Captain

3.15.2026// Sonic Cartographies, San Francisco Bay Area Installment IV, led by @macapner and @klank.ist at Tank Hill Park, SF. With @orcora @emilypothast @chlorinearoma @zekarias @buzzw_arl_ord @captainmcsweeney // : Thank you to @smallrockmedia for some great clips and stills. Others taken by me. : Such a pleasure to play with you all!

collaborative performance w/ @captainmcsweeney at Stay Gold, Oakland CA July 27, 2025

6.8.2026 // a line up of improvisational noise // Dead End Vintage, 3370 19th St. San Francisco // doors 7:30, show 8 // $10, NOTAFLOF Ava Koohbar : sound enactor, handmade instruments, ‘making unfolds through process, handmade instruments and performances. Performance not as a product, but a as a way of life.’ - excerpt from a description of her new book, Of Flesh and Frequency, a Poetics of Sound Making. @avakoohbor Kanoko Nishi-Smith is a performer currently based in SF/Bay Area. Her recent interest has primarily been in performing 20th century and contemporary musical compositions for piano as well as for koto (Japanese 13-string zither), and free-improvisation in various different contexts. @kanoko.nishi Danishta Rivero is an improviser, performer, and sound artist based in Oakland, California. She explores the artifacts resulting from heavy processing of the voice and their relationship to its acoustic resonance. @dnishhh Jordan Blankenship is an experimental sound artist from Modesto, California. His work examines the kinetic relationship between sound and gesture through extended techniques, prepared instruments, and improvised performance. @jordanblankenship K Francis Messer is a bay area-based percussionist and electro-acoustic noisemaker. performances emphasize suspension and consequence with analog feedback, prepared drums, salvaged objects, and sonic interference. sounds move in fractures and flares, embracing points of collision. @chlorinearoma Kaitlin McSweeney is a performer and composer based in Oakland, Ca. She improvises with live-looped vocals, cello, feedback, signal and environmental noise. Her recent work explores eroticism in noise through a body-centered invitation of tension and release, tearing apart and bringing together. @captainmcsweeney Domi Nigro is a performance artist and dancer of varied vocabulary based in Oakland, Ca. Inspired by both the mundane and fantastical, their art aims to explore the merging paradigms of these worlds by delving into highly emotional feeling states, improvisation, and technical movement forms. @earthenergy Thank you to @deadnoisestation and @antonio_californio !

Collaboration between Domi, K Francis Messer and Kaitlin McSweeney : a trio welcoming sonic feedback as a fourth collaborator in an experimental performance with elements of ritualistic repetition, deep listening echoing the tradition of Pauline Oliveros, and prepared drums, cello, voice, and resonant objects. If you’d like to see the full video of this performance, link in bio. This was at our fundraiser for @mecaforpeace at @tac_oakland on January 18th, 2026. : Out of a receptive summoning, distinct voices emerge and impress upon each other, inter-penetrating and gravitating towards a common orbit of evolving conditions. Feedback is shaped by the space around us: the surfaces of stone and glass, the plants, and the people passing through, and so becomes an elastic bridge between presences, not unlike the way memory exists. : When one is lost and another remains, part of that memory is gone, and must be reassembled from pieces left only with the one still here. Memories are not of the past; they shift with us, colored always by the present when recalled. : Feedback is similar: the air that moves through and around us always carry the potential for sound, but one must turn towards the specific presences of a place in order to know how to bridge its surfaces and release its unique ringing. Contacting memory takes a similar willingness to be receptive, to hear those echoes which are ringing always, whether we are listening or not. It is a collaboration with body and the present moment, a creative act, an act of collecting and mending threads between disrupted connections, an act of listening to and collaborating with the echoes. : @earthenergy @chlorinearoma @captainmcsweeney Stills by @danielwalker.creative (thank you!) Some of the video footage was contributed by @psychic.pain and audio by @inquiet.moontime (thank you!)

