Adventurous Electric Guitar Festival: Opening Concert

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.

Houston bassist and composer Thomas Helton is a multifaceted improviser and skilled interpreter of contemporary bass repertoire. Equally adept at playing jazz, classical, experimental and avant-garde music, Helton continues to push and redefine the possibilities of his instrument by embracing extended performance techniques and new compositional forms. He has studied with bass masters including Mark Helias, Rufus Reid, Lynn Seaton and William Parker, and performed with Milt Jackson, Daniel Carter, Monty Alexander, Ernie Watts, Weasel Walter, Damon Smith and Steve Swell. He is a founding member of The Core Trio, whose acclaimed records with Matthew Shipp were released in 2014 and 2015, and artistic director of the Houston Composers Salon. His projects include the duo pH with electronic composer Kevin Patton, the Boomtown Brass Band, and the dance ensemble Group Acorde. Helton is the primary bass luthier at Quantum Bass Center in Houston.

Sandy Ewen is an experimental guitar player known for solo and collaborative improvisation. Ewen generates sounds with physical implements and extended techniques; other than a pan pedal, she does not process the guitar’s signal with effects. The resulting sounds are nuanced, focused on textures and timbres, with a clear but unusual connection to the physicality of the guitar — its strings, pickups and body. Ewen has spent over 20 years expanding her craft and musical vocabulary through both solo and collaborative projects. In 2026 she embarked on a 49-date US tour including trios with Damon Smith and Weasel Walter, and duos with Arrington de Dionyso, Fred Frith and Henry Kaiser. She has performed with the Roscoe Mitchell Quartet, at Sant’Anna Arresi Jazz Festival, Moers Festival, Wels Festival and Jazz em Agosto, and has an extensive discography including projects with Keith Rowe, Jaap Blonk, Roscoe Mitchell and many others. Ewen also creates experimental videos and analogue photographic work, presenting a solo exhibition in Brooklyn in 2025.

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.

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.

Asher Lurie (b. 2003) is a composer, percussionist, and guitarist from Dallas, Texas. He is the winner of the Tribeca New Music Young Composer Competition and the Composers Concordance Composition Competition, and a finalist in The American Prize, musicON Composition Competition, Brevard Music Center Composition Competition, and The Sound Ensemble. Ensembles he has worked with include Sandbox Percussion, Unheard-of//Ensemble, arx duo, Trio Kanon, Latitude 49, and Pathos Trio. As winner of the inaugural Stamps Composition Competition he was commissioned to write Make a Statement, premiered by the combined Stamps ensembles and Time for Three. Lurie began with electric guitar and bass lessons with Mick Cervino, studying rock and metal through a neoclassical lens; inspired by this and his heritage, his music explores aggression, explosiveness, and relentlessness with lush, dreamy touches emerging from the background. A graduate of the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music, he is currently pursuing his Master’s in Composition at the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University, where he studies with Pierre Jalbert.

Kelly Doyle is a boundary-pushing Houston guitarist known for seamlessly blending jazz, country, rock, and avant-garde influences into a singular sound. Primarily self-taught, Doyle has developed a highly personal approach to the electric guitar, drawing as readily from improvisation and experimental music as from the deep traditions of Texas guitar playing.

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.