Join us as Audiofemme—a music publication that centers writing by women and non-binary journalists—celebrates the work of their Agenda grant cohorts four/four presents and Medusa in this showcase.

ABOUT THE SHOWCASE: Audiofemme created the Agenda Artist Grant in 2020, which provides seed funding of $2000 per grantee to interdisciplinary artists and creators, prioritizing BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ communities. This showcase enables their past grantees to present the work they’ve created through the support of this funding. Devoted to forwarding emerging artists’ work, Audiofemme is thrilled to present their inaugural showcase, including dance collaborations curated by four/four presents featuring LEYA x Omri Drumlevich and MIXTAPES - Kayla Farrish x Alex MacKinnon, as well as  a film screening and album performance by Medusa.

• Audiofemme Presents The Agenda Showcase ft. four/four presents and Medusa
  

• four/four presents: LEYA x Omri Drumlevich collaboration performance; MIXTAPES - Collaboration between Kayla Farrish & Alex MacKinnon

• Medusa presents The Allegory of The G/rave project – an indie multimedia film screening and album performance.

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BIOS:

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LEYA, the NYC-based project of harpist Marilu Donovan and violinist/vocalist Adam Markiewicz, utilizes alternate tunings, operatic dream-state vocals, and strange harmonies to create a music language both unique and ancient-feeling. Their work has been presented within a myriad of live and digital contexts across music, media, fashion, and art and has been critically lauded as a paradox of beauty and horror.

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Omri makes his work across the mediums of dance, physical theater and film, and has been a performer in Punchdrunk's Sleep No More since 2018. His most recent ensemble dance work The Art of Walking Away was presented at Suzanne Dellal Center in TLV in 2021 and his last short film Under Your Name was screened at the Perpetuum Mobile dance festival in Brussels, Belgium in 2022. Omri is a former dancer of the renowned Batsheva Dance Company, for which he was rehearsal director in 2021 and performed with them extensively all over the world between 2010-2017. He is a senior Gaga teacher and stages Ohad Naharin's work with dance companies and in schools in the US.

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MIXTAPES originally premiered at Triskelion Arts in October 2022, and began from researching the connection, influences, overlap, and accumulating histories layered between jazz, gospel, soul, and hip hop. It’s an exploration of cadence, flow and personality particularly influenced by different characters and eras in the hip hop tradition.  It explores the process of searching for sounds and grooves before settling on an idea.  A musician first and producer second, MacKinnon draws on sounds from the jazz and gospel traditions and marries ambient and textural layers with wavy drums and deep synthesizers in a search for the perfect loops. Farrish was enamored by the voice of the MC, their sound scores, and the embodiment. These sounds carry histories. She is interested in the distinct voices and styles of an era, its references, and also how to find her own voice within that. It can be specific, but also mixed, changed, and reinvented. Farrish questions the embodiment of these sounds paired with their influences and histories.

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four/four was developed by choreographer Loni Landon and music presenter Rachael Pazdan in April 2020. Emerging during the COVID-19 pandemic as a response to dark stages, four/four created the digital collaborative series TETHERED, which united musicians and dancers across the globe to collaborate via video. TETHERED has presented over 75 dancers and choreographers and over 25 musicians to date, partnering with organizations such as Central Park SummerStage and Brooklyn-based music venue Public Records to present this work on their channels.

In the summer of 2021, four/four produced Open Air, a live, outdoor, site-specific series of music and dance collaborations in public parks and outdoor locations throughout New York City. This series has been presented mostly free to the public and has been produced in neighborhoods such as Harlem, Bushwick, South Slope, and DUMBO.
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Medusa is a nonbinary ‘revenge-pop’ musician based in Buffalo, New York. Their signature production - described by Soundriv as “a breakthrough collection of LGBTQ hymns,” and by Bucketlist as “the most inventive [expletive] music we’ve heard in a long time” - often features unconventional sounds like wolf howls and cheerleading chants. Medusa describes their style as “by any means necessary,” then makes good on the promise. But the 27 year old is never weird for the sake of being different. When they set out to distort an 808 bassline, or loop a news anchor’s voice into a ghostly choir, they’re really trying to perform a kind of emotional alchemy: the transformation of joy, fear, and agony into visceral pop music. After Medusa grabs their demons by the throat, they shove them into a time signature, hoping to imprison them in song. Then, like the infamous Gorgon herself, they return to their cave until it is time to defend themselves again.

Medusa's Allegory of The G/rave project is a completely indie multimedia community-building adventure––branching into many interactive parts––the two large works at its core are an album and a short film. The short film will be released episodically in the form of the album's music videos.  Medusa's goal has been to transform the emotions which usually thrive in secrecy and isolation (shame, rage, grief, terror, exhaustion) into opportunities for group catharsis.

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