4.10.26 // an intimate gathering at The Yellow House // DM for address. Music at 7:30. Electro acoustic sets by @captainmcsweeney @sammyfielding and @scotthawkinsmusic // : Captainmcsweeney aka Kaitlin McSweeney is a performer and composer based in the SF Bay area, threading a background in classical singing, cello and voice into what she currently called a process of ‘daimonia’ - feeling between diabolic (tearing apart) and symbolic (uniting) sensory experiences with live looping, feedback and hardware noise. : Sammy Fielding brings a low bass voice, akin to those wrought for Gregorian chanting, into lyrical dark folk pieces that border on etudes at times, telling stories of myth and nature with complex time signatures and deeply personal song structures. : Scott Hawkins wields a wail worthy of the 1990s PDX grunge scene, threading raw emotion and tones gracefully into pieces that hit like epics, with the soul of the 60s beat poets, while retaining an intimacy that gives one the feeling of being told a secret on a dark starry night.

2 Sisters A Staged Reading Concert of Max Abner’s New Set-Libretto Improvised-Music Opera Sharing a bill w/ the great Levitator Trio in the Sun. 3/29 @westoaklandsoundseries (7PM) at the dresher ensemble studio :: 2201 poplar street, oakland california Tix info in bio! @_michaelrogerson_ is directing! @sadiegreyduck is musical directing! @travismakingthings @lurkingeye Sadie, and Joseph Dee Bradshaw are the band! The singer-actors are (oh boy) @captainmcsweeney @mothballsoup @giuliamakesmusic @digivika__ Celeste Winant, Joseph, and Max Blurb: Two Sisters is the next installment in MAX ABNER’S series of operas that combine set librettos with improvised music. Set in the rural enclave known as Rough River, two sets of sisters (one set unremarkable, one set former child stars) live in adjacent riverhouses overlooking the water. Each set—guarded by deeply attentive mothers—suffers from various forms of emotional arrested development. When one of the former child stars drowns in a flood, one of the more pedestrian sisters becomes convinced that she is the drowned sister, still very much alive. Two Sisters plumbs the ensuing blurriness, as mourning, care, delusion, and placation mingle in a case of mistaken and troubled identification.

Benefit for @thesanabelteam was wonderful, 3.20.2026. Big thank you to @tac_oakland for trusting us with your beautiful space and being so supportive. : We raised $522 in direct aid: Thank you all who came out and were so generous! : Feeling so honored and lucky to have shared a stage with the artists on this line-up: thank you for sharing your time, energy and art so generously. @billygomberg @derricknallard @earthenergy @orcora @xdebussyx

Excerpts from my latest substack post, link in @black_coffee_and_stars bio. Also tomorrow 3/20 I’m at @tac_oakland doing a collaborative set with @earthenergy ::: come raise funds for The Sanabel Team with us and @billygomberg @xdebussyx @derricknallard and @orcora ::: doors 7, show 730 $15 - 20 notaflof // Standing in the waves yesterday at baker beach feeling the sand pulled put from under my feet, that strange feeling of acceleration while standing still, life has felt like that in general since January. At the edge of things breaking and reforming and that not always knowing if I’m accelerating or sinking or standing still. / And my instinct is to lean into the art making, whether it’s music or making a sea turtle in the sand. Or when the sun was going down yesterday we kind of yelled/sang/haaaaa’d at it but lovingly. A stranger said “wow I don’t even know what that is but I needed that.”

