The 2025 edition of Seventh Stanine Festival will take place on Saturday, June 14, at Rhizome in Washington, D.C. Running from 1:00 PM to 9:00 PM, the festival brings together a compelling lineup of avant-garde, experimental, and genre-defying musicians for an intimate celebration of independent music and creative resilience.
This year’s performers include Tyondai Braxton, Ben Vida, Lucy Liyou, Wendy Eisenberg,and Deakin of Animal Collective, alongside D.C. experimental pop stalwarts The Caribbean, described as “minimalist/drone/Philip Jeck by way of Carole King.”
The day will also feature DJ sets from Geologist (Animal Collective), Jonathan Williger (music writer), Paul Vodra (host of Hometown Sounds), and Lee Gardner (co-host of Essential Tremors).
Tickets for the festival are on sale now.
Seventh Stanine is a gathering of artists who create not for fame or financial reward, but out of sheer necessity—because they can’t imagine a life without making art.
Founded in 2016 by D.C. band The Caribbean, the first edition of the festival took place at The Dew Drop Inn in Northeast D.C. on June 3, 2017. The goal was simple: bring together a community of friends, collaborators, and kindred spirits under one roof.
“I had long thought about having a festival in the smallest venue possible—literally like a tiny room,” said co-founder Matthew Byars in a Washington City Paper interview. Byars, also a co-producer of the NPR-distributed podcast Essential Tremors, has helped guide the event from that modest beginning to its current incarnation—now co-presented with Essential Tremors and featuring internationally recognized, yet defiantly underground, performers.
Previous editions have hosted performances by Water Damage, Susan Alcorn, Luke Stewart Trio, Bill Nace, Id M Theft Able, and Geologist (Animal Collective), among others—continuing the festival’s tradition of showcasing artists at the intersection of innovation and authenticity.
Seventh Stanine remains a celebration of the unsung, the uncompromising, and the uniquely essential voices that form the heartbeat of the underground.
2025 Lineup:
Tyondai Braxton & Ben Vida
Stream: "Teleknesis (Album Trailer)" on YouTube
Stream: Vida on YouTube
Tyondai Braxton is an American composer and electronic musician who has been writing and performing music under his own name and collaboratively since the mid-1990s. Having recently completed a residency at Public Records in Brooklyn, Braxton incorporates electronic and modern orchestral elements into his music, which ranges in scale from solo pieces to large-scale symphonic works. The former frontman of experimental rock band Battles, Braxton has focused on his own work since 2010, including his critically acclaimed album Central Market, which has been performed by world-renowned orchestras such as London Sinfonietta, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the BBC Symphony Orchestra and HIVE, a multimedia project for three percussionists and two modular synthesizer performers which premiered at the Guggenheim in NYC. Braxton has been commissioned to write pieces for ensembles such as The Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, The BBC Concert Orchestra, The Bang on a Can All Stars, Kronos Quartet, Alarm Will Sound, and Third Coast Percussion. He has worked in collaboration with the likes of legendary composer Philip Glass as a duo and iconic visual artist Thomas Demand at the 2017 Venice Biennale. 2022 saw the release of the recording of his work Telekinesis for orchestra, choir and electronics with Metropolis Ensemble, The Brooklyn Youth Chorus, and The Crossing.
Ben Vida is an artist and composer. Recent solo exhibitions include [Smile on.]… [Pause.]… [Smile off.] at Lisa Cooley Gallery, New York, and Slipping Control (West) at 356 S. Mission Road, Los Angeles.
In fall 2016, Vida presented iterations of a new durational piece scored for choir and electronics titled Reducing the Tempo to Zero, at Centro Pecci in Prato, Italy, The Rossini Art Site in Briosco, Italy, and STUK in Leuven, Belgium. His work has been featured in Artforum, Modern Painters, The Paris Review, The New York Times, Art Review, Wire Magazine, The Creators Project, and WIRED Magazine, among others. His pieces have been presented widely in venues such as the Guggenheim, New York; The MCA, Chicago; The ICA, London; The Kitchen, New York; Performa Biennial, New York; EMPAC, Troy, New York; Leap Gallery, Berlin; Lampo, Chicago; Cricoteka Museum, Kraków, Poland; The Artist’s Institute, New York; the Sydney Opera House; LiveArtsWeeks at Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna; Borderline Festival, Athens, Greece; and the Royal Festival Hall as part of the Meltdown Festival in London. Vida has released records with numerous labels including Alku, PAN, Future Audio Graphics, and Kranky. His most recent LP, Damaged Particulates, was released on Shelter Press.
