Waterworks 2026 – Festival of Experimental Sound (April 24 & 25)

Poster designed by Jeff DiPerna

Waterworks 2026 – Festival of Experimental Sound

Friday, April 24, 2025 | Doors at 7pm, music at 7:30pm
saturday, April 25, 2025 | Doors at 7pm, music at 7:30pm

Metropolitan Waterworks Museum
2450 Beacon Street
Boston, MA 02467  

Tickets
$30 general admission each night
$20 students or members each night
$50 2-day passes (limited availability)
No one turned away for lack of funds

There is limited parking at the museum. Please use the T (Reservoir or Cleveland Circle stops on the Green line), if possible! 
The museum is fully accessible to people with disabilities. If you have questions, call the museum at 617-277-0065 or email susanna@nonevent.org.

Night 1: Doors 7pm, Music 7:30pm (listed in alphabetical order)
A. Campbell Payne
The Bicentennial Memorial Accordion Choir (expanded version)
Bob Bellerue
Dave Seidel
SUTUR

Night 2: Doors 7pm, Music 7:30pm (listed in alphabetical order)
Amirtha Kidambi & Music Research Strategies
Bill Nace & David Watson
Greg Kelley presents “A Fanfare for Non-Event” featuring Kelly Bray, Eric Dahlman, Ellwood Epps, Forbes Graham, Lemuel Marc, and Kimmie Sabio
Jesse Kenas Collins x Michael Rosenstein x Yoona Kim (trio)
Michiko O.

About the artists
A. Campbell Payne is a Massachusetts-based musician with a practice rooted in pattern, chance, time, and perception. Payne's approach tocomposition utilizes generative structures, extended polymeter, and idiosyncratic tuning systems built around just intonation. Drawing influence from dance, astronomy, and the history of mathematics, Payne creates sonic environments that are at once approachable and disorienting.

Amirtha Kidambi is invested in the creation and performance of subversive, anti-hegemonic music, from free improvisation and avant-jazz, to Indian carnatic and devotional, experimental bands, electronic music, noise and new music. She is an educator, activist and organizer working to challenge systems of white supremacist, colonial, capitalist, patriarchy, and is co-founder and co-organizer of South Asian Artists in Diaspora and Musicians Against Police Brutality. As a bandleader and composer, she is the creative force behind the incendiary protest group Elder Ones and has received critical praise for her albums Holy Science (2016) and From Untruth (2019) on Northern Spy records from the New York Times, Pitchfork, Wire Magazine and Downbeat among others.

The Bicentennial Memorial Accordion Choir honors the two centuries that have passed since the accordion's invention. In long-form pieces, they mix lush, percussive, and discordant instrumentation with traditional European-American melodies. The members of BMAC hail from greater Boston, Providence, and Los Angeles. This will be the expanded version of the ensemble, including founding member Janet Soomi.

Bill Nace is a Philadelphia-based guitarist, active in the experimental and free-improv scene since the mid-00s. Maybe best known as one half of Body/Head, the majority of Bill’s album credits are collaborative, with players including Paul Flaherty, Thurston Moore, Chris Corsano, Steve Baczkowski, and David Watson, many of which have seen release on his own Open Mouth label. He also has two solo LPs on Drag City.

Bob Bellerue is a sound artist, experimental musician, sound/video curator, and A/V technician based in Ridgewood NY. Over the last 35+ years he has been involved in creating and presenting a wide range of sonic activities – experimental music, sound art, noise, junk metal percussion ensembles, soundtracks for dance/ theater/ video/ performance art, Balinese gamelan, and sound / video installations. Bob’s sound work is based in improvised free noise within multidimensional feedback systems, using amplified instruments, objects, decontextualized field recordings, and resonant spaces, processed by electronics and software written in the Supercollider audio synthesis programming language.

Dave Seidel composes and performs electroacoustic music with an emphasis on long tones and microtonal sonorities. Along with many Bandcamp releases (mysterybear.bandcamp.com), he has two CD releases: "~60 Hz" on Irritable Hedgehog (2014) and "Involution" on XI Records (2021). In a previous life as a guitarist, he is best known for the premiere recording of Lois V Vierk's "五 Guitars" ("Go Guitars") on Vierk's CD "Simoom" (XI Records, 1991). He lives in New Hampshire.

David Watson is an experimental musician. A guitarist, bagpiper and advocate for intelligent listening, his work encompasses improvisation and composition in a wide variety of contexts. Originally from New Zealand, he has lived and worked in New York City since 1987. He has worked intensively with a wide range of extraordinary artists, including Chris Abrahams, Robert Ashley, Frisner Augustin, Marcia Bassett, Tony Buck, Che Chen, Anthony Coleman, David First, Alastair Galbraith, Frode Gjerstad, Shelley Hirsch, Samara Lubelski, Chris Mann, Christian Marclay, Sean Meehan, Ikue Mori, Bill Nace, Andrea Parkins, Lee Ranaldo, Talibam!, Yoshi Wada, Alex Waterman, John Zorn, $75 Bill, amongst many others.

Greg Kelley is a Boston-Based trumpet player, who has performed throughout North America, Europe, Japan, Argentina & Mexico at numerous festivals, in clubs, outdoors, in living rooms, in a bank, and at least once on a vibrating floor. He has collaborated with a number of musicians across the globe performing experimental music, free jazz and noise, appearing on over 100 recordings in the process. He constantly seeks to push the boundaries of the trumpet and of "music." The ensemble for his “A Fanfare for Non-Event” features a number of the area’s finest experimental trumpet players: Kellie Bray, Eric Dahlman, Ellwood Epps, Forbes Graham, Lemuel Marc, and Kimmie Sabio.

Jesse Kenas Collins x Michael Rosenstein x Yoona Kim (trio)

Marshall Trammell (Black Spirituals, Music Research Strategies) has created a voluminous body of work spanning a broad range of disciplines and approaches including solo works for drum set and electroacoustic processing, large chorale inter-media performance recitations, installations and digital archive visual score network databases. These works have been presented in concert halls, theaters, and gallery exhibition spaces in North America and Europe. He is also a member of White People Killed Them, a trio consisting of Trammell, Raven Chacon and John Dieterich.

Michiko Ogawa (Michiko O) is a Berlin-based researcher-performer-composer born and raised in Tokyo, Japan. She has performed at major international festivals including MaerzMusik (Berlin), Supersense Festival (Melbourne), Café OTO (London), Kontraklang (Berlin), Edition Festival (Stockholm), Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (UK), Ultraschall (Berlin), and the Brisbane International Film Festival, among others. Her most recent release, Pancake Moon, was recently released on Futura Resistenza.

SUTUR is the duo of Jessica Hernandez (ehrdz) and Aaron Michael Smith (UN/NO), which they describe as a chimeric conjunction of repetitions and reflections. Jessica Hernandez is a dj, curator, and events organizer from Dorchester. Aaron Michael Smith is a composer, violist and artist currently based in Boston, MA. Aaron is interested in exploring the way that various practices and mediums overlap, reflect and contradict one another. Together Jessica and Aaron organize the Transporter series at Boston Cyberarts.

Waterworks 2026 is presented with the support of the Metropolitan Waterworks Museum, WZBC 90.3 FM, the Newton Cultural Council (a local agenciysupported by the Massachusetts Cultural Council), Streetcar Beer & Wine, and Café Fixe