Bug Jazz, Weiss + Waters, & rahrahree! at Dada – Queens, NY

Weiss + Waters Duo:

Composer and performer Charles Waters and sound and visual artist Monika Weiss invite to their first public performance together in New York. Throughout her interdisciplinary practice Weiss continues to improvise daily, recording her short “piano meditations” to later layer and alter the tracks to create complex electronic compositions and sound/video installations. Waters, long a woodwind specialist and composer, brings his rare work on piano and organ to the mix as well. Together they plan to weave dense sonic spaces in an exciting dialogue between saxophone, piano and more.

Charles Waters –

Brooklyn-based composer and performer Charles Waters, described by The New York Times as “wildly

creative,” is a founding member of the renowned jazz collective Gold Sparkle, alongside drummer

Andrew Barker and trumpeter Roger Ruzow. As a leader, Waters fronts various groups, including the

Charlie Waters Trio, Nuzion Big Band, and several garden music ensembles, while maintaining an active

presence as a side musician.

Recent releases include Anti-Structure 1-6 (Clarinet Trio, 2025) with Peter Hess and Ken

Thomson, and Waters Garden Octet: Williamsburg Concerto (2023, NuRecords), recorded live at Red

Shed Garden. Waters has collaborated extensively with leading figures in contemporary music, amassing

a diverse discography.

In addition to his work as a musician, Waters is the author of Assemblage Manifesto, a text

exploring subversive improvisation. He is also a curator, writer, and filmmaker/film composer. As the

driving force behind the Garden Music Collective (aka @citimusic), Waters has curated over 50 concerts

at Red Shed Garden in East Williamsburg since 2010. This initiative serves as a response to gentrification,

providing a platform for community engagement through music in Brooklyn’s garden spaces.

Instagram: @citimusic

Monika Weiss –

Monika Weiss is a New York based Polish-American visual artist and sound composer working in time-

based media of music/sound, film/video, installation, and live performance, as well as works on paper,

Weiss was trained as a classical pianist at the Warsaw School of Music before studying at the Warsaw

Academy of Fine Arts. Residency at the Experimental Intermedia Foundation in the early 2000s inspired

her relocation to New York City.

Exhibited at over 100 venues around the world, most recently in New York her work was on view

at WhiteBox (2024) and A.I.R. Gallery (2022) where it was reviewed by ARTnews and described as

“audio layered to evoke a chorus of ghosts whose voices rise and fall in lamentation”. In 2024, her two

outdoor sound sculptures were concurrently commissioned by the Laumeier Sculpture Park in St. Louis

and the Centre of Polish Sculpture in Orońsko, Poland.

Known primarily as an intermedia artist, Weiss has also historically made music records, as part

of Warsaw’s ensemble Warszawska Jesionka and with Frankfurt-based Achim Wollscheid. In 2022

Monika Weiss-Metamorphosis/Nirbhaya was released by Infrequent Seams. Since 2011 the artist holds a

professorship at Washington University in St Louis. Her studio is located in Brooklyn, New York. She is

currently part of Hyphen-Hub, a New York and global network organization

Instagram: @monikaweissartist

rahrahree!:

As rahrahree!, Tamara Yadao and Kurt Gottschalk execute geometries of oratory and slippery significances as important as the listener wants them to be. They have been known to use guitars, bells, saronay and their voices in exercises generally designed to fail. They made a record over a decade ago. https://batterrierecords.bandcamp.com/album/elephant

Bug Jazz:

Bug Jazz was born in 2023 out of a creative exercise during a five-day-long improvised recording project in Upstate NY. The group had created a map of fictional island to ‘play through’, the Western half of which was inhabited by subterranean human-sized bugs. What might these bugs listen to? We figured perhaps some kind of atonal music bearing similarities to elevator jazz. Since these initial sessions, Bug Jazz has grown from a performance exercise into a recording/performance collective that blurs the line between live performance, recording, and mixing by playing directly through a 4-track tape machine. We aim for an aesthetic that’s 40% spiritual free jazz and 30% Andrew W.K. ‘the only thing better than a guitar solo is a guitar solo played on a guitar that looks like a slice of pizza’.

Cole is a recording engineer and producer that works primarily on noisy and experimental rock, hardcore, and improvised records. Cole has also previously played guitar and drums in the Chicago-based alternative rock band Blinker. Jasen is a guitarist for the seven-piece NYC-based tweemo band Here For You, and previously fronted the seven-piece emo group Faced Out. Josh is a singer-songwriter and improviser who released their solo record ‘Carps in the Mud’ via Atlanta Zone Records in 2022.