Outer Sounds is concert series presented by TURNmusic and curated by Greg Davis at The Phoenix Gallery & Music Hall in Waterbury VT. Greg is an internationally recognized electronic musician from Burlington & owner of Autumn Records in Winooski. He has been curating & programming concerts for 20+ years. He will utilize his connections to bring cutting edge musicians to The Phoenix. The Outer Sounds concert series will explore the worlds & intersections of electronic, experimental, avant-garde, improvised, ambient, drone, minimalist, free jazz, modern composition, psychedelic music and more. All concerts are intended to be accessible and open to anyone, regardless of knowledge or experience. We hope the music will encourage discussion, inquiry & feedback. Come with open ears, minds & hearts and listen to the Outer Sounds.

Artist Bios

Caroline Davis

Alive with nurturing visions of simple sonic offerings morph our present situation, Caroline Davis’ main reason for playing music is to connect with others, beckoning new vistas among curious listeners. Her musical journey began in Singapore, in a humid climate, hearing sounds underwater that she would recreate by singing to her German shepherd dogs, who treated her as their own. Her family moved to the United States, Atlanta, Georgia, around age 6, where she encountered R&B and gospel music rife with horns that called her to choose the saxophone 6 years later.

Today, Caroline’s music covers a wide range of styles, owed to this shifting environment. As a leader, she has released seven albums: Live Work & Play (2012), Doors: Chicago Storylines (2015), Heart Tonic (2018), Alula (2019), Anthems (2019), Portals: Mourning (2021), and Alula: Captivity (2023). Her active projects include jazz-leaning Portals, experimental R&B My Tree, and protest band Alula. She has won Downbeat’s Critic’s Poll Rising Star Alto-Saxophonist and has been included in numerous Reader and Critics Polls. Her work has garnered much praise from NPR, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Wire, and a host of international publications.

Davis is active as both a side-person and a leader in a diverse set of expressions. Davis has shared the stage with Lee Konitz, Rajna Swaminathan, Michelle Boulé, Angelica Sanchez, John Zorn, Bari Kim, The Femme Jam, Matt Mitchell, Terry Riley, Miles Okazaki, and Billy Kaye. Outside of these performance relationships, she has been involved with the following mentorship communities: IAJE’s Sisters in Jazz, the Kennedy Center’s Betty Carter Jazz Ahead Program, and Mutual Mentorship for Musicians. Grants and residencies supporting a grateful Caroline include: Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Chamber Music America, New York Foundation for the Arts, Jerome Hill, Civitella, BringAbout Residency, The Jazz Gallery, and MacDowell. Some of her compositional practice integrates music with cognitive science, influenced by her Ph.D in Music Cognition.

Caroline is an advocate for social justice in the realms of gender (Jazz & Gender at The New School and This Is a Movement) and in the movement for carceral justice (Justice for Keith Lamar). She is organizing community events under the moniker Creatives for Abolition, supporting artistic endeavors and the message of prison industrial complex abolition.

Wendy Eisenberg

Over the last five years or so Wendy Eisenberg has been keeping listeners guessing. Nominally an improvising guitarist, they don’t recognize any musical limitations, perpetually finding ways to apply a deeply exploratory practice to a wide variety of contexts. Eisenberg plays solo guitar as well as banjo in both acoustic and electric settings, warped post-punk songs in the trio Editrix, delicately dangerous guitar music in the critically acclaimed Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet, country-free jazz in the band Darlin', with Lester St. Louis and Ryan Sawyer, febrile post-Prime Time free jazz in Strictly Missionary, and punk-prog in a trio with Trevor Dunn and Ches Smith. As Eisenberg told fellow guitarist Nick Millevoi in an interview for Premier Guitar in 2021, “I need to be in a punk band at the same time as I need to be playing free improv at the same time as I need to be playing songs. All at the same time—otherwise none of the practices will work for me.” Their musical range isn’t a glib manifestation of eclecticism, but a genuine artistic essence.

