New Music Circle reveals its 68th Season with Horse Lords, Wadada Leo Smith, Vinny Golia, and more

Since its inception in 1959, New Music Circle (NMC) has broadened the sonic palette of St. Louis with cutting-edge concert curation and an academic approach that includes workshops, school visits, and artist residencies. Nearly seven decades later, the nonprofit organization continues its commitment to expansive sound art by presenting free-jazz, avant-garde, modern composition, and even visual mediums such as film and digital video. Now, on the cusp of its 68th season, NMC reveals a lineup filled with genre pioneers and world-class musical acts who prove that there is still new ground to break. 

As the longest-running organization of its kind in the midwest, NMC operates as a beacon for the broad spectrum of experimental music in the United States. With a volunteer board made up of individuals who represent different interests in the world of avant-garde music, the group continues to foster innovative sound in a variety of different spaces throughout St. Louis. 

While NMC’s 68th season officially begins on Friday, September 25, the organization will host its annual kickoff and fundraiser event at The Royale (3132 S. Kingshighway) on August 20 at 6 p.m. The lineup for this night includes 18&Counting, NNN Cook, DJ Cherry Red, and many more. 

Tickets for NMC events are typically $20-$10 with a sliding scale for struggling artists and concertgoers. More info about the organization and its 68th season can be found at newmusiccircle.org.

September 25

Horse Lords with Shinra Knives

The Key STL, 3225 Olive

“St. Louis is a city that cares about music in a way that is unique, like a devotion. Organizations like [NMC] are so rare and typically don’t last so long—that makes it special and very important. There’s kind of nothing else quite like [NMC] in the midwest at this scale,” says Max Eilbacher, composer, multi-instrumentalist, and bassist of experimental rock outfit Horse Lords.

Formed in 2010, Horse Lords injects elements of kraut rock into hypnotic, densely layered songs informed in equal parts by jazz and punk. The band’s 2026 album, Demand to Be Taken to Heaven Alive!, offers an innovative blend of guitars, saxophone, and propulsive percussion punctuated by just intonation tuning and complex polyrhythms. While the group originally cut its teeth in the DIY music scene of Baltimore, Maryland, its members gradually relocated to Germany, where they currently work and reside. 

“For different tours, we have had fill-in drummers when it made sense. Since our drummer Sam Haberman moved to Berlin with his family three or four months ago, we have had much more rehearsal and rewriting time from the new album. When the set is tour ready and on the road, it’s very different,” Eilbacher says. Horse Lords will be performing reworked material from its discography in St. Louis with its core lineup intact.

NMC opens its 68th season with a thunderous clap that also includes the sounds of Shinra Knives, an electronic artist whose sidewinding songs have been featured on Aphex Twin’s live DJ sets. 

October 25

Wadada Leo Smith & Joe Morris

Pulitzer Arts Foundation, 3716 Washington

“The best way to eat an apple pie is to not have an impression of what it’s going to taste like,” says Wadada Leo Smith, the legendary creative composer and multi-instrumentalist who has worked with Anthony Braxton, Cecil Taylor, and John Zorn, along with many innovative improvisers. He even created Ankhrasmation, a symbolic image-based language for performing artists with scores that have been exhibited in several museums throughout North America. 

Since his debut in the 1960s, Smith has been a source of cosmic wisdom and aural exploration with a distinct approach to composition that merges visual design with interpretive sound art. While he first performed in St. Louis more than 30 years ago, the last visit Smith made to the river city included the Golden Quartet, a supernova avant-garde group that consisted of Vijay Iyer on piano, Pheeroan akLaff on drums, and John Lindberg on bass. This time around, he’ll be performing alongside longtime friend and collaborator Joe Morris, a renowned improviser and string specialist from New Haven, Connecticut.  

“Joe Morris and I have a good connection. I met him after I relocated from the midwest to New Haven in the 1970s. [Morris] had heard some of my music and some talks I did on the radio, and then years later we connected when making a record with Jamie Saft up in Massachusetts,” Smith says.

Between appearing on more than 150 recordings and writing a beloved book on improvised music, Perpetual Frontier: The Properties of Free Music, Morris is a perpetual-motion machine whose work has informed experimental artists for several generations. 

“One day he calls and says, ‘Let’s do a duet,’ and the music we made came out as a recording,” Smith says, recalling the pair’s 2024 album, Earth’s Frequencies, which was released through Polish avant-garde label Fundacja Słuchaj.

“We’ve been looking to perform some of that again ever since. And this is going to be the first time we are performing the music in a reconstructed way,” Smith says. He is looking forward to reconnecting with Morris for this special NMC concert. 

“Art is the only certainty that humans have created that has real value,” he says. “The value itself cannot be disputed. One cannot erase an experience, it always exists. So I’m looking forward to all of you experiencing this and having this joy and unusual moment with me and Joe.”

November 13

Fred Tompkins Quartet with video by Kevin Harris 

The Chapel, 6238 Alexander

Flutist and composer Fred Tompkins will lead his ongoing quartet (a mighty group that includes St. Louis’ own Jim Hegarty, Greg Mills, and Glen ‘Papa’ Wright) with live video synthesis by audiovisual specialist Kevin Harris. Tompkins has been performing in both modern classical and avant-garde jazz circles since 1964, and he began his musical journey in New York, where he worked with artists such as Joe Farrell and Richard Davis among many other greats. It was during this time that he collaborated with legendary jazz drummer Elvin Jones, and Tompkins’ own composition “Yes” was even featured on Jones’ 1969 album Poly-Currents. The first time Tompkins worked with New Music Circle was in the 1970s, so it’s fitting that he is the only St. Louis native headlining a New Music Circle event this season.

