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.
NIKA (Zola Jesus’ project; electronics) and Nate Wooley (trumpet)
Zeena Parkins (harp and electronics), Ryan Sawyer (percussion), and Elaine Carey (electronics)
Mir Naqibul Islam (tabla) and Randall Dunn (electronics)
Michael Vallera (guitar) and Alan Licht (guitar)
A livestream will be available free of charge at 8pm on the day of the performance and archived for future viewing. Each performance will also be broadcasted live on WFMU.
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.
NIKA is the improvised feral noise project of Zola Jesus. NIKA is a channel of the collective sinew that connects us to our primitive howl—a collaboration with the ancestors.
Zeena Parkins is an artist based in New York, celebrated for her unparalleled rigor and boundless creativity. Renowned for redefining the harp’s sonic potential, she combines innovaEve technique with groundbreaking design, creating both extended acoustic methods and custom electric instruments.
Hailed as making “..the most progressive campfire music ever” by The New York Times, trumpeter, composer, and writer Nate Wooley has been a quiet force in reshaping contemporary American music. As a trumpet player, he has been an important interpreter of experimental composition, making his premiere as a soloist with The New York Philharmonic in 2019. As an improviser, he has been a part of a movement to redefine the technical possibilities of the instrument, his solo performances being called “exquisitely hostile” by Massimo Ricci of Touching Extremes. His compositions are evolving amalgams of improvisation, folk music, text, and immersive experiences that communicate an arc of human experience from the fragility of being alone to the ecstasy of collectivity. He is also a writer of essays on new music published in The New York Review of Books, The Nation, and E-Flux Journal among others. He founded and was the editor-in-chief of Sound American, a print and online music journal making space for musicians to speak in their own words, for ten years.
Ryan Sawyer (NYC) is a musician (percussion), composer, academic, and visual artist. He has performed, recorded and toured with countless bands and musicians. Sawyer’s unique approach to improvisation and composition include free form shepherding of sound thru drums and voice. After years of improvisation and side man employment Sawyer has dedicated his focus and practice to healing thru sound and brings this mindset to every opportunity he has to make music. Presently, he is concentrating on a new piece for a small orchestra and maracas called Ryan Sawyer’s Shaker Ensemble with a release of a live record on Lobby Art Editions.
Elaine Carey weaves spectral electroacoustic textures and eruptive drones into densely layered sonic tapestries. Exploring themes of horror, humor, and the surreal, her work pursues the precipice of extremes through free improvisation and extended technique on instruments both traditional and electronic — from musical saw and strings to small motors and analog hardware — most recently centering Eurorack modular synthesis.
A fixture of the Los Angeles experimental underground, she co-founded noise duo Telecaves in 2013 and has since collaborated widely, including with LAFMS supergroup Extended Organ, Xiu Xiu, Carla Bozulich, Tara Jane O’Neil, and Carlos Giffoni (as Rogue Squares, since 2017). Elaine is currently at work on her debut solo LP.
Michael Vallera (b. 1984) is a Chicago-based musician and visual artist who uses the guitar and electronics to explore stasis, texture, and an overall sense of intimate sonic space. His visual work employs photography and collage to communicate similar themes, highlighting aspects of symmetry and balance. He has collaborated through performance and recording with artists such as Lee Ranaldo, Loren Connors, Doug McCombs, Elliott Sharp, and Steve Hauschildt. He performs as Cleared with percussionist Steven Hess and as Maar with visual artist and musician Joseph Clayton Mills.
In 2010, he received his MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago with a concentration in Sound, with a particular focus on studio techniques related to long-form composition and drone music. Structures of repetition and dissonance are staples of his sound-based practice, influenced equally by principles of minimalism and the unique history of experimental guitar musics, drawing critical comparison of his work to the likes of Keith Rowe and Christian Fennesz.
Alan Licht is a musician, writer, and curator based in New York. Appearing on nearly one hundred recordings, he is known for his guitar work in the underground rock bands Run On and Love Child, a long-standing duo with Loren Connors, the improv project Text of Light with Lee Ranaldo, and stints with such legendary figures as Yoko Ono, Tom Verlaine, and Arthur Lee. His most recent solo guitar album is Havens (VDSQ, 2024). Licht is the author of Common Tones: Selected Interviews with Artists and Musicians 1995–2020 (Blank Forms, 2021); Sound Art Revisited (Bloomsbury, 2019), and the editor of Will Oldham on Bonnie “Prince” Billy (2012, Faber & Faber/W. W. Norton).
