Artists

Séance Centre artists listed alphabetically by last name. Check out their full artist pages for full bios, archival photographs, and videos.

A-TEAM

In 1982, a group of friends deep into post-punk, jazz and dub got together in Mad Professor's legendary Ariwa studio and lay down their youthful interpretation of a NYC disco cut. They called the song Trouble and released two versions (vocal and dub) on their friend Tony McDermott's !Drum! label with artwork inspired by Russian Constructivism. The group, comprised of Justin Langlands, Chrysta Jones, John Schofield, Tom Dixon, and Dave Killen, decided to call themselves A-Team.

MICHEL BANABILA

Michel Banabila, born 1961, is a sound artist, composer, and producer. Banabila has released music since 1983 and has produced musical scores for numerous films, documentaries, theatre plays and choreographies. He has worked and performed in The Netherlands, Poland, Lebanon, UK, South Africa, Russia, Japan, Spain, China, USA and Belgium.

OREN CANTRELL

Oren Kyle Cantrell is a filmmaker and musician. His formative years were spent in and around Boulder, Colorado playing in various bands, making zines and other visual art. His work is informed by the diy ethos of punk, experimental film, poetry and the spiritual teachings of George Ivanovich Gurdjieff.  He currently lives in New York City with his family. 

MASSIMO DEL CORPO

Massimo Del Corpo is an Italian musician based in Paris. He explores different corners of electronic music using analog and digital synthesisers accompanied by electric guitar/bass composing experimental, psychedelic and ambient music. ‘Anima Di Gomma’ is his first release.

JOANNE FORMAN

American composer Joanne Forman was chosen as one of the six from a field of over 200 to study with the Pulitzer Prize winning composer Dr. Robert Ward. She has composed ten one-act operas (for which she also wrote the librettos); orchestral, choral and chamber music; song cycles (in Spanish, German and English); and well over 100 piano pieces and musicals (including for children). 

BEVERLY GLENN-COPELAND

Beverly Glenn Copeland, born into a family all of whom were very musical, essentially studied the classical piano repertoire from ‘cradlehood’ while listening to his father playing the piano four to five hours a day. He went on to study classical music at McGill, and then after a few years of concertizing - singing the European song repertoire - he suddenly felt called to write music that would weave all the different musical cultures he had come to love.

MICHAEL KLAUSMAN

Born and raised in Kansas, Michael Klausman currently lives with his family along Colorado’s Front Range. Since being expelled from University for excessive library late fines, he has gone on to work for a handful of influential record stores, and now helps produce reissues of obscure & out-of-print albums for various labels. He is also the co-founder of WRY, a small poetry press that operates out of his garage, and which mostly specializes in letterpress publications of obscure & under-known poets.

MJ LALLO

MJ Lallo is an award-winning composer, singer, and voice over artist. Lallo uses her voice to sound like trumpets, bass, cello, birds and drums. Often what you think is an instrument is actually her voice. She opened MJ Productions in San Francisco in 1983 as a post production house specializing in music and SFX. In 1998 she moved to LA and in 2000 she opened her own professional recording studio, where she scores music as well as sings in character voices for animation. 

EBLEN MACARI

Eblen Macari-Garniel, is a Mexican composer and musician who for 40 years, has developed his unique style of creating music; fusing Middle Eastern rhythms, environmental textures and contemporary modal harmony with 8 and 6-string guitar and electronic processes. He has composed original music for documentaries, feature films, television series, planetariums and museums.

SAM MCCLELLAN

Sam McClellan graduated from Hampshire College in 1980 with a bachelors degree in music and alternative health. There he studied under infamous electronic healing music pioneer Randall McClellan. Music of the Five Elements was one of the products of his research into how music affects the organ meridians of acupuncture/acu-pressure, which also included single-blind testing of the effect of note intervals on subjects and a paper documenting his research.

PLAYDATE

Matthew Bailey and Carl Schilde play fully improvised music oscillating somewhere between bingo hall Casio suites and kosmische dreamscapes. The duo perform under the name Playdate, and are sometimes accompanied by 90s instructional videos, larger than life amateur dancers, and outdated light shows. 

VITO RICCI

Vito Ricci's leading edge instinct and creativity have made him a vital and prolific composer of the downtown New York music scene since 1979. During his thirty-year-plus career, Ricci has scored over fifty productions including for concert, theater, dance, performance, film and video. Performances of his works have been presented at countless venues over the years, and recent collaborations include a residency at Sisters, Brooklyn in 2016 with Lise Vachon and a performance with Bob Holman at MOMA/PS1 in November, 2017.

PHILIP SANDERSON

Born in 1960, Philip Sanderson first began experimenting with reel to reel tape recorders and rewired ‘circuit bent’ electronic equipment in his teens. He compiled his first cassette Dark Cuttings in 1977 and in 1978 formed the Snatch Tapes label releasing Snatch 1, the first outing for Claire Thomas & Susan Vezey and Storm Bugs (a collaborative project with Steven Ball).