Playing Hooky

The high intensity band Guerilla Toss performs brutal and inventive rock and roll dance music in a one hour set performed live and broadcasted as part of the Playing Hooky radio event series. Streamed live on clocktower.org straight from a shipping container/recording studio in the idyllic garden at Pioneer Works. Tune in at 4PM to hear Guerilla Toss live. To stay updated click HERE Ecstatic, vital, and brilliantly unhinged, Guerilla Toss promotes positive energy and twisted spirituality through brutal, intelligent, live rock and roll dance music. A Guerilla Toss concert is more of a ritual than a performance; it is the unique pairing of musical voices and backgrounds that makes them such a special party band. But they are more than that – Guerilla Toss gets real when you pay close attention. Their music is inspired by drug addiction/mental illness and the re-birth of the soul through spiritual practice and psychedelic drug healing – helping the listener overcome these mind-fuck hardships.

The Baltimore band Horse Lords performs a symbiotic clash of minimalist experimentations and rock, in an ecstatic one hour set performed live and broadcasted as part of the Playing Hooky radio event series. Streamed live on clocktower.org straight from a shipping container/recording studio in the idyllic garden at Pioneer Works. Tune in at 4PM to hear Horse Lords live. Grafting the relentless repetitions of modern minimalism onto the propulsive engine of rock and roll, Horse Lords create an ecstatic forward thrust driven by dueling polyrhythms that curve endlessly past one another. The Baltimore quartet, consisting of saxophonist/percussionist Andrew Bernstein, bassist/synthesist Max Eilbacher, guitarist Owen Gardner, and drummer Sam Haberman, employs arcane tuning systems to achieve their otherworldly harmonies, made possible by guitars refretted by Gardner. The resulting sound is at once stark and lush, tightly interwoven and threatening to fly apart, making their live performances spellbinding and utterly thrilling affairs. Listen in at horselords.bandcamp.com.

The ecstatic guitar virtuoso, Ava Mendoza stops by the studio for a Playing Hooky broadcasted live set. Streamed live on clocktower.org straight from a shipping container/recording studio in the idyllic garden at Pioneer Works! Tune in at 4PM to hear Ava Mendoza live. Ava Mendoza plays guitars and stompboxes, and writes music. Mendoza is based out of Brooklyn, NY. She has played guitar for most of her life, and for the last decade has been actively playing her own music as well as with different groups. She has toured throughout the U.S. and Europe, and recorded or performed with a broad spectrum of musicians including singer Carla Bozulich (The Geraldine Fibbers, Evangelista), Fred Frith (Massacre, Henry Cow, Art Bears), Nels Cline, Jamaaladeen Tacuma, Weasel Walter, Tune-Yards, and more. She has played on recordings released by labels Weird Forest, Tzadik, Clean Feed, NotTwo, ugEXPLODE, Resipiscent, New Atlantis, and others. She was named one of Guitar World‘s “10 Female Guitarists You Should Know”.

The New York-based singer/songwriter Frankie Cosmos (musical alter-ego of Greta Kline) steps into the studio for a Playing Hooky session, bringing with her an hour of anecdotal dream-pop. Tune in at 1pm to hear the whole set LIVE! Playing Hooky is Clocktower's live in-studio performance series featuring musicians of all ages and styles from cowboy music to pure noise. Recorded in our Red Hook studios at Pioneer Works and offered as a distraction from the mid-week blues. Frankie Cosmos's backing band includes Aaron Maine/Ronnie Mystery (Porches) on drums and David Maine/David Mystery (Porches) on bass and Gabrielle Smith (Eskimeaux) on keyboards/harmonies. The group has recorded with the labels, Pukekos and Double Double Whammy.

Former no-wave DNA bandmember Ikue Mori visits Clocktower Radio's headquarters for a session of drop-out-tune-in live radio! The laptop and drum-machine master elevates her instrument from push button automat to soaring sonic synaesthesizer. Aside from her legendary role in the DNA project with Arto Lindsay and Tim Wright, Mori can be found elevating groups including Mephista with Sylvie Courvoisier and Susie Ibarra, Phantom Orchard with Zeena Parkins, Kibyoshi project with Koichi Makigami and Mark Nauseef, and various ensembles with John Zorn.