Eisenberg has collaborated with a disparate array of musicians from all points along the creative music spectrum, including Bill Orcutt, Allison Miller, Shane Parish, Francisco Mela, Carla Kihlstedt, John Zorn, and Caroline Davis. They have released music on Tzadik, VDSQ, Ba Da Bing! Records, Garden Portal, Feeding Tube, Out of Your Head, and Dear Life Records, and performed everywhere from intimate basements to international festivals including Moers, Le Guess Who? and Big Ears. They also write words about music and other things, and have published work in John Zorn's Arcana series, The Contemporary Music Review, Talkhouse, and Sound American.

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Dani Dobkin

Dani Dobkin is a New York City based artist, composer and educator currently working with sound, ceramics and modular synthesis. Recently their work has engaged with ideas of grief, decay and ephemerality.

Past and recent collaborators include Yarn/Wire, International Contemporary Ensemble, CT::SWaM, Qubit and Women in Sound.

As an artist and composer, their work has been showcased at a variety of venues and galleries including ISSUE Project Room (NYC), Dimenna Center for the Arts (NYC), Spectrum (NYC), Fridman Gallery (NYC), Mom’s Gallery (NYC), The Wallach Gallery (NYC), The Rubin Museum (NYC), Public Records (NYC), Chronos Art Center (Shanghai), NextSunday (Tokyo) and Little Berlin (Philadelphia).

Dobkin received a BFA from Bard College and an MFA in Sound Art from Columbia University. They are currently a doctoral candidate in music composition at Columbia University and teaches modular synthesis at Bard College.

Matt Sargent

Matt Sargent (b. 1984) is a composer, guitarist, recording engineer, and music technologist based in upstate New York, where he is an assistant professor of music at Bard College. His music grows from interests in resonance, the making/breaking of patterns, and computer models of musical thought. Over the last decade, his work has focused extensively on musical algorithms and real-time notation systems, which can be heard in his compositions and technical collaborations with other artists.

His compositions have been described as “bringing a sharpened sense of the transcendental into the 21st century.” (Paul Muller, Sequenza21) On his 2018 release, Ghost Music, Bill Meyer writes, “this music isn’t about following in anyone’s footsteps; it uses bare resources to establish a bounded and essential place.” (The Wire Magazine)

His albums include Illuminations (Sawyer Editions, 2023), Between Time and After (Chen Li Music, 2023), Bend (Waveform Alphabet, 2023), Tide (A Wave Press, 2020), Separation Songs (Cold Blue Music, 2019), Tide (for ten basses) (Marginal Frequency, 2019), and Ghost Music (Weighter Recordings, 2018).

He is currently engaged with expanding available repertoire for the pedal steel and electric guitar. In 2022, Matt commissioned new works for solo pedal steel from Michael Pisaro-Liu, Carl Stone, and Nomi Epstein. His performance of Trails (2019-2022), a new concert-length work for pedal steel by Kevin Good, was recently released by Sawyer Editions. He commissioned and premiered James Romig’s concert-length work for electric guitar, The Fragility of Time, which will be released by A Wave Press in Fall 2024.

In demand as an audio engineer for contemporary music, Matt’s recent production credits include Alvin Lucier’s One Arm Bandits (Important Records), Ricochet Lady (Black Truffle), and Works for the Ever Present Orchestra II (Black Truffle), Musica Elettronica Viva’s Symphony No. 107 – The Bard (Black Truffle), Sarah Hennies’s Spectral Malsconcities (New World Records), Kyle Gann’s Whispers, and Ensemble Signal / David Felder’s Les Quatre Temps Cardinaux (Coviello Contemporary), among many others. He recently restored Richard Teitelbaum’s soundtrack for the Suzan Pitt film, Asparagus, which will be released by Black Truffle Records in 2024.

As a technical producer and software designer, Matt developed a networked music notation program for the Swiss-based Ever Present Orchestra, which facilitated performance of numerous large ensemble works composed by Alvin Lucier. In 2021, he co-composed A Murmur in the Trees, for twenty-four basses, with Eve Beglarian and bassist Robert Black. Along with Chris Cerrone, he is currently reconstructing the electronics of the late composer Ingram Marshall. Praising his work on Robert Carl’s album, Splectra (Cold Blue Music), Fanfare Magazine writes, “he could find no better collaborator than composer and sound designer Matt Sargent.”