Maggi Payne is Co-Director (since 1992) of the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College, Oakland, CA, where she teaches recording engineering, composition, and electronic music. She also freelances as a recording engineer and editor and a historical remastering engineer. Her electroacoustic works often include visual elements which she creates, including video, dance, transparencies, and film. She enjoys collaborating with other artists and has worked with video artist Ed Tannenbaum for over twenty years. She is also a flutist, and has written several works for flute as well as other acoustic instruments. Major works include her video/film/dance works Through the Looking Glass, Quicksilver, Liquid Amber, Cloud Fields, Effervescence, System Test (fire and ice), Apparent Horizon, Liquid Metal, Airwaves (realities), Crystal, Solar Wind, Transparencies, Allusions, and Orion, and audio works BAM, Black Ice, Beyond, STATIC, ROAR, Wet, Surface Tension, Shh, Glassy Metals, Electric Ice, Arctic Winds, fff, Santa Fe, Motor Rhythms, FIZZ, Of All, Distant Thunder, Reflections, Brass Mirrors, Fluid Dynamics, Holding Pattern, breaks/motors, Shh, White Turbulence 2000, HUM 2, Sweet Dreams, Close-ups, Raw Data, Minutia 0-13, Aeolian Confluence, Resonant Places, Desertscapes, Phase Transitions, Songs of Flight, Ahh-Ahh (ver 2.1), White Night, Subterranean Network, Ling, Scirocco, and HUM. She has had performances of her works throughout the Americas, Europe, Japan, and Australasia. She received two Composer's Grants and an Interdisciplinary Arts Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and video grants from the Western States Regional Media Arts Fellowships Program and the Mellon Foundation. She received four honorary mentions from Bourges, and one from Prix Ars Electronica, and was an Artist in Residence at the Exploratorium in San Francisco and the Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga, CA.

Marc Manning is an artist and musician living and working in San Francisco. His work includes painting and sound performance. He has released music under the monikers Tied to the Branches, Everything is Fine, and Heavy Lids, as well as collaborations with Dragons Eye label manager Yann Novak, Suss Müsik, Arland Nicewander and Akina Kawauchi. Since his first recording under his own name in 2004 Manning has been exploring the possibilities of the guitar and especially feedback to summon what he describes as “a synergistic living cauldron of sound.” Manning’s artistic practice is based around meditation, ritual, and the occult as it relates to the idea of summoning images and sound.

Marielle V. Jakobsons is a composer and intermedia artist based in Oakland, CA. Her compositions evoke minimalism with melodic drone and enveloping polyrhythmic soundscapes of synthesizers, voice, and strings.  She builds installations and instruments which bring focus to visceral experience of sound and light, most recently with her “Macro-Cymatic” visual music instrument.   Her photographs, installations, and videos have been exhibited across the US, and she tours internationally as a solo artist and with her bands Date Palms, Myrmyr, and other collaborations.  Her records can be found on Mexican Summer, Digitalis, Students of Decay, and Important Records, among others, and her latest solo album is due out on Thrill Jockey Records August 2016. Photograph by Nicolas Zurcher, Photo Production by Tana Sprague.

Chuck Johnson is a musician and composer who approaches his work with an ear towards finding faults and instabilities that might reveal latent beauty, with a focus on guitar, experimental electronics, and Kosmische Americana. Recordings of his work have been published by Three Lobed, Merge, Trouble in Mind, Strange Attractors Audio House, Communion, and Amish, among others. Between 2011 and 2015 Johnson released a triptych of solo acoustic guitar LP's - "A Struggle Not A Thought," "Crows in the Basilica," and "Blood Moon Boulder" that have become touchstones of the post-Takoma era. His music has been acclaimed for a compositional style rooted in both a haunting melodic sensibility and a minimalist penchant for pure sonics. In early 2017 he will release a new LP of ambient works for pedal steel guitar and electronics for VDSQ.