Noveller is the solo electric guitar project of Brooklyn/Austin-based composer and filmmaker Sarah Lipstate. As Noveller, Lipstate's richly textured noise soundscapes are woven through with pulses, throbs, and loops, resulting in a perfectly orchestrated pandemonium. Tune in at 1pm to hear the whole set LIVE! Playing Hooky is Clocktower's live in-studio performance series featuring musicians of all ages and styles from cowboy music to pure noise. Recorded in our Red Hook studios at Pioneer Works and offered as a distraction from the mid-week blues. Sarah Lipstate has worked with No Fun Productions, Saffron Recordings (her own imprint), Weird Forest, Important Records, Taiga Records, Shelter Press, and Fire Records.

Multi-instrumentalist and composer Ned Rothenberg joins Clocktower in the studio for a Playing Hooky session, to share his compositions that lie on the edge of jazz and new music, and draw influences from around the world, including the Hindustani and Japanese classical traditions. Tune in at 1pm to hear the whole set LIVE! Playing Hooky is Clocktower's live in-studio performance series featuring musicians of all ages and styles from cowboy music to pure noise. Recorded in our Red Hook studios at Pioneer Works and offered as a distraction from the mid-week blues. Ned Rothenberg performs primarily on alto saxophone, clarinet, bass clarinet, and the shakuhachi - an endblown Japanese bamboo flute. His solo work utilizes an expanded palette of sonic language, creating a kind of personal idiom all its own. In an ensemble setting, he leads the trio Sync, with Jerome Harris, guitars and Samir Chatterjee, tabla, works with the Mivos string quartet playing his Quintet for Clarinet and Strings and collaborates around the world with fellow improvisors.

A guitarist of considerable moxie and a surprisingly tender singer, Ben Seretan restlessly employs a wide variety of sonic approaches in his immersive hour long Playing Hooky set: unending clouds of downtown minimalism, full tilt large rock ensemble crash cymbal workouts, the gentlest of 70s folk jams and country-pop love songs, and the upliftedness of power ballads, mega-church worship music, and ecstatic jazz. Tune in at 1pm to hear the whole set LIVE! Playing Hooky is Clocktower's live in-studio performance series featuring musicians of all ages and styles from cowboy music to pure noise. Recorded in our Red Hook studios at Pioneer Works and offered as a distraction from the mid-week blues. Ben Seretan is a graduate of Wesleyan University, a 2012 Wassaic Project resident, a 2013 Sitka Fellow, and a 2014 Flux Factory artist-in-residence. He is also an organizer and performer of sunrise concert series, and has performed in horse barns, bedrooms, churches, movie theaters, power plants, rooftops, and once on top of the wheelhouse of a tall ship.

Born in Florida to Ecuadorian immigrants, and influenced by the various Latin American cultures of southern Florida, Roberto Carlos Lange is the force behind the bilingual and hybrid persona of Helado Negro. He arrives at Clocktower studio for a set of innovative and dexterous tunes that balances myriad forms, such as electronic and krautrock, through meticulous music craftsmanship and suffused with mesmerizing rhythms, loops and melodies. Tune in at 1pm to hear the whole set LIVE! Playing Hooky is Clocktower's live in-studio performance series featuring musicians of all ages and styles from cowboy music to pure noise. Recorded in our Red Hook studios at Pioneer Works and offered as a distraction from the mid-week blues. Helado Negro constantly develops his music-making process and has produced experimental and refined full-length LPs Invisible Life, Canta Lechuza and Awe Owe as well as the original Island Universe Story series, released in three EPs. In 2012 he created a new collaborative group with Julianna Barwick called OMBRE, and released a debut album called Believe You Me. Also a visual artist working with video, sound, and performance, Helado Negro, beyond the persona, serves as a creative space that encourages a cohesive collision of art and music.

Italian by birth, Gypsy by heritage, and Brooklynite by residence, Zeb aka The Spy From Cairo is the kind of musician that fits in perfectly with the downtown NYC music scene and with a Playing Hooky session live in the studio! Zeb brings together deep Middle Eastern and Jamaican sounds in a hypnotic and captivating hour of music that sits at the unique nexus of Dub and Arabic music. Tune in at 1pm to hear the whole set LIVE! Playing Hooky is Clocktower's live in-studio performance series featuring musicians of all ages and styles from cowboy music to pure noise. Recorded in our Red Hook studios at Pioneer Works and offered as a distraction from the mid-week blues. Zeb has been closely associated with the Turntables on the Hudson scene for close to 12 years – producing dozens of albums as Zeb, The Spy From Cairo and the Organic Grooves project, as well as remixing for everyone from Baba Maal to Tosca to Billie Holliday to Novalima, steadily garnering a worldwide collective of fans and followers.