Eden Rayz is a Boston-based composer, cellist, instrument designer, and extreme vocalist. Her subversive and immersive performances have served as healing spaces that transcend genre and subculture.
Eden served as a 2023-2024 Artist-In-Residence at historic Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, MA, where she was commissioned to compose, perform, and host a set of musical death awareness meditations and long-form ritual listening pieces. Eden created a new electroacoustic instrument called Argent and Sable from the cemetery’s former pipe organ. Her live album The Cemetery Tapes featuring Argent and Sable, amplified cello, extreme vocals, and percussionist Austin Birdy will be released independently in the summer of 2024.
As a session cellist, she has recorded and performed with bands including Moon Tooth, Third Eye Blind, Marrowfields, The Furies, Geni Skendo, Rachel Sumner, Cradle of Judah, and Wyclef Jean, and improvised on soundtracks like the 2023 Grammy-winning Assassin’s Creed Valhalla: Dawn of Ragnarök. Her cello performances have been hailed as “terrifying” and “unbelievably special,” by metal reviewers. I Care If You Listen described her work as “...a musical world the listener has stumbled into, not just a representation of something happening in a concert hall.”
In May of 2022, she self-released her debut solo album Corpus Vice which blends death metal and contemporary art music. The album was written as functional music to aid listeners in processing climate grief. She serves as front person and cellist for death metal band Angel Grinder. Her solo flute works have been performed at Carnegie (Weill) Recital Hall and her chamber works have premiered at Musiikkitalo in Helsinki, Finland and in Cortona, Italy.
Eden holds a masters degree in composition and music theory from Boston Conservatory at Berklee. She has lectured on composition, notation, and string technique at universities including Berklee College of Music, Harvard University, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and teaches students locally and internationally out of her private online lesson studio in Boston.
Listen to her solo works at edenrayz.bandcamp.com and read her writings at substack.com/@edenrayz
Killick Hinds lives in Athens, Georgia USA. His music is Appalachian Trance Metal made on unusual stringed instruments with an emphasis on unquantifiable rhythms (shaping time), intuitive intonation (shaping pitch), and shamanistic ROYGBIV (shaping color). The primary sonic influences on Killick are animals, wind, water, fire, electrical hum, and silence. Pop-culture mashups and ancient and obscure forms infuse his music; the effect more closely resembles speech patterns and emotionally-drawn architecture than it does conventional Western music. Despite its eclectic nature the sounds are surprisingly familiar and accessible to audiences of all ages and levels of musical involvement. Killick is a co-founder of Habitable Records (habitablerecords.com) and offers mastering services for dynamic sounds through H(i)nds(i)ght Studio. More than 300 Killick albums.
Federico Balducci + Becca Pasley
Federico BalducciThe music of Puerto Rican guitarist and composer Federico Balducci can be described as a mixture of classical and ambient music with unusually intricate harmonies.Federico Balducci has a Bachelor’s Degree in Film Scoring from the prestigious Berklee College of Music. Currently, Federico mostly works on film scores for short films and documentaries.Becca PasleyBecca Pasley has a varied background studying and performing creative improvisation, noise music, DIY punk rock, Black American music, and European classical. The name of their ambient noise project, Souther Cistern, recognizes the strong influence of Deep Listening, Pauline Oliveros’s mindfulness philosophy, and her album of the same name that was recorded in an empty reverberating cistern.
