Bar Laika presents Satellite 21: Austin Sley Julian and Julia Santoli

Join us at Bar Laika on Wednesday, February 8 at 8pm for the 21st edition of Satellite, featuring live music performances by Austin Sley Julian and Julia Santoli. Julian and Santoli have been developing their project since 2021. The duo share a fascination with systematic chaos. They grind through space, welding dense atmospheres of sound and material.

Austin Sley Julian is a visual and sound artist, improviser, and performer born in New York. Julian has worked in many visual and aural media, making countless pieces through the years, touring nationally with several music projects that he has founded, most notably: Sediment club, Sunk Heaven, and Signal Break. Using prepared guitar, handmade instruments, discarded artifacts, and debris, Julian creates moving, physically jagged, harsh gestures that hurl at their audiences. Through these kinetic sounds and sculptures Julian strives to convey a physically unstable energy in his work that reflects the technological society in which it was created. Structures are constructed and deconstructed in the same gesture. Sounds float and sink in the same note. Image is viscerally close and encompassing, all in the same moment. Julian’s work shows an attraction to the aesthetic that is created by this dichotomy between rhythm, structure, and total collapse. His work strives to keep the audience in a constant conflict between these polar extremes. It evokes feelings of anguish, frustration, and inherent conflict to confront the ugly instability of this condition with realism and “pessimistic optimism.”

Julia Santoli is a multi-disciplinary artist and experimental musician. Santoli creates immersive and precarious environments with voice, feedback, electronics, and installation. Her approach to vocalization integrates embodied practice with an attention to close listening and empathetic response in electroacoustic compositions and structured improvisations often tipping the scales between resonant clarity and extreme sonic states. Solo works, collaborations and sound design have been presented at spaces including Issue Project Room, Roulette, Judson Memorial Church, Queens Museum, Drawing Center, and Widow Jane Mine Cave, and in artist-run-spaces across the United States, Germany, Japan and elsewhere. Santoli has been an artist-in-residence at Issue Project Room, Pioneer Works, and Leipzig International Art Program. She was an Asian Cultural Council Artist Fellow in 2019 and is currently pursuing doctoral studies in music and collective practices at The Graduate Center, CUNY.

Satellite is a monthly experimental music series curated by Sanna Almajedi. 

For more information, contact laika@e-flux.com.