Join us for our first (!) installment of our Trustfall Series. This one will feature Melinda Faylor (piano & electronics), Muyassar Kurdi (voice & electronics), and Jess Tsang (percussion, objects & electronics).
Tickets: Sliding scale $8-20
Free for artists and arts workers
Trustfall is a new performance series that features artists and composer-performers experimenting in sound and music. Artists may share work at any stage of development. This series aim to build a nurturing creative community by creating a space of trust and generosity between artists and foster a more intimate connection between art and audiences. Following each performance is a short, casual gathering.
About the artists
Melinda Faylor is a pianist/composer based in NYC who works in various media to weave together dense and mercurial sound worlds using field recordings, synthesized sound and piano. Current projects include a solo album, Melia chamber trio, sound design for Chemicals in the Water, and Summer 2025 concerts and masterclasses in Tunisia with the Cultures in Harmony organization. She is the recipient of the Ma-Yi Theater grant (2021), NMUSA Creator Fund (2023), Queens Art Fund (2023), and the Anti-Social Music Tiny Fund (2024). Starting in August 2025, she will have a residency at Spectrum in Red Hook, featuring monthly solo and collaborative genre-fluid sets in a cozy, salon-style environment.
photo by Sawani
Muyassar Kurdi is a Palestinian-American New York City-based interdisciplinary artist. Her work encompasses sound art, voice, movement, painting, analog photography, and film. Her practice honors the futuristic and ancient through meditative movements and sonic sound explorations. Centered on embodiment with a non-linear approach rooted in improvisation, she explores memory, displacement, and the body in relation to nature.
In 2024 Kurdi received the NYFA Womens Fund for Music, American Composer Forum’s Create, and Brooklyn Arts Fund. She was a finalist in the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship for Combined Disciplines 2023, and was commissioned by Roulette Intermedium in 2020 as well as a 2022 artist residency with support from Jerome Foundation. She is also a recipient of the Queens Fund New Works Grant, NYFA City Artist Corps grant, and Puffin Foundation grant. Recent residencies include Harvestworks and The Watermill Center with OPERA ensemble. Love is Blue, Kurdi’s solo interdisciplinary exhibition, opened in the Fall of 2023 at LaMaMa Gallery in NYC. In April 2025 she performed durational pieces (voice/movement) inside the exhibition by Otobong Nkanga in the atrium at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC. Performance highlights include Poetry Project, Abrons Arts Center, Roulette Intermedium, Center For Performance Research, Lincoln Center, The Rubin Museum of Art, Issue Project Room, Cafe OTO, Chicago Cultural Center, Center for Contemporary Art Laznia, Fridman Gallery, Zaratan - Arte Contemporânea, and Judson Memorial Church as well as exhibitions and film screenings at VIERTE WELT (Berlin), Trieze Gallery (Paris), Knockdown Center, Queens Museum, Spectacle Theatre, and Anthology Film Archives (NYC). She taught interdisciplinary workshops most notably at Zaratan - Arte Contemporânea, Bilgi University, Cultur (Istanbul), Maysles Documentary Center, and MoMA PS1.
photo by David Lawrence
Jess Tsang is a percussionist, researcher, and improviser based in Brooklyn, NY. She is endlessly examining how objects shape our lives, and how that might be translated into music.
A founding member of guitar and percussion duo party of one and experimental ambient band dogsbody, Jess has also collaborated with an eclectic variety of artists, dancers, and musicians including Rebecca Saunders, David Szanto, Elena Rykova, and Deborah Carruthers. Favorite projects include premiering Nicole Lizée’s interactive Mozart murder-mystery opera No One’s Safe, performing within Martin Creed’s installation The Back Door at the Park Avenue Armory, the world premiere of Dan Trueman and Rebecca Lazier's, Bessie-award winning There Might Be Others, and Kid Millions’ 100 Disciplines, an immersive, hour-long work at the Brooklyn Museum.
She has appeared in performances throughout North and South America, Europe, Asia, and Australia and was a fellow at the 2018 Eighth Blackbird Creative Lab. In 2019, she was selected as a fellow for OneBeat, an initiative of the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs in collaboration with Found Sound Nation. Jess is also the founder of listenbeer, a series of multi-sensory concert experiences merging craft beer with experimental music.
Most recently, she was commissioned by Contemporary Musiking Hong Kong to create quotidian, new video work for the 2021 Sound Forms Festival: Present_Present.
As a researcher, Jess has presented her lecture recital at Harvard University for Ex-Centric Music Studies: Harvard Graduate Music Forum Conference and at Queensland Conservatorium in Brisbane as part of the second annual Transplanted Roots Percussion Symposium. Entitled “Personally curated, yet easily disposable: Crossing the threshold into the realm of found objects”, it is the culmination of her research into the history and expansive ideology of incorporating found objects into contemporary percussion music. She has presented additional lectures at the University of Guanjuato (“People Can Be Trusted” - Performative Dialogues in the Music of Sean Griffin) and the University of California San Diego (How Percussionists Think - Recontextualizing Legacy).
Jess holds a Master’s degree from McGill University and an undergraduate degree from The New School. Her debut album, sound shadows was released by madeFor records in 2021.