S*Glass // Petra Zélie // Thomas Carnacki - Shapeshifters

Name: S*Glass // Petra Zélie // Thomas Carnacki - Shapeshifters
Start: 2026-01-18T19:00:00-08:00
Location: Shapeshifters Cinema

Schedule

Sun, 18 Jan, 2026 at 07:00 pm

UTC-08:00

Location

Shapeshifters Cinema | Oakland, CA

An evening of sonic textures, projected imagery, and perhaps a mudskipper. (Confirmation pending… hopefully by showtime.) Three sets for the price of one evening: each performance approaching the notion of “experimental music” from a different practical angle, but unified by a shared sense of immersion, the subtle, and perhaps the uncanny.

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Thomas Carnacki is a variably-sized entity engaged in unsettling textures, organic sources, occasional flights of whimsy, and (aspirationally) subtle nuance. Though sometimes brief spasms of wanton abandon enter the proceedings. Contributing musicians down the years have included Gregory Hagan, Sheila Bosco, Agnes Szelag, Jesse Burson, the late Jim Kaiser, though for this current evening the instantiation will be Cheryl E. Leonard and Gregory Scharpen. Carnacki music has appeared in numerous films, theatre pieces, and internationally-touring dance performances, including an evening-length work by Margaret Jenkins that toured Sweden. Notable guests/collaborators over the nearly two-decades of performing and recording have included Carla Bozulich (Geraldine Fibbers, Evangelista), M.S. Waldron (irr app. (ext.)), Dawn McCarthy (Faun Fables), Carla Kihlstedt (Sleepytime Gorilla Museum), Moe Staiano (Surplus 1980), Emily Jane White, Matmos, Kristine Barrett (Kitka), Juliet Gordon (Luxury Skin) and countless others. Carnacki has released over a dozen records of varying sizes (from 3” to 12”), about which people have opined things such as: “ectoplasmic tendrils form unfathomable noises as unknown machines creak, click, and rattle… This is a whole other world where art and the afterlife briefly touch..” And that Carnacki “attempts to open up listeners' worldview to the things that are best ignored; tapping into mental states that may tap back.” Which, in context, is intended as a compliment, and we take it as such.
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Petra Zélie is a multidisciplinary artist, educator, and experimental sound composer whose work spans film, performance, and sonic art. Her feature film The Yellow Wallpaper (2022) has won Best Narrative Feature at multiple international festivals and will be featured in the Van Gogh Museum's "Yellow" exhibition (Amsterdam, February 2026).
As an experimental sound artist, Zélie creates immersive compositions utilizing granular synthesis, voice manipulation, and site-specific interventions. Recent performances include Stanford University, UC Berkeley, SF Sound, and The Hive Oakland, and the La Cloaca festival in Mexico City (December 2025).
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Numerous practices make up the electro-acoustic sound collages created by S*Glass. He combines tape music, electronic processing, voice, found sound, and chance operations. Every show uses a different batch of curated audio, mixed live, while the self-produced studio albums are more refined assemblages. The playing of non-musical objects is sometimes incorporated (dental floss, aluminum foil, wind-up toys, metal lunch box, cabbage). Self-shot video is screened during sets, which is mostly textures made with multiple layers that slowly wobble out of sync, jump cuts, and a smattering of primitive animation. The overall effect is one of surreal disorientation.
S*Glass is a founder of Bren’t Lewiis Ensemble (a large non-musical music group begun in the early 1980s), and Glands of External Secretion (a duo with rock musician Barbara Manning since the early ’90s). From the late ’80s until 2004, he was the main driver behind Bananafish. Since 2017, he’s performed as a solo artist and completed U.S. tours of the West Coast, New England, parts of the South and Midwest, England and Scotland, Australia and New Zealand, Japan, and a handful of places in Canada.
He’s released music and sound on his label Butte County Free Music Society, and has also collaborated with an international array of others such as Dylan Nyoukis (Scotland) Anla Courtis of Reynols (Argentina), Noel Meek (New Zealand), Bryan Day (US), Andrew Zukerman (Canada), Cody Brant (US), Orchid Spangiafora (US) Bruce Russell, (NZ), and John Wiese (US). Other labels that have released his work include Chocolate Monk (UK), Siltbreeze (Philadelphia), Spleencoffin (Baltimore), Blue Spectrum (UK), l’Esprit de l’Escalier (US), Krim Kram (Ireland), Independent Woman (New Zealand), Nashazphone (Egypt), Beartown (UK), Ikuisuus (Finland), Tanzprocesz (France), I Dischi Del Barone (Sweden), Coherent States (Greece), Feeding Tube (Massachusetts), VHF (Virginia), Opax (Italy), Ultra Eczema (Belgium), Dinzu Artefacts (Los Angeles), and Starlight Furniture Co. (San Francisco).