Wednesday, March 25, 2026 at 8:00 PM to 11:45 PM
2220 Arts + Archives, Los Angeles
Black Editions Presents guitarist, singer, songwriter and composer Ava Mendoza with composer-improviser, vocalist, scholar Amirtha Kidambi and mixed media sound artist, saxophonist and composer Matana Roberts. AVA MENDOZA is a guitarist, songwriter and composer. Best known for her solo guitar/voice performances, and as the leader of the experimental rock band Unnatural Ways, she has received critical acclaim for her guitar work's compelling combination of technique and visceral impact. Performing/recording credits include work with William Parker, The Bill Orcutt Quartet, Marc Ribot, Carla Bozulich, Fred Frith, Malcolm Mooney, Mike Watt, Nels Cline, John Zorn, Negativland, the Violent Femmes, and more. She has received composition commissions from film distributor Kino Lorber, Jazz Coalition, New Music Creator Development Fund, and John Zorn’s Stone Commissioning Series at National Sawdust, as well as an FCA Grant to Artists award. Spanning free jazz, punk, electronic, noise & South Asian music, AMIRTHA KIDAMBI's work challenges systems of power and the “decolonization and deconstruction of borders physical, mental and musical”. Kidambi is a composer-improviser, vocalist, scholar, educator and organizer, leading the defiant protest jazz band Elder Ones. Based in Lenapehoking-Brooklyn, Kidambi collaborates with Luke Stewart, Darius Jones, Mary Halvorson, Maria Grand, Rafiq Bhatia, William Parker, Muhal Richard Abrams, Robert Ashley and other groundbreaking artists, receiving praise from Pitchfork, Wire Magazine, NPR and touring internationally at Rewire, SESC (Brazil) Unsound, Big Ears and was recently a guest curator at Le Guess Who? festival in the Netherlands. As a composer, she has scored the anti-colonial films of Suneil Sanzgiri, exhibited at Brooklyn Museum, MoMA and global film festivals. Central to her practice is her work as an organizer and educator, working against oppression in all its forms and was the Working Artist Fellow for 2025 at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, hosting a new podcast called Outernational on music and liberation. MATANA ROBERTS works in many contexts and mediums, including improvisation, dance, poetry, and theater. She made two records as a core member of the Sticks And Stones quartet in the early 2000s and has gone on to release a diverse body of solo and ensemble work under her own name on Constellation and Central Control over the past decade. She is perhaps best known for her acclaimed Coin Coin project, a multi-chapter work of “panoramic sound quilting” that aims to expose the mystical roots and channel the intuitive spirit-raising traditions of American creative expression while maintaining a deep and substantive engagement with narrativity, history, community and political expression within improvisatory musical structures. Constellation began documenting the Coin Coin project in 2011 and has released the first three of a projected twelve album-length chapters to date.