Program

Drone / Noise / Opera

Micaela Tobin is a soprano, sound artist, and teacher based in Los Angeles, CA who specializes in experimental voice and contemporary opera.

As a sound artist with a background in opera, Micaela integrates voice and electronics within the genres of noise and drone music. Her work incorporates ritualized gesture and amplified object-symbolism and explores her diasporic identity as a first-generation Filipina-American. Micaela’s vocal practice is based in building connections between the physical voice as a means of empowering one’s ‘inner’ voice and challenging colonial stories and systems.

Composing primarily under the moniker 'White Boy Scream,” Micaela dissects her operatic and extended vocal techniques through the use of electronics, oscillating between extreme textures of noise, drone, and operatic sound walls. Her most recent full length album, “BAKUNAWA” (Deathbomb Arc) includes elements of sonic ritual, ancient myth, and ancestral memory. Of the album, Steve Smith of The New Yorker Magazine asserts that “opera would do well to pay attention.” The album was ranked #9 Release of 2020 in The Wire Magazine. In May 2021, Micaela premiered the cinematic adaptation of the album through REDCAT, titled “BAKUNAWA: Opera of the Seven Moons.”

As an opera composer, Micaela premiered and earned a five-star review for her first original experimental opera, entitled 'Unseal Unseam,' at the world’s largest art festival, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, in summer 2016; the work was described as “hypnotic” and “paralyzingly beautiful,” by New Classic LA after its U.S. debut in October 2017. Her most recent opera, “Belarion: A Space Opera” which premiered at the American Legion Center in Pasadena, CA in February 2019, is about the magickal practices of JPL founder Jack Parsons.

As a performer, Micaela played the principal role of Coyote in the critically acclaimed opera, SWEET LAND (dir. Yuval Sharon & Canuppa Luger; Comp. Raven Chacon & Du Yun). She also performed with The Industry in their groundbreaking opera, 'Hopscotch, a mobile opera for 24 cars (dir. Yuval Sharon).' She has also toured with hip-hop experimentalists clipping. on their 2017 tour with The Flaming Lips. Micaela also appeared as a principal vocalist in the premiere of Ron Athey and Sean Griffith’s automatic opera, “Gifts the Spirit”; and as a soprano soloist alongside Annette Bening in the play 'Medea' at UCLALive.

https://www.whiteboyscream.com
https://wbscream.bandcamp.com
https://www.micaelatobin.com
https://www.instagram.com/deathbombarc
https://www.facebook.com/wbscream

Post-Rock / Spoken Word

Established in San Francisco, CA in 2002, Enablers' subsequent five LPs and four EPs have signaled a transcendent approach to “Spoken Word” music. The 2019 LP, Zones (Broken Clover, Lancashire&Somerset, and Exile on Mainstream) is a further example of Enablers’ push for musical expansion and growth. Zones represents a band that is increasingly more comfortable with experimentation and improvisation, while continuing to embrace all the musical elements that have established their sound for close to twenty years.

Band Members: Joe Goldring (former Swans, Toiling Midgets, Touched by a Janitor) on guitar; Kevin Robert Thomson (former Nice Strong Arm, Timco, Touched by a Janitor, now Hazel Atlas) also on guitar; poet, writer, and narrator Pete Simonelli on vocals. Rounding out the line-up is drummer Sam Ospovat (Ava Mendoza, Brendan Seabrook, Beep!, tUnE-yArDs, William Winant).

Discography: —End Note (LP 2004, Neurot Recordings); “New Moon” (7” split with Red Panda, 2005, Lancashire and Somerset); Output Negative Space (LP 2006 released on Neurot Recordings; re-issued on vinyl by Lancashire and Somerset, 2012); The Achievement (EP 2007, Awesome Vistas); Tundra (LP 2008 Majic Wallet & Exile on Mainstream, Lancashire and Somerset); Now You Can Answer My Prayers (EP 2009, Lancashire and Somerset,); Blown Realms and Stalled Explosions (LP, 2011, Exile on Mainstream/Lancashire and Somerset dual release); Berlinesque (EP, 2014, digital release on Bandcamp); The Rightful Pivot (LP, 2015, Lancashire and Somerset/Exile on Mainstream dual release/Atypeek digital); Pigeon Diaries (EP, 2019, Lancashire and Somerset [vinyl], digital release on Bandcamp); Zones (LP, 2019, Lancashire and Somerset/Exile on Mainstream dual release).

https://enablers.bandcamp.com
https://www.facebook.com/enablerstunes
https://www.instagram.com/enablershazelatlastunes

Press Blurbs:

From Jack Chuter’s Storm Static Sleep - A Pathway Through Post-Rock:
(Enablers’) music lands between the slippery harmonic surfaces of early 90s post-rock and the softened elegance of the more modern incarnations of it, the guitars dragged like a ribbon by the elusive poetic imagery of Pete Simonelli’s spoken word.

From Jordan Mamone, writing for Noisey:

Enablers' snaking guitar telepathy is equally distinctive…Joe Goldring and Kevin Thomson (have) refined an intuitive vocabulary of filigreed arpeggios, needling leads, and grand crescendos that roil like the vast Pacific….Simonelli has accomplished that rarest of feats: enhancing slow-burning, noir-ish rock with unapologetic poetry that actually flatters rather than overshadows the songs…(Ospovat’s) improvisational arsenal of rolls, taps, and flutters allows for spontaneity without sacrificing impact.

Drowned in Sound writer Mike Diver described them as 'a confrontational band, a visceral beast of eight legs and one mouth that never quits, its stream of freeform hang-loose lyricism owing a debt in style, perhaps, to literary forefathers'.

NY Times best-selling author, Beth Lisick, in The SF Weekly described the band as, “visceral spoken word backed by perhaps the world’s best power trio.”

** A web search will reveal numerous articles in various other publications lauding the band’s virtues on record and in live performances.