Adventurous Electric Guitar Festival: Morning Panels

Chapman Welch is a guitarist, composer, educator, and music-technology specialist at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music, where he serves as Electroacoustic Specialist for the Rice Electroacoustic Music Labs (REMLABS). His work spans experimental and electronic music, improvisation, American guitar traditions, and the creative use of technology in performance and composition. Welch is a founding member of the Adventurous Electric Guitar Festival with composer and guitarist Christopher Trapani, an initiative devoted to contemporary and experimental approaches to the electric guitar through performances, workshops, artist presentations, and educational programs. As a guitarist, Welch toured extensively with his band Law of Nature and recorded with legendary Allman Brothers producer Johnny Sandlin. He won the 2019 Texas Flatpicking Championship and has twice been a finalist at the National Flat Pick Guitar Championship in Winfield, Kansas.

Christopher Trapani is an American/Italian composer born in New Orleans in 1980, whose work weaves American and European stylistic strands into a personal aesthetic that defies easy classification — drawing on Delta Blues, Appalachian folk tunes, dance band foxtrots, shoegaze guitar effects, and Turkish makam alongside spectral techniques. He studied with Bernard Rands at Harvard, Julian Anderson at the Royal College of Music, and Ottoman microtonality in Istanbul on a Fulbright, spent seven years at IRCAM in Paris, and completed his doctorate at Columbia in 2017. His honours include the 2016–17 Luciano Berio Rome Prize, the 2007 Gaudeamus Prize, and a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship. He is Assistant Professor of Experimental Music & Digital Media at LSU.

Peter McCulloch is a plug-in developer and sound designer at Eventide. He has worked on a variety of plugins such as Temperance, SplitEQ, Physion Mk II, and SP2016 Reverb, and he also did sound design for the Harmadillo and TriceraChorus algorithms on the H9 and H90 stompboxes. Peter is a trained classical composer specializing in interactive electro-acoustic music, and plays piano and Hammond organ. Prior to joining Eventide he taught electronic music at NYU and Vassar College for 10 years.

Kevin Sinclair Patton, PhD, is a creative technologist and academic who builds interactive systems that connect people — a strategic problem solver and inventor creating bespoke technological solutions that serve artistic vision. He is also a practicing musician and audio engineer whose studio and electroacoustic work informs his approach to responsive, interactive systems. He is an Assistant Professor of Interaction Design at the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design at the George Washington University. He holds a Ph.D. and M.A. from Brown University and was an Invited Researcher at the Sorbonne, University of Paris IV. His collaborative projects span immersive web experiences, augmented reality, and interactive installations for cultural institutions. Recent work includes DECIDE(S) (decides.app), a collaborative music production web app; Wayside (wayside.at), a browser-based AR system built for artist Andrew Kastner; Guest Editor of Volume 30 of Ideas Sónicas, a bilingual peer-reviewed journal examining automation and expression in creative practice; and Louise et Ondarel, a virtuosic guitar-and-voice duo performing multilingual art songs of solidarity, love, and dreams in Arabic, Russian, French, and English. As an educator, Kevin sees a direct continuity between his public-facing work and his teaching, where student projects regularly evolve into public installations and cultural engagements.

Although known for his surrealistic guitar stylism, Brad Allen Williams describes himself as a “professional listener.” Improvisation is a core musical value that animates collaborations and solo projects alike — it informs the openness, curiosity, presence, and relentless thirst for context that are his hallmarks. In his work with artists like Brittany Howard, Bilal, Nate Smith and others, Williams grounds outwardly-bold aesthetic choices in encyclopedic knowledge. On his solo albums æconomy and light rivers, he casts himself in productive opposition to his instrument, which he describes as “overleveraged in the last 100 years of popular music.” The mission is at once modest and extremely ambitious: he aspires to reimagine the guitar’s role and function on an atomic level, all while keeping service of music at the center.