Helena Espvall started to play electric guitar as a bored teenager in northern Sweden, and went on to take cello lessons and was never bored again. After having played in rock bands, a silent movie orchestra, an arabian ensemble and being inspired to play free improvised music by a shocking Eugene Chadbourne performance, she moved to the US in 2000,where she spends much of her time collaborating with dancers, playing with folk psych band Espers and singing bossa nova and swedish traditional songs. Helena has performed several times at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival, twice at the High Zero Festival of improvised music in Baltimore,  MD, at the Improvised and Otherwise Festival in Brooklyn, NY, at Big Sur experimental festival in California and at Terrastock 2006 & 2008 among others. Espvall has received grants for artist residencies in Mojacar, Spain and at CESTA in Tabor, Czech Republic, and was invited to play at OpenCircuit InterAct, an international festival for improvised music in Hasselt, Belgium, last May where she performed with Chris Corsano, Paul Flaherty, C. Spencer Yeh, Daniel Carter and others.  In 2006 she released her debut solo album Nimis & Arx on Firemuseum/Pax records.  She has worked with Lukas Ligeti, Fursaxa, Damon & Naomi, Bert Jansch, Vashti Bunyan and many more. She has an ongoing collaboration with Masaki Batoh (of Tokyo band GHOST), with whom she recently toured in Japan, where she also performed with Damo Suzuki, Keiji Haino, Tatsuya Yoshida and Seiichi Yamamoto.

Zaimph is the solo project of Marcia Bassett, a New York City artist and musician.  In Flaubert’s novel Salammbô, the Zaimph is a holy magical veil that guards the statue of the moon goddess Tanit. Bassett appropriated the name in 2003, releasing a handful of CD-Rs on Heavy Blossom.  Later CD and LP releases have appeared on numerous independent labels such as Hospital Productions, W.M.O.r, Utech Records, Gypsy Sphinx, and Volcanic Tongue.

Under the Zaimph veil, Bassett predominately uses guitar and vocals to create sounds that shimmer in a dark metallic buzz of sonic noise and drone, before a swift shift into blissed out ragas or crippling, brutal, white-hot noise. The organic improvised elements of Bassett’s work leave traces of eerie ghost voices and deep-space echoes that  recall the electrified ritual of nomadic Japanese avant-gardists Taj Mahal Travellers — but more immediately sound like a magnification of her  contributions to Double Leopards and Hototogisu, generating towers of electricity that move from malevolent arcs of anti-gravity and spumes of throttled single notes  into deep wormholes that do violence to feeble notions of time and space.