TALsounds

Natalie Chami (TALsounds) is a Canadian-born Lebanese American musician and educator. Known for her work in drone, ambient, and improvisational music, she has cultivated a distinguished solo career over the past 15 years, crafting a distinctive blend of personal and transporting music. Her compositions seamlessly integrate synth work, operatic vocals, and meticulous atmosphere crafting. Chami has released albums on various labels, toured internationally, and earned acclaim for her significant contributions to the avant-garde electronic scene including publications such as Pitchfork, The Fader, The Washington Post, and The Chicago Tribune. Her latest release, Shift (2023), is a departure from her signature warm analog synth sound, with exclusive use of hardware digital and FM synthesizers, embracing a crisp, icy tonal palette and a minimalist approach. Notably, Chami collaborated with fellow Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) women in the production, art, and photography for the album. Beyond her contributions to live performance and music production, Chami played a pivotal role as a founding faculty member at the Chicago High School for the Arts, continues to maintain a private music studio for students since 2010, was a video host for the online musical instrument marketplace, Reverb.com, and currently serves as the Product Manager for Synthesizers at KORG USA. Chami also enjoys when her multifaceted career extends into the realm of film scoring and sound installations. She also very much loves her family of humans, cats, and dogs… and nature and chocolate cake. https://www.talsounds.com/ Dark Sines is the music, literary, and psychology project of Taylor Proffitt. The project is designed to bring the struggles of mental illness into awareness and form. The music is a subliminal environment for listeners to touch, stretch, bend, and recreate their deepest dreams, traumas, desires, and projections of self-love. Inspired deeply by the work of Carl Jung, Dark Sines steps through the fog into a left field genre: Psychological Music. Recordings of Saxophone, Piano, Guitar Pedal, Modular Synth, and Field sounds intertwine into a psychoanalytic lake into which listeners should deeply dive. Taylor performs and moves between the Smokey Mountains of Synth Capital, Asheville, NC, the swamps and beaches of Norfolk and Virginia Beach, and the political underground of Washington DC. Wade into the mist at darksinesmusic.bandcamp.com Alma Laprida is a multi-disciplinary artist whose creative pursuits encompass composition, improvisation, performance, installation, and radiophonic pieces. Armed with instruments and objects such as the trumpet marine, field recordings, synthesizers, megaphones and the lyre, her explorations traverse diverse realms in the pursuit of creating captivating sonic experiences. Alma has released three solo albums, collaborated on two other albums, and contributed to various compilations. In 2021, after a decade of creative work and life in Buenos Aires, she relocated to Maryland, USA. Besides her solo work, she’s currently part of Hypnotized Chickens and the Bureau of Sensory Affairs. https://linktr.ee/almalaprida Requiem are a DC-based audiovisual arts group founded in summer 2020 as the brainchild of experimental guitar player and soundscape designer Tristan Welch, multi-instrumentalist, producer, and multimedia artist Doug Kallmeyer, and established visual artist Monica Stork. Known for their immersive, cinematic and hypnotic multimedia experiences, Requiem’s core sonic identity is characterized by heavy soundscapes, deep synthetic bass, and musical percussion, imbued with an inherent emotional depth facilitating their explorations of the experiences and sentimentality of interpersonal relationships. Building on the foundations laid by influences including God Speed You! Black Emperor, Tycho, and Faust, Requiem have forged a new, genre-transcending path, which elegantly bridges the gap between pop sensibilities and instrumental post-rock, ambient, and addictive electronic rhythms. Frequent collaborations with artists from around the world, sold-out releases on both UK and US labels, and a longstanding reputation as part of the global artistic underground have also helped them cement their status as a groundbreaking, one-of-a-kind act. https://www.requiemdrone.com/