SPATIAL 024 :: Gelsey Bell | Kayla Cashetta | Netta Weiser
Saturday, November 21, 2026
169 Bowery NYC
DOORS 7:30p | SHOW 8:00p
Gelsey Bell :: Sapwood is a work for voice, daxophone, and field recordings from the internal sounds of trees in spring – specifically a cottonwood, a blue spruce, and a silver birch. This spatial rendering of the work explores the movement and relation of layered human and arboreal sounds in a kinesthetic encounter of wood, breath, and the exchange of vapor. The daxophone is a wooden bowed instrument that brings voice to carved “tongues” of wood acting as a kind of bridge between animal and plant. While the field recordings are made with a geophone that documents the vibrations caused by liquid moving up the trunk of a tree as it drinks and its subtle dance in the wind.
Netta Weiser :: Radio-Choreographies explores the acoustic translation of choreographic practice into multichannel electronics. It transforms the Gordon Gallery into an invisible dance stage, resonating with sounds of dissident bodies and unheard voices. As part of her ongoing artistic research, Netta Weiser develops a sonic dance archive focused on works by female choreographers in contexts of migration and resistance. In this multichannel live performance, she activates dances created as acts of protest against war, authoritarian politics and patriarchal domination. Moving between Beirut, Berlin, Tehran, and Vienna, Radio-Choreographies traces embodied histories of dissent through sound, transmission, and collective listening.
Kayla Cashetta :: I’ve recently been developing an instrument called the Strange Spatializer Synth, which uses the forces of strange attractors to create and control the movement of sounds within a 3-dimensional space. Strange attractors produce dynamic systems that are often described as “bounded chaos”: they continuously evolve over time in a chaotic yet semi-predictable fashion, while subtle changes to the system lead to major shifts in its behavior. When applied to a group of sound objects, these forces create visually intricate trajectories, which translate to expressive spatial movements and gestures.
In this piece, the attractors influence an orchestra of basic sound waves and noise sources, organized into groups according to their contrasting movement patterns. Each group sonically changes in response to the positions of its sound objects, while simultaneously affecting the sonic properties of the others. This interconnected system draws inspiration from natural environments and the concept of emergence: the process by which complex, large-scale behaviors and characteristics are created through small local changes of individual parts. As the groups interact and transform one another, the piece develops into a dynamic organism of its own.
About the Artists
Gelsey Bell (she/they) is a Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary performance creator, composer, and vocalist. Her recent works include the experimental opera mɔɹnɪŋ [morning//mourning], the soundwalk Cairns, the musical one-act Archaeopteris, and her in-development experimental opera Sickbed. Her work often features non-human protagonists and storytelling over geologic and cosmic time scales. She is the Co-Artistic Director of thingNY and Varispeed. She has released multiple albums, including the mɔɹnɪŋ [morning//mourning], Skylighght, and Heads Together, and her librettos have been published through 53rd State press and TDR/The Drama Review. She has received awards from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Opera America, the Aaron Copland Fund for Music, the Japan Foundation, NYSCA, and others. Performance highlights also include Dave Malloy’s Natasha, Pierre, & the Great Comet of 1812 (Broadway, Off-Broadway, etc.) and Ghost Quartet, Robert Ashley’s Celestial Excursions and Improvement, Darius Jones’s Samesoul Maker, and works by Jay Afrisando, Kate Soper, Tomomi Adachi, Brent Michael Davids, Raven Chacon, and others. She has a PhD in performance studies from NYU and is part-time faculty for the Master of Music Performer-Composer program at the New School. http://www.gelseybell.com
Netta Weiser (b. 1991) is a Berlin-based artist and choreographer working across performance, sound installation, and experimental radio. In 2019, she initiated the long-term artistic research project Radio-Choreography, which explores the transformation of dance into sound, the relationship between live broadcasting and muted histories, and collective listening as a choreographic practice. Her works have been presented internationally, most recently at the Humboldt Forum, Akademie der Künste, and KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, Tanzquartier and TONSPUR Micro Museum for Sound at MQ Vienna, Onassis Stegi Athens, WDR, Villa Medici Rome, Tanzmuseum Cologne, Peterhaus Theater Cambridge UK, and Badischer Kunstverein Karlsruhe. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Studio for Electroacoustic Music at the Akademie der Künste Berlin, the VALIE EXPORT Center Linz and the Vila Sul Salvador-Bahia. She is currently an artist in residence at ISCP in New York, supported by Artis.
Kayla Cashetta is a composer who works in the realms of electroacoustic, experimental, and electronic music. Her recent work explores generative approaches to sound synthesis and spatialization in multichannel environments.
Her music has been presented at venues and festivals including National Sawdust, the Center for New Music, the New York Festival of Song, and Festival Empreintes. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, and has studied at IRCAM as a participant of the CURSUS Program for Computer Music and Composition. She currently teaches in the Electronic Production and Design Department at Berklee College of Music.