December 12

Pedestrian Deposit with Kingston Family Singers

Off Broadway, 3509 Lemp

NMC has a long history of presenting some of its more unhinged events at Off Broadway, a multifaceted venue in south city known for hosting a wide range of genres. That’s why it’s the perfect stage for the relentless noise and avant-garde outfit Pedestrian Deposit, the ongoing Los Angeles–based noise, drone, and performance duo of Janine Borges and Shannon Kennedy. The pair have been stalwarts of experimental underground music in America for more than 20 years by way of consistent and constant DIY touring. Pedestrian Deposit remains dedicated to expanding their approach to performance art, making them a great fit for NMC’s latest season. Opening the show is Belleville, Illinois, native Kingston Family Singers, an innovative act that incorporates electronics, modular synth, and video and should serve as fantastic counterpoint to the Los Angeles duo.

January 23, 2027

Chris Williams Vibration Trio (Chris Williams, Patrick Shiroishi, Kalia Vandever)

Schlafly Tap Room, 2100 Locust

The last time Brooklyn-based trumpeter and composer Chris Ryan Willaims came through town, he brought along cellist Lester St. Louis, and the pair performed as HxH as part of NMC’s 66th season. For his return, Chris Williams’ Vibration Trio offers an unparalleled wind ensemble that incorporates digital processing and synthesizers for a kaleidoscopic set of exploratory sound. While Williams provides a foundational aesthetic via trumpet, he is flanked by Japanese-American saxophonist and composer Patrick Shiroshi, an acrobatic improviser whose expansive body of work even includes prog-rock groups such as Upsilon Acrux. The trio is glued together by the slide-trombone stylings of Kalia Vandever, a Grammy Award–winning musician and composer who has worked with the likes of Harry Styles and Japanese Breakfast, as well as many of modern jazz’s most prolific players. While Chris Williams’ album Odu: Vibration II isn’t strictly a trio effort, it offers a glimpse of the group’s enigmatic interplay with collaborative tracks from all three players featured throughout.

February 12, 2027

Vinny Golia Trio (Vinny Golia, Ken Filiano, Michael TA Thompson)

560 Music Center, 560 Trinity

Since the 1970s, Vinny Golia has been a highly influential composer, multi-instrumentalist, and educator within the spheres of avant-garde jazz, free improvisation, and contemporary classical music. Based in Southern California, he is universally recognized for his astonishing mastery of dozens of woodwind instruments, spanning the entire families of flutes, saxophones, and clarinets. One of his many feats includes the assemblage of the ongoing 50-piece Vinny Golia Large Ensemble, but the project he’ll be bringing to the 560 Music Center is a rather renowned trio that includes bassist Ken Filian and drummer Michael TA Thompson. The trio’s 2025 album, Catastasis, offers a peek into the sonic sculptures that will be carved at this concert presented by both NMC and WashU Music.

February 26, 2027

Filter Three (Cecilia Lopez, Ingrid Laubrock, Trevor Dunn)

Schlafly Tap Room, 2100 Locust

Each member of Filter Three is a world-class improviser with a discography that would make even the most seasoned crate-digging jazz collector blush. The trio comes together to explore the boundary between acoustic and electronic sound. Cecilia Lopez is a rare example of an electronic musician who has organized their approach to drop-of-a-hat style spontaneous improvisation, and she works with Trevor Dunn (double bass) and Ingrid Laubrock (saxophones) to craft an exploratory space for the wandering mind. Through live amplification and processing, instrumental timbres are altered, twisted, and blended, where at times individual voices lose themselves in a collective network of sound.

April 4, 2027

MV Carbon with Radiator Greys

The Luminary, 2701 Cherokee

MV Carbon is a true sonic sculptor who operates at the intersection of sound, technology and visual design by integrating vintage and analog systems for a wild and unapologetically experimental body of work. From composing soundtracks for independent films to collaborating on musical projects released through labels such as Kill Rock Stars, Atavistic Records, and Load Records, this New York–based performance artist is known for breaking boundaries between many musical disciplines. Between performing in bands such as Bride of NoNo and Metalux and presenting work in museums, MV Carbon is a contemporary creative whose true impact is hard to quantify. 

“MV Carbon is an artist who I have followed closely for as long as I’ve been a fan of this type of music,” says Josh Levi, board president of NMC and an accomplished sound artist and curator known to many St. Louis music fans as FloodYrFace, a longtime organizer of experimental concerts. “Her music is perhaps a melting pot of different sub-genres within the greater scope of experimental music and she can move from drone to electro-acoustic wanderings with ease and sit within space and silence as much as cacophony,” Levi says.

The NMC music committee is made up of many local artists and musicians who work together to present a diverse and forward-thinking lineup every season, which typically runs from fall to spring. While Levi has been going to shows and performing in St. Louis since 2002, he only recently joined NMC in 2022. Levi will be also perform his own music, for the first time at a NMC event, under his longtime moniker of Radiator Greys, a psychedelic noise-music projected that incorporates layered tape loops, samplers, and cascading synths to create an ever-expanding soundscape of non-conforming music. 

“MV Carbon is an artist who always pushes herself through multiple instrumentation, whether it’s cello or analog synthesizer or tape machines, but always pushing towards new sounds and compositions. The history in her own artistry echoes the canon that NMC has operated within. I think she is a great fit for the season as a forward-thinking artist,” Levi says.