EXO-TECH

GROUNDTONE is PS21’s new music festival—a weekend-long celebration of adventurous music making, with dazzling performances by fresh, singular voices from across today’s musical landscape.

The festival presents concerts in nontraditional, immersive settings all across our grounds—in the round, in the fields, and beyond. 

Part of Upstate Art Weekend, GROUNDTONE is all ages, with something for everyone—free workshops and performances during the day, and ticketed shows each evening. Food and drink will be available all weekend.

Weekend passes are just $75. Day passes are also available for Friday and Saturday, or purchase tickets to any individual show.

More about GROUNDTONE

Sophia Brous is an Australian, New-York based artist, performer, musician, composer, director and curator. She creates new works of contemporary music, theatre and multi-artform performance, working with concert houses, theatres, festivals and major events internationally.

Sophia is a resident artist at The Brooklyn Academy of Music/BAM, New York, and former resident of National Sawdust New York and The Watermill Centre. She was Curator at Large of Brooklyn not-for-profit Pioneer Works, and Artistic Associate of the Arts Centre Melbourne, where she founded Supersense: Festival of the Ecstatic in 2015, named ‘the only festival that matters’ by the Sydney Morning Herald.

Brous’ practice draws on far-reaching interests in contemporary performance, music and sound, multi-disciplinary collaboration and artistic direction. She works with a vast range of artists across music, film, theatre, dance and contemporary performance, to create new and commissioned works for stage, concert hall, blackbox theatre, gallery and public space.

New Zealand–born pop star Kimbra is a musical force innovating the shape of pop today as a songwriter, musician, producer, and adventurous performer. Her 2011 debut, Vows, No. 14 on the Billboard Top 200, was certified platinum in Australia and New Zealand. Kimbra exploded into the public consciousness that same year with “Somebody That I Used to Know,” a duet with Gotye that earned her two Grammy Awards for Record of the Year and Best Pop Duo/Group Performance. The song topped Billboard’s Hot 100 chart in 2012 and was the bestselling song of that year in the U.S., eventually selling over 13 million copies. In 2014, she released the highly acclaimed album The Golden Echo, recruiting artists as diverse as Thundercat, Omar Rodríguez-López of the Mars Volta, Bilal, and John Legend to highlight her eclectic musical style.

A true guitar polymath, Nels Cline’s recording and performing career spans jazz, rock, punk and experimental music with over 200 recordings, including 30 as a leader, to his credit. His many accolades include being anointed by Rolling Stone as both one of 20 New Guitar Gods and one of the top 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time.

Born in Los Angeles on January 4, 1956, Cline and his twin brother, drummer Alex, formed a teenage rock band called Homogenized Goo, inspired by the groundbreaking psychedelic guitar work of Jimi Hendrix’s “Manic Depression,” Jeff Beck’s solo on The Yardbirds’ “Happenings Ten Years Time Ago,” George Harrison’s playing at the end of the Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever” and Pete Townshend’s feedback squalls on “I Can See for Miles.” Later rock guitar influences for Nels included Steve Howe from Yes, Jan Akkerman from Focus and Roger McGuinn from The Byrds. “I just loved psychedelia — reverse guitar stuff, Indian-type drones, distortion and feedback. It all created a sense of the mystery and magic of sound that maybe set the stage for me to not to just play straight rock my whole life.”

Eucademix is the moniker of Yuka Honda, a producer, composer, performer, and visual artist renowned for her innovative, genre-defying approach to music and multimedia. Through her compositions and self-crafted video art, Honda seeks to transport audiences and expand the possibilities of sound and visual expression.

Her work is shaped by a bold and distinctive fusion of influences: the experimental energy of New York’s downtown jazz scene, the raw power of hip-hop and street music, the intricacies of classical music cherished by her mother, and the profound inspiration of nature—wild, beautiful, and at times mercilessly harsh. Honda’s artistry blends experimental textures with rhythm-driven grooves, engaging both the intellect and the body.

Lina Lapelytė (based in Vilnius, LT and London, UK) is an artist working across performance, sound, and installation. Her practice, rooted in musical composition, critically explores pop culture, gender norms, and collective memory. Using both trained and untrained performers, Lapelytė investigates vocal expression through popular music and opera, turning singing into a shared, affective experience that challenges dominant cultural narratives and systems of silencing.

Booker Stardrum is a composer, drummer/percussionist, and producer. Stardrum has been involved with countless experimental and improvisational collaborations, pop projects, film scores, and sound design productions, and has released three solo records (‘Crater’ in 2021, ‘Temporary etc.’ in 2018 and ‘Dance And’ in 2015). Stardrum’s music is a highly personal amalgamation of electro-acoustics, minimalism, ambient, jazz, and contemporary experimental electronic music. His compositions are sculptural, carved from the dense layering of instruments and manipulated samples, a pantonal harmonic sense, and an intuitive approach to rhythm.

Spencer Zahn is a bassist, multi-instrumentalist, and composer. Since moving to New York in the mid-2000s, Spencer has worked as an in-demand sideman and collaborator, touring and recording with artists from across a wide musical spectrum. Zahn’s career as a solo artist began later, around the same time he started playing with like-minded guitarist Dave Harrington, in 2015.

Zahn’s first two solo albums, 2018’s People of the Dawn and 2019’s When We Were Brand New, were born out of solitary synth experiments, melding his jazz background with a warm electronic pulse. His new album Sunday Painter, released in September 2020, is a refined step forward for the New York City-based musician — a lush collection of instrumental songs that undulate along waves of jazz, ambient pop, Americana, and neo-classical.

Described by The New Yorker magazine as one of the “prime movers of the local avant-garde”, and an “exacting avant-classical guitarist” by TimeOut NY, Patrick Higgins is a New York based composer/performer of experimental music. Higgins has composed works for some of the nation’s leading ensembles, ranging from chamber orchestra works, percussion cycles, and string quartets to smaller ensembles and soloists. He has scored works for television, museum exhibitions, and films both short-form and feature-length. Higgins plays guitar and composes in ZS, hailed by the New York Times as “one of the strongest avant-garde bands in New York.”

After years spent performing and recording with other artists and groups, Canadian-born, New York City-based Julia Kent found her own voice with her solo debut, Delay, an exploration of the private emotional worlds that exist within the disjunctions and disorientations of travel, hailed for its “lovely, melancholy” compositions, full of “aching romanticism…rich melodicism, and detailed arrangements.” She toured to support it throughout Europe and North America, and subsequently released an EP, Last Day in July.

Clara Warnaar is a percussionist, drummer and composer living in New York. A member of the International Contemporary Ensemble, Clara tends towards collaborative, devised and interdisciplinary projects. As the drummer for the band Infinity Shred, Clara thrives at the intersection of rock, electronic, improvised, and composed music, and is sought out as a drummer and collaborator for having this particular versatile blend of skills.