Chris Williams Vibration Trio

Chris Williams Vibration Trio

The Chris Williams Vibration Trio is a wind ensemble that explores the boundaries between live acoustic jazz improvisation and electronic soundscapes.  Led by Brooklyn-based trumpeter and composer Chris Williams, the trio treats acoustic brass and woodwind instruments as foundational elements to be warped, stretched, and molded via real-time digital processing.  The ensemble’s distinct chemistry relies heavily on the profound cooperative connection between three prominent voices in the modern jazz underground.  Bandleader Chris Williams anchors the group on trumpet and synthesizers, using his instrument as a melancholic, introspective vessel.  He is joined by Grammy Award-winning trombonist Kalia Vandever, whose remarkably lush slide trombone provides elegiac harmonies and anchoring weight to the lower registers.  Multi-instrumentalist Patrick Shiroishi rounds out the trio on saxophone, weaving stark contrasts into the record by shifting from delicate, textured breaths to harrowing, vocal-like wails that claw through the electronic haze.

The trio’s acclaimed album, Odu: Vibration II, was released on AKP Recordings and received glowing praise across the experimental music community.  Culled from a live performance at Brooklyn’s premier avant-garde venue, Roulette Intermedium, the record was lauded for its transformative, cathartic journey through tension and resolution.  Critics at Pitchfork praised the album’s cinematic depth, describing it as an “unraveling” process where the musicians masterfully balance “nameless dread” with reemerging moments of sunlight.  Beyond written praise, the release achieved wider recognition by being named one of NPR’s Best New Albums, cementing its status as a landmark electroacoustic release.

Their primary musical objective is a deep study of resonance, balancing drifting ambient levity with highly structured, sometimes dissonant, sonic forms.  Conceptually, their music often mimics a visceral descent into subterranean voids or cave systems, using slow-motion horn textures, filtered bells, and thick synthesizer drones to transport listeners into transcendent states.

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Chris Ryan Williams

Chris Ryan Williams is a Brooklyn and Los Angeles-based interdisciplinary artist, trumpeter, and composer.  His acclaimed work spans electroacoustic composition, performance installation, and contemporary jazz.  Blending improvised trumpet with live electronic processing, he creates dazzling, cinematic soundscapes that ricochet between ambient, atmospheric resonance and heavy, noise-driven, free-jazz passages.

He has been in residence with BANFF Centre for the Arts, Foundation of Contemporary Arts, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Musik Installationen Nürnberg and is 2023 American Composers Forum Fellow and 2024 Hermitage Artist Retreat Fellow.  He has collaborated with creators including Eyvind Kang, Luke Stewart, Bennie Maupin, Nicole Mitchell, Imani Dennison, Wendy Eisenberg, Pink Siifu, and Marjani Forte-Saunders.

Williams also has an ongoing collaboration with cellist Lester St. Louis under the moniker HxH, a duo which has “embraced the challenge of bringing laptop instrumentalism into a wide personal world by making sounds that are at once art-minded and accessible, and true to the tenets of spontaneous composition and social music.”  (Piotr Orlov, Pioneer Works)

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Kalia Vandever

Kalia Vandever (they/them) is a trombonist and composer living in New York.  Praised by AllMusic as “a master musician and composer” and “a singular talent,” Vandever’s approach to the trombone is distinctive, defined by their sonorous tone and lyrical voicing.  They lean into the challenges of the instrument and allow patience and melody to guide their process, drawing from their love of both songs and improvisation, creating a landscape of sounds that resonate in the body and hold the listener.

In Bloom, their 2019 debut album, and its follow-up Regrowth (New Amsterdam, 2022) swiftly established Vandever as a compelling bandleader in jazz circles – a group format they returned to on Another View (Northern Spy, 2025) and still engage in regularly in live performance.

Recognized by NPR as part of the “new class of jazz artists pushing the music forward,” Vandever’s debut solo album We Fell In Turn (AKP Records, 2023) signaled a separate path being explored simultaneously.  The album features solo works for trombone, voice and electronics, laying the groundwork for a new sound to be further developed.  Mana, Vandever’s new album on Chicago’s International Anthem Recording Co. leans into that development: solo trombone filtered through a well-dialed pedalboard, manipulated live; electroacoustic interplay simultaneously echoing and transforming the long-note melodicism of Vandever’s melancholic brass work; head-on, unambiguous, and deeply personal lyricism.

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Patrick Shiroishi

For over a decade, Patrick Shiroishi has been a fixture in Los Angeles’s thriving experimental underground.  Over the last decade he has established himself as one of the premier improvising musicians in Los Angeles, playing solo and in numerous collaborative projects.  Shiroishi may well be considered a foundational player in the city’s vast musical expanse.

After cutting his teeth performing what he describes as “weird progressive rock” at DIY spaces around Southern California, he eventually started making jazz as a way to distance himself from the confines of art rock songwriting.  “For that kind of stuff, it’s super dense.  A lot of notes, different time signatures, very structured music,” Shiroishi says. “I think what drew me to free improvisation was that it’s the complete opposite.  There’s absolutely no rules.”

Since the release of his 2013 solo debut, black sun sutra, Shiroishi has produced numerous releases and collaborative works.  He plays the saxophone as a weaponized tool for radical emotional expression, blending staggering physical intensity with a profound, archival sense of historical storytelling.  He is recognized as a titan of the Los Angeles avant-garde.  His multi-instrumental performances stretch the bounds of the woodwind family into a vocabulary that balances extreme violence with monastic silence.

He has presented work and performed at the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Broad Museum, The Getty, commissioned by the LA Philharmonic, and has toured around the world in various solo and band configurations including The Armed and contemporary classical ensemble Wild Up.

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