Reception presents Bitchin Bajas & Beam Splitter

Since 2010 Bitchin Bajas (the trio of Cooper Crain, Rob Frye and Dan Quinlivan) have continued to prove themselves as one of finest groups operating on the borders between electronic music, minimal composition and jazz improvisation. Their music combines synthesisers, electronic organ with saxophone and flute in a way that is reminiscent of artists such as Terry Riley, Harmonia or Fripp and Eno but delivered with a contemporary freshness and clever sense of composition that makes the music feel vital and new. We have been big fans of both their series of releases on the Drag City label alongside their collaboration albums with Natural Information Society. We suggest starting with their album Switched On Ra (Drag City, 2021); an electronic reimagining of the music of Sun Ra or their latest album Inland See (Drag City, 2025).

BEAM SPLITTER – Audrey Chen (US) and Henrik Munkeby Nørstebø (NO) – is a duo for amplified voice, trombone and analog electronics based in Berlin, Germany. Through numerous performances in a wide range of spaces, contexts and collaborations, they have developed a unique brand of highly amplified dialog, which is as intimate as it is equal amounts raw and entirely exposed. The duo have toured extensively across five continents since 2015, joining together their two individual voices into a distinct language that delves beyond the borders of the corporeal elements of un-processed voice and trombone, while utilizing analog electronics to offset their hyper extended physical play.

Their latest duo album “SPLIT JAW” was released on Nat Baldwin’s Tripticks Tapes in 2023. This bite size format packs an entire universe of their crafted sputter, breath and glitch inside its forty-five minute magnetic tape loop. The album is one third introspective Berlin studio production and the rest, live from a splintering concert given at Wels Unlimited Festival in Austria, their last concert of 2022 where audience and the duo alike giving it their all center of room, split open like hollow bones head to clavicle, muscles twitching and air spewing, breaking ground and mending it with alien hums. Further recent releases include “Beauties” (2023) with Lønning and Reinertsen, “Wrists out” (2024) with Phil Minton and “Dedicated play : Live at Morphine Raum” featuring fourteen stellar guests.

Since 2020, the pair have been organizing Dedicated play, an artistic and curatorial platform fostering community building and genre-breaking intersections of experimental musicians and artists from a diversity of social, cultural, and musical
backgrounds. The project has taken shape as a concert series in collaboration with Morphine Raum (Berlin), an online album presentation, a festival in Berlin and London co-curated with Hyunhye Angela Seo (Xiu Xiu), and select satellite events. BEAM SPLITTER have taken part in larger commissioned works at the Teatro Colón, Buenos Aires and largely conceptualized a theatrical adaptation of MEDEA in front of the Olympic Stadium in Kyiv, Ukraine (for butoh dancers and musicians) produced by the Ukho Agency.

Festival/venue performances include Sonoscopia (Porto), National Museum of Natural History (Kyiv), Issue Project Room (New York City), Festival Music Unlimited (Wels), Avant Art Festival (Warsaw+Wroclaw), Mayhem (Copenhagen), Trigger (Shanghai), Nameless Sound (Houston), Zebulon (Los Angeles), Gogolfest (Kyiv), Kongsberg jazz festival, Simultan festival (Timișoara), Morphine Raum (Berlin), The Lab (San Francisco), CCRMA Stanford university, Asphalt Festival (Düsseldorf), Fylkingen (Stockholm), Tiehua Music Village (Taitung), Teatro Colón (Buenos Aires), Audio Foundation (Auckland), Send+Receive (Winnipeg) and Météo Mulhouse Music Festival.

Funded by the Arts Council of Ireland