Virgo Full Moon Lunar Eclipse// link in bio, free// It’s taken about 20 years for me to feel like I can write about this chapter of my past without pretending I’m not still shattered and guilt-ridden. Though it still hurts. It hurts that what I saw at the UN was not just my imagination, that my professor was a predator, that I didn’t stay and fight. : For 20 years it’s been something I don’t talk about because it’s been something others just get confused about: it was easier to believe something was just wrong with me than to consider that something is deeply deeply wrong with the human systems that hold and entangle us all. But not anymore, because we are all seeing too much, as I did. : You can see the pain and confusion in my eyes in these pictures from that time. And yet true love for the lake, for the dream, even as it died. And so often with the lake. Looking to the lake for answers, for solace, for something that made sense. : Turns out it is the lake we must turn to when our dreams die, and the ocean and the moon and the trees, and our bodies, and each other, to learn to hold one body and one step at a time whether we’re walking through the forest or towards a line of police with guns and shields. : Many dreams have been shattered, and in the pieces we find our ability to trust each other again. We must.

3.20.2026 Benefit for The Sanabel Team at Temescal Arts Center @thesanabelteam @tac_oakland Doors 7pm show 730 15 - 20 donation, no one turned away for lack of funds. /// with @derricknallard @orcora @billygomberg @xdebussyx @captainmcsweeney @earthenergy /// Derrick Allard is sound artist that utilizes field recordings, mundane objects, detritus and naively played instruments to explore acoustic sounds inherent spiritual and aesthetic value outside of the confines of music Kevin Corcoran is a percussionist based in San Francisco, California. He is focused on techniques which extend the sonic range of the drum by emphasizing texture, friction, sympathetic vibration, sustained tones and the use of found objects, often augmenting these sounds with location recordings, amplification, and feedback. Working with musicians, dancers, writers, and visual artists, improvisation and collaboration are crucial aspects of his practice. Captainmcsweeney and Domi met in 2012 on tour with a punk Americana stomp band in a bus called Rosa. Based in Oakland, Ca, the duo reconnected in 2024 and began a collaboration unfolding through an ongoing dialogue between movement and sound, playing with the boundaries between inner and outer experience, musician and dancer, self and other, performer and audience, and all the variations between these dualities, while carefully holding sensuality as a way of returning to the body. Performance becomes a space of re-sensitization and a ritual of remembering aliveness and honoring presence. Fraufraulein, the SF duo of Billy Gomberg and Andy Guthrie, are master world builders. Their work is immersive - it wraps around you like a warm coat, guiding you into a deep trance-like state. Time moves in slow circles, folds in on itself, and unspools like caught fishing line. Their music reflects a truth that we all share in some way. It’s the pauses between thoughts, the little observations that color a day, the beauty of how others’ lives imbricate for brief moments before pulling apart.

POSTPONED DUE TO WEATHER! —> now SUNDAY MARCH 15, 2PM SONIC CARTOGRAPHIES An ever-evolving performance series connecting continents through sound and improvisation, unfolding transnationally through global collaboration. Next Bay Area installment: Sunday March 15, 2PM In Tank Hill Park $15 / NOTAFLOF Featuring @zekarias @emilypothast @chlorinearoma Chris Cooper @orcora @captainmcsweeney @macapner and a graphic score by @hchingcomposer Sonic Cartographies was founded by @edaer.me Curation and poster for this edition by @macapner

Sunday 2/8/26, 7PM, suggested $15: Beauty Supply Arts is proud to present an evening of weirdo Americana-adjacent sound by Aux Meadows, Joseph Dee Bradshaw, vika ft. dev01d, and the Greyduck/captainmcsweeney/Snyder/Campos-Quinn/wyrm Quintet. Aux Meadows is an Oakland-based instrumental trio that counts itself as "Home of that lonesome planet sound." Joseph Dee Bradshaw is an East Bay poet-improvisor who will be performing his dexterous fingerstyle solo acoustic guitar compositions. vika ft. dev01d is songs and words by poet-scholar-musician vika, accompanied by the sonic worldbuilding of dev01d. Greyduck/captainmcsweeney/Snyder/Campos-Quinn/wyrm Quintet is ambient soundscape Friendship chromagraphic magnificat thunder cloud mournful orca, featuring Greyduck's inimitable upright bass playing along with pedal steel, cello, tape loops, 16MM film, and more! Poster by Max Abner