For the first time since 2009, the legendary No Fun Fest returns to New York with a three-day fest titled No Fun New Perspectives, focusing on improvised music and featuring a dream-like lineup of avant-garde musicians from different generations, with every presentation during the festival a world premiere that will push experimental music to new and unknown places.
No Fun Fest was celebrated as a pivotal event in Experimental Music and Noise during its original run in New York City from 2004 to 2009, and a second edition in Sweden in 2009.
Bill Nace (guitar), Carlos Giffoni (electronics), and Charmaine Lee (electronics and voice)
Twig Harper (electronics), Hada Benedito (prepared piano), and Michael Foster (saxophone)
Lea Bertucci (electronics and voice) and David Watson (bagpipes)
Mark Morgan (guitar), Samara Lubelski (violin), and Greg Kelley (trumpet)
A livestream will be available free of charge at 8pm on the day of the performance and archived for future viewing.
Carlos Giffoni is the person behind No Fun, which included a festival that ran in NYC in different venues from 2004 to 2009, multiple collaborations with other festivals around the world, and the No Fun Productions label. Carlos is a Venezuelan musician who lived in the US from 1996 to 2025 and currently resides in Valencia, Spain. With recent releases on Ideologic Organ and Room40. As well as recent residencies at GRM in Paris and EMS in Stockholm. He has collaborated with an impressive list of experimental musicians, and his work has been featured in multiple fashion campaigns and films.
Bill Nace is an artist and musician based in Philadelphia, PA. He has collaborated with a wide range of musicians, including Michael Morley, Graham Lambkin, Sakina Abdou, Twig Harper, David Watson, Jooklo Duo, chik white, John Truscinski, Thurston Moore, Jake Meginsky, Jessica Rylan, Paul Flaherty, Wally Shoup, Aaron Dilloway, and Kim Gordon, with whom he regularly plays as one half of the duo Body/Head. His last solo LP Plays the 2-string Taishogoto was released on Three Lobed Records/Open Mouth Records.
In addition to Drag City and Three Lobed, recordings can be found on Ecstatic Peace (Northampton, MA), Ultra Eczema (Belgium), Holidays (Italy), Throne Heap (VA), HP Cycle (Toronto, ON), as well as on Nace’s own label Open Mouth.
Charmaine Lee is a New York-based vocalist and electronics artist whose music explores the extremes of presence, intimacy, and noise. Known for her fierce improvisational approach and use of extended vocal techniques, she has ongoing collaborations with artists including Ikue Mori, Conrad Tao, Eric Wubbels, and the JACK Quartet. Her solo sets use feedback, vocal fragments, and real-time processing to create live compositions that are as fragile as they are ferocious. Together with Randall Dunn, Lee also runs a record label, Kou Records, dedicated to artists who have built singular music languages.
Twig Harper (currently California) b.1976. Sonic sleight of hand wrapped in a cybernetic cartoon nightmare on Earth. Electronics.
Hada Benedito Mateo is a trained pianist and multifaceted musician based in Berlin. She led the Berlin Soundpainting Orchestra for a decade, becoming a familiar figure in the free music scene while performing worldwide. Her work focuses on free improvised music, live silent film soundtracks, interdisciplinary collaborations, and sound trips for people of all ages. With a particular emphasis on the prepared piano, she creates playful soundscapes by integrating objects, electronics, and a variety of unconventional instruments.
Michael Foster is a saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist working in the fields of free improvisation, noise, free jazz, graphic & video notation, performance art, and other forms of weird music. He utilizes extensive instrumental preparations, augmenting his saxophone with amplification, objects, balloons, drum heads, vibrators, tapes, and samples, drawing equal inspiration from Don Byas and Black Leather Jesus. His current ensembles include duos with cellist Leila Bordreuil, percussionist Ben Bennett, pianist John Blum, poet/vocalist Lydia Lunch, Richard Kamerman (as The New York Review of Cocksucking), Ted Byrnes, The Ghost (with Joey Sullivan, John Moran, Zach Rowden), Michael Foster with Strings, Foster-Weber-Griener, and more.
Lea Bertucci is an experimental musician whose works revolve around electronic and spatial extensions of instrument and voice. In addition to her longstanding practice performing with woodwinds, she has created compositions for strings, brass, percussion and other instruments, often incorporating electronics and multichannel sound. With an ear toward site-responsiveness and acoustics, her work has expanded toward installation and non-linear presentations of her music, often staged in hyper-resonant spaces.
David Watson is a creative musician. His work includes improvisation, composition, making music for film and dance as well as organizing music events. Watson has worked in improvised and experimental music, maintaining an investigative and questioning approach. Since 1991 he’s been on a journey to reinvent the bagpipe as a new-music instrument. He has deliberately made pieces for different performance contexts – concert stages, clubs and the outdoors. He has made pieces inspired by processions and parades, and composed experimental works for pipe bands, for brass bands, as well as for amateurs and non-musicians.
Mark Charles Morgan is most well known as the guitarist and singer of Sightings, a New York City based avant rock band which existed from 1998 to 2013. They released 10 full length albums on the labels Load, Ecstatic Peace, Fusetron and Dais. Mark currently plays solo and “Department of Heraldry” is his debut record.
Player of multiple instruments, and voice, within the broad waters of song and abstract improvisation, Samara Lubelski, born and bred in NYC – known as a solo artist with eleven full-length releases, but she has also been involved in numerous bands and collaborations including; Hall of Fame, The Tower Recordings, MV/EE, a duo with Marcia Bassett, a duo with Bill Nace, as a studio and live member of Thurston Moore’s band (solo, Chelsea Light Moving), and in her associations with the long-standing German collective Metabolismus. She has studio engineered for Sightings, Double Leopards, Mouthus and others. In addition she has played as a guest musician on numerous recordings of other artists.
