Side Yard Sounds: Matt Robidoux / Coppice / NNN Cook
June 20, 2026, 7–9 PM
Join us for an evening of experimental sound, improvisation, and spatial listening with Matt Robidoux, Coppice, and NNN Cook, presented alongside the closing of Lindsey Dorr-Niro’s Spectral Psalm.

NNN Cook
Interdisciplinary visual/sound artist, poet, and designer NNN Cook runs the experimental cassette label Close/Far Recordings and is the creator and curator of the St. Louis-based music, video, and art series: Bruxism. His work is typically concerned with proximity, geometry, mysticism, psychodynamics, identity, the primeval, and critical spatial practice. Cook’s work has been presented by Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Laumeier Sculpture Park, Museum of Contemporary Religious Art, NON STNDRD, The Luminary, Public Media Commons, World Chess Hall Of Fame, Synoptic Frequencies, Tulsa Artist Fellowship, Dissonant Works, Experimental Sound Studios, Radius, and High Concept Labs, among others. He is a longstanding board member of New Music Circle, a St. Louis nonprofit organization dedicated to the creation and performance of improvisational and experimental music founded in 1959. Cook is a recent Futures Fund grantee—a program of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. The grant supported a collaborative project researching the ecological and social impacts of settler-colonialism and resource extraction in St. Louis’ constitutive hinterlands: the Old Missouri Lead Belt and Southern Illinois Coal Belt. The Wire magazine said this of his solo release, “(Bl)end User”: “Cook is a distinctive voice in this crowded field.”

Coppice
For over 15 years, the Chicago-based duo Coppice (Noé Cuéllar and Joseph Kramer) has created experimental music centered on auditory pairings. Its compositions often address recursive relations between presentation and representation, framing and reframing, object specificity and technological imprint.

Currently, Coppice is exploring the timbres, tones, and shapes of idiophones (a kind of musical instrument whose own substance vibrates to produce sound), and strategies in spatial audio.

Coppice’s previous experiments include Bellows & Electronics (2009–2014), Physical Modeling & Modular Syntheses (2014–2018), and Phonography & Fiction (2018–2022). These musical trajectories and their respective instruments and devices are documented online, along with writings on creative processes, including retrospective works published by Leonardo and Seismograf. Visit https://coppice.futurevessel.com/ .

Matt Robidoux
Matt Robidoux (they/he) is a San Francisco based composer, improviser, and educator interested in the convergence of movement and sound as it relates to free improvisation and accessibility. Their primary instrument is the “corn synth” (Kinetically Operated Randomness Network) a modular system that interprets physical input from two “ears of corn” sculptures cast in aluminum.

They are part of a composer collective with Sally Decker, Brendan Glasson, Briana Marela, Michelle Moeller, and Mitch Stahlmann, and Flatways, an electroacoustic improvising trio with Jordan Glenn and Sudhu Tewari. They have worked with Creativity Explored, Del Sol Quartet, Fred Frith, Eclipse Quartet, William Winant, Jaap Blonk, Laura Steenberge, Sunburned Hand of the Man, Anla Courtis, and J Mascis.

Why corn?
I like to focus on the modularity/ubiquity of corn and this kind of illogical sculptural sound causality as a starting point for free improvisation. The instrument was invented during my residency at ACRE in Wisconsin, where I cast two corn cob moldings in aluminum at a metal pouring workshop in a cornfield. Movement and touch determine the parameters of pitch, velocity, and duration. This makes for an accessible instrument, at once charming and absurd, while also a merging of my practice creating space for unrestricted musical improvisation.

The modular environment, configured around two touch controlled aluminum cast ears of corn, is informed by my ongoing work with Pauline Oliveros’ final project AUMI (Adaptive Use Musical Instrument) in direct collaboration with the disability community and multidisciplinary arts organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area. The powerful echo and artistic legacy of Mills College CCM (1967-2022) resonates in my design of the corn synth, modeling it after the Buchla 158, the original synthesizer used at the San Francisco Tape Music Center beginning in 1963.

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Tags: Compound Yellow, coppice, experimental music, improvisation, Lindsey Dorr-Niro, Matt Robidoux, NNN Cook, Oak Park, Side Yard Sounds, visual/sound art