Toronto-based improviser Karen Ng has established herself as a unique musical force nationally and internationally. Whether encountering her on tour with renowned artists or in an intimate venue in Berlin, audiences have come to know her distinctive tone and remarkable offerings in a variety of contexts. Over the last 15 years Ng has performed with some of Canada’s most prized artists such as The Weather Station, Andy Shauf, Do Make Say Think and many more, appearing in high profile performances such as Jimmy Kimmel, NPR’s Tiny Desk, Austin City Limits and festivals including Big Ears, Pitchfork, Bonaroo, Primavera, Osheaga, Best Kept Secret and Wilco’s Solid Sounds among others.
One of Canada’s leading improvisers “with a breathtakingly wide musical scope” (Musicworks) she also collaborates regularly with creative and ad hoc ensembles in the wider improvising scene across Canada, in Europe and the US. Since the pandemic, Ng has been a featured guest on Chicago’s Experimental Sound Studio Option Series, Western Front in Vancouver, Bimhuis in Amsterdam and performed at festivals such as Coastal Jazz Festival (Vancouver), Suoni Il Popolo (Montreal), Pique (Ottawa), Venus Festival (Toronto), Sonic Transmission (Austin, TX) Cologne Jazz Week and other established institutions who focus on experimental programming.
Notable recordings span over a decade with various artists including Lido Pimienta, Joan Shelley, The Weather Station, Badge Epoque Ensemble, Charles Spearin, Craig Dunsmuir, Rob Clutton and many more, as well as sound design and scoring work with Brandon Valdivia (Nuit Blanche 2024) and Dillon Baldassaro (That Friend, Fly Baby Fly OST). She has released one tape (Here 2018) of solo saxophone and clarinet music independently and her first full length album Backwards Blue was released in October 2025 on Halocline Trance.
Matt Robidoux (they/he) is a San Francisco based composer, improviser, and educator interested in sound-gesture causality and the convergence of movement and sound as it relates to free improvisation and accessibility. Their primary instrument is the “corn synth” (Kinetically Operated Randomness Network), a modular system that interprets physical input from two “ears of corn” sculptures cast in aluminum.
Why corn?
I like to focus on the modularity/ubiquity of corn and this kind of illogical sculptural sound causality as a starting point for free improvisation. The instrument was invented during my residency at ACRE in Wisconsin, where I cast two corn cob moldings in aluminum at a metal pouring workshop in a cornfield. Movement and touch determine the parameters of pitch, velocity, and duration. This makes for an accessible instrument, at once charming and absurd, while also a merging of my practice creating space for unrestricted musical improvisation.
The modular environment, configured around two touch controlled aluminum cast ears of corn, is informed by my ongoing work with Pauline Oliveros’ final project AUMI (Adaptive Use Musical Instrument) in direct collaboration with the disability community and multidisciplinary arts organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area. The powerful echo and artistic legacy of Mills College CCM (1967-2022) resonates in my design of the corn synth, modeling it after the Buchla 158, the original synthesizer used at the San Francisco Tape Music Center beginning in 1963.
They are part of a composer collective with Sally Decker, Brendan Glasson, Briana Marela, Michelle Moeller, and Mitch Stahlmann, and Flatways, an electroacoustic improvising trio with Jordan Glenn and Sudhu Tewari. They have a duo with Laetitia Sonami called The Gleaners that often collaborates with Paul DeMarinis. They have worked with Creativity Explored, Del Sol Quartet, Fred Frith, Eclipse Quartet, Dustin Wong, Julius Smack, William Winant, Jaap Blonk, Laura Steenberge, Sunburned Hand of the Man, Anla Courtis, J Mascis, Wendy Eisenberg, gabby fluke-mogul and Matt Norman.
They hold a MA in music composition from Mills College, where they studied with Roscoe Mitchell, Zeena Parkins, John Bischoff and James Fei. Their scholarly work is featured as a chapter in Improvising across Abilities: Pauline Oliveros and the Adaptive Use Musical Instrument via University of Michigan Press (2024). Matt has performed throughout North America, Europe, and Japan and has work available on Already Dead, Null Zone, Crash Symbols, Feeding Tube Records, Mystra, Exploding In Sound, Ydlmier, Carpark Records, and most recently their own imprint Air Tone.
Sweet Lips is the artistic collaboration between Owen Kurtz and Sierra Weston. They make avant-pop music that explores the cultural and technical frameworks of the genre using experimental performance and recording approaches. Their debut “Sweet Lips Debut” was released December 2024 on the Ministry of Phonic Services Label. They also make multi-media installation work which has shown at the plumb and 24 hr atm lotto in Toronto. Excerpts from these projects were released as “Sweet Lips Singles” in November 2025.
Colby Richardson is a Toronto-based media artist working within experimental film, sound art, performance, and installation. His practice is entangled with the technological detritus that he has collected. His inspiration is found in piles of half-functioning video equipment, discarded consumer electronics, lightbulbs, radios, children’s toys, old iphones, dyson airblades, strobe lights, and anything that spins. Richardson embraces a low-tech approach and aims to work with found materials in a medium-specific method, forgoing modification or processing, and instead deriving complexity from chaos, repetition, and improvisation. His work is playful, formalist, and exploratory, and often involves collaborations with other artists. For this year’s send + receive, he will be collaborating with both Karen Ng and Sweet Lips, where he will be providing experimental live-camera projections.