Wednesday, August 27, 2025 at 8:00 PM to 11:00 PM
Zebulon, Los Angeles
**Sagittaire & Ascetic Faces (album release)** **Brendan Eder Ensemble** **Cole Berliner** **DJ Josh Da Costa** **\---** **Sagittaire with Ascetic Faces** - Coventry Suite Pt. 1 The term “collision music” is typically associated with bassist/producer Bill Laswell, known for uniting artists from divergent sound worlds to create something unexpected. Coventry Suite Pt. 1, the experimental hip-hop and R&B project from Sagitairre’s Ivan Mairesse, is directly influenced by Laswell’s concept — “colliding” musicians from various communities in his hometown of LA to form the genre-agnostic group, Ascetic Faces. The album’s title is an additional nod to Coventry, the British town that spawned ska group The Specials and the multiracial 2-Tone movement. “I was interested early on in the recontextualization aspect of sampling, whether that came from Christian Marclay or Prince Paul,” explains Mairesse. “In a way, it’s an extension of pop-art.” Coventry Suite Pt. 1 is not Mairesse’s first time working with hip-hop MCs, nor delving into beat-driven genres such as trip-hop and techno, yet this album marks a stark departure from the sun-kissed pop songs of his 2020 debut, Lovely Music. For Mairesse, removing his own voice from the equation was a major revelation. Inspired by Ryuichi Sakamoto’s 1990 release, Beauty (“a solo album with a strong personal vision that would be nothing without the collaborations”) these nine songs pass the mic to R&B singer Brynne Faler, soulful crooner Mellow Marcy, rapid-fire rapper brz, and the spellbinding Rebecca Ramirez. Sagittaire sets the stage with the lush, cinematic instrumental “Shandra Brass,” as wordless incantations flow through foghorns in the mist. When “Price of Salt” drops its bouncing beat, and the DJ Shadow-esque organs hit the gas on “Magic Buses,” it becomes clear that Mairesse knows his way around an SP-404. As a DJ and record collector since his teenage years, he understands that A Tribe Called Quest’s psychedelic patchwork of samples are every bit as avant-garde as free-improv guitarist Derek Bailey jamming to jungle music. Nodding to the artists, filmmakers, and other creative forces that inspired him, Mairesse inserts references to composer Erik Satie, hip-hop mogul Monica Lynch, and directors Paul Schrader and Jacques Rivette. The warped vocal snippets filtering throughout “Poet of Aloneness” sound like tuning into a left-of-the-dial radio station where you might hear these names, before the pummeling breakbeats of “Light Sleeper” fade into the downtempo bliss of closer “Kiss.” Mairesse’s voice only appears once, in a rapped verse on “Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie?” Following Mark E. Smith’s approach of “confiding in the pen” of his unconscious mind, these lyrics were completely improvised and unedited. “That’s a version of me that’s never been on record before,” shares Mairesse. “It was a really freeing experience.” \- Jesse Locke **Brendan Eder** is a Los Angeles composer and drummer best-known for his eponymous genre-bending ensemble of woodwinds, drum set, and bass. In 2023 Eder released his third album, THERAPY, a collection of meditative compositions recorded mostly at a church in Southern California. The self-released album went on to chart at #6 in Billboard's Crossover Classical and was featured in The Guardian's "The Best Albums of 2023 So Far." Following 2021’s Cape Cod Cottage — Eder’s understated-jazz concept album under the guise of Edward Blankman, a retired dentist in the 1970s — for Therapy, Eder drops the alter ego and the drum set and explores more reverberant sounds with his ensemble of woodwinds. The result is a distinctive take on ambient music subtly interwoven with Eder’s affinity for 20th century classical and jazz