Wendy Eisenberg
Stream: "Lasik" on YouTube
Wendy Eisenberg is an improviser and songwriter who uses guitar, pedals, the tenor banjo, the computer, the synthesizer and the voice. Their work spans genres, from jazz to noise to avant-rock to delicate songs; their performances span venues, from international festivals to intimate basements. Though often working solo as both a songwriter and improviser, with acclaimed releases on Tzadik, VDSQ, Out of your Head, and Garden Portal, they also perform in the rock band Editrix, the Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet, Squanderers (with Kramer and David Grubbs), and in endless other combinations of their heroes and peers including Allison Miller, Carla Kihlstedt, John Zorn, Billy Martin, and Caroline Davis. They are also a writer on music and other things, with published essays on music in Sound American, Arcana, and the Contemporary Music Review.
Deakin (Animal Collective)
Stream: "Golden Chords" on YouTube
Josh Dibb (aka Deakin) is an artist, producer & composer most notably a member of the band Animal Collective. He has released multiple studio & live albums with Animal Collective, his solo project Deakin as well as producing and mixing albums for Avey Tare, Tickley Feather, Herald and most recently the Panda Bear album Sinister Grift. As a film composer he has composed music for the films Crestone, The Inspection, Jetty & Obex. He most recently produced Panda Bear’s full-length Sinister Grift, released on Domino Records.
Lucy Liyou
Stream: "Arrested" on YouTube
Lucy Liyou synthesizes field recordings, text-to-speech readings, poetry, and elements from Korean folk opera into sonic narratives that explore the implications of Orientalism and Westernization. Liyou’s debut project, A Hope I Had, was a sonic examination of hereditary depression in Asian families. Liyou followed up the release with her debut full-length, Welfare, an ambitious analysis of the colonialist concept of self-care. Less than a year later Lucy Liyou released the acclaimed follow-up, Practice, which drew deeply on aesthetic touchstones from Liyou’s Korean heritage to examine how families explicitly and implicitly pass on coping mechanisms—or lack thereof—for grief and loss passed through generations. Lucy Liyou’s first two full-length albums Welfare / Practice were reissued on vinyl for the first time in May 2022 via American Dreams Records. Her latest record Dog Dreams (개꿈) is a rumination on the double-sidedness of trauma and love, on how one does not undercut the other, but are rather interlocked in an affective dialectic. Her newest album is Every Video Without Your Face, Every Sound Without Your Name.
The Caribbean
Stream: Poplulations "(Scott Solter Remix)" on YouTube
The Caribbean is an American experimental project from Washington, D.C., composed of Michael Kentoff, Matthew Byars, and Dave Jones. Described as “minimalist/drone/Phillip Jeck-by-way-of-Carole King” and by the description in a review by PopMatters that, “They're taking Brill Building songs and writing them in invisible ink, turning jazz standards into Twilight Zone episodes, turning folk songs into clouds of fog,” the band has been critically acclaimed for its deconstructionist approach to pop music, and its wry, literary lyrics. Their 2011 album Discontinued Perfume was hailed by the Washington Post as "a subtle masterpiece," and DCist proclaimed the following about their record Plastic Explosives: "Let us be clear about this: Plastic Explosives is one of the finest recent records we’ve found, from any act, local or otherwise."
Emily Robb
Stream: "Hermit's Cave" on YouTube
Emily Robb is a Philadelphia based musician who has been part of the rock underground and experimental scenes for over a decade. Her debut solo album, How To Moonwalk, was created almost exclusively on guitar. The Key’s Yoni Kroll describes the record's contents as “absolutely fuzzed-out and deranged playing that’ll take you straight from the gutter to redemption and back.” Her most recent full-length is If I Am Misery Give Me Affection. She also records, mixes and produces music at her small studio in Philadelphia, Suddenly Studio.
Jon Camp
Stream: "Where Cicadas Go To Die" on YouTube
Jon Camp is a fingerstyle guitarist and composer from the Washington, D.C. region. He blends twang, drone, and melody into a cohesive whole that is exploratory without forsaking the hook. His self-titled and most recent release came out on Centripetal Force in May of 2022.
DJ’s
- Geologist (Animal Collective)
- Jonathan Williger (writer)
- Paul Vodra (host of Hometown Sounds)
- Lee Gardner (co-host of Essential Tremors)