Exposure Therapy: Live Experimental Music Performances

Atheer Soot & Bandit Lu

Atheer Soot is the sound and performance project of Moe Mustafa, a Jordanian-Palestinian artist based in Helsinki. The name means “that which resonates into outer space,” and it reflects Moe’s approach of using sound as a way to explore memory, migration, and the feeling of being untethered. His work often draws on color and material as tools for shaping sonic memory. Bandit Lu, the project of Philadelphia-based sound and visual artist Andy Ong. Bandit Lu is a project shaped by field recordings, minimalist piano loops, and synthesized textures. It’s focused on evoking a sense of nostalgia, familiarity, and introspection. The name comes from Lu Zhishen, a character in the Chinese novel Water Margin, who represents the mix of virtues and flaws that come with being human.

Deaf Anthropologist & Jerry Lim

Deaf Anthropologist is the project of Gaetano Rago, a Hamburg-based artist working across sound, design, and text. With a background in interdisciplinary anthropology and a lifelong sensorineural hearing loss, Rago explores how auditory perception shapes reality. His work frequently centers on auditory pareidolia, the tension between familiarity and estrangement, and the dynamics of immersion and dispersion. He has collaborated with dancers, designers, and installation artists in a range of interdisciplinary contexts. Jerry Lim is a Brooklyn-based multi-instrumentalist and visual artist, focused on guitar and kayagum. His practice spans experimental music performance and improvisation, often centered around custom-built microtonal instruments and altered tuning systems. He has performed at venues including Roulette, The Stone, and Carnegie Hall, and has collaborated with artists across a wide range of disciplines, including Joe McPhee, Sang-Won Park, Sean Meehan, and Martha Colburn. In addition to his musical work, Lim is also active as a visual artist, primarily working in photography.

Heliocentrist & Vito is Terrible

Heliocentrist is the experimental music project of Atlanta-based Adam Nguyen. With no set agenda, Heliocentrist was conceived to explore Adam’s inclination towards minimalism, repetition, loose structures and gentle sonic textures. As an avid multi-instrumentalist and vintage electronics tinker, Adam finds inspiration in acoustic and analog sound sources. New Jersey-based Darrin Maier makes music as Vito is Terrible, a noise and ambient project built around dense textures and caustic sounds. His path to modular synthesis started behind a drum kit, but when that didn’t stick he pivoted to the world of modular synthesis, which now shapes his entire practice.

Jolly Birdie & Voice from the Machine

Jolly Birdie is the project of Baltimore-based composer and musician Joe Aliberti. Drawing from ambient, drone, and space music, the project centers on hardware synthesizers to create sounds that evoke calm and contemplation. Joe has been developing Jolly Birdie for over eight years, but the project has recently gained more visibility through local performances—and collaborations like this one. Voice from the Machine is the electronic project of Timothy Gordon Neher, based in Reading, PA. Tim has been making music for nearly two decades, with a fascination for synths and electronic production that began in high school—covering punk songs using a Juno-60 and GarageBand. He went on to study music composition at the University of the Arts. Around the time of the pandemic, his practice took a sharp turn toward modular synthesis, which now sits at the heart of Voice from the Machine. On stage, the project becomes experimental electronic pop: vocoded vocals layered over a fully live modular setup. Off stage, it shapeshifts into something more abstract—like the industrial soundscapes in this performance, conjuring a dark vision of the future. You can learn more about these performers on the Exposure Therapy website: https://www.exposuretx.com/sessions/jolly-birdie-voice-from-the-machine

onewayness & Simon Bridgestock

Exposure Therapy presents onewayness and Simon Bridgestock