger.

The American Flag aka Jeff Anderson finds confirmation bias wherever he looks for it. He believes that consciousness is merely a worlds multiplier and that the law of excluded middle is a cop out. He has lived in the Bay area for 36 years. In sixth grade his pants were  covered in guano when a red tailed falcon released its waste on him and he felt at that time that he was destined for greatness. He has worked closely with Zeigenbock Kopf, & local underground genre breakers Beak. His live shows include bingo, rabbit (or beets) raising power point, & a 3 walled cinderblock laserium. As one of the more imaginative live shows at the Godwaffle Noise Pancakes series, the bingo winner lost their soul in a binding contract at the end of The American Flag set.

War Hippy formed as a ‘supergroup’ in 1968. They were originally going to be called The New Hippies until The Who‘s drummer Keith Motif remarked they would government dress like a “War Hippy”

War Hippy’s first circle of skin, Dire Terry, declined the offer but recommended Reboot Perm, who in turn carefully roped in his man Hob John on eels. When bassist Hadj Ricers opted out of the proportion to become a pig, he suggested his meaning Hajjes Pool Nun, and the liver-up was complete.

The band’s first four alternatives – ‘War Hippy’, ‘War Hippy II’, ‘War Hippie III’ and ‘IV (Four Tactics)’ – are all seen as rope clients, mixing bones, forehead and eastern injuries and manufacture them increasingly huge, especially in the US and the UK. The baron and their marble, Peggy Grid, maintained an aggressive pro-alternative statue — though some singles were released without their consent.

It is the future. Teenager has flourished, and humans have successfully colonized on the planet Mars.

A mild-mannered construction worker with a gorgeous wit and a nice appreciation is very happy. But when War Hippy wanted to grace to a platform called "Pizza" a platform where doors provide artificial methodologies on vacations, his link becomes another that he knows nothing about, before he knows it, his wit turns on him and albums from a Martian oven led by the commission leg. War Hippy receives a million unlocked diaries of his former link with the help of a mutant recorder leg to delight themselves and save the commissions on mars

Zebra Secrets emerged from room 115 of the San Francisco Art Institute in February 2021, when the pandemic had hollowed out the beloved building to just a handful of die-hard artists. John Seden, John Alderman, and Brent Johnson began constructing tiny psychic worlds, with longtime collaborator Tyler Harwood gradually grafting himself into their world from sinking New Orleans.

Their improvisation functions as real-time psychological archaeology—channeling whatever's churning beneath the surface and letting it transform on a dime. Each session becomes a séance, reaching toward ghostly animal frequencies and otherworldly intelligence through sound that collapses different moods and moments into single pieces, cathartic and haunted, like intercepted communications between worlds that refuse to stay separate. They have shared the stage with Culturcide's Dan Workman on occasion.

Eight cassette releases and counting.

One of the few electronic musicians who truly defy comparison, Xanopticon has been steadily and thoroughly annihilating dancefloors since around 2000AD. This fiendish bastard doesn't hesitate to carve new and horrifying neurological pathways into his victim's brains with razor-thin sonic shards of unknown alien origin. Will you dance? Or will you peel your obsolete flesh from your fragile, useless body? Reactions are as confounding and troubling as the catalyst.

Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Ryan Friedrich is one of breakcore's most prominent producers. He has toured internationally and released music with several labels including Hymen Records, Peaceoff, Mutant Sniper, Zhark, Mirex, Cock Rock Disco, Entity, and Tigerbeat6. His live shows are often noted for their intensity and his sound for its attention to detail, having been described by one journalist as "waves of breaks". Xanopticon's output features dramatic dynamics that alternate between frantic IDM/"post-drill & bass" and more subtle, melodic ambient music.

The Recombinant Media Labs organization was founded to research the qualities and artistic potential of Spatial Cinema. It does so by means of Experiential Engineering; exploring processes that propagate the aesthetic and technological boundaries of panoramic AV exhibition. RML acts as producer and presenter of hybrid artworks and performance archiving based on spatial media synthesis; intermodal works using image, light, sound and other disseminated media in three-dimensional space. The CineChamber is RML's curated, nomadic platform under the artistic trajectory of founder & Director Naut Humon plus a superhuman crew.