Sara Wintz is a writer and editor. Her writing has appeared in The Poetry Project Newsletter, EOAGH, they are flying planes, ecopoetics, Jacket, and Sustainable Aircraft; at The Zinc Bar, The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, at Segue Reading Series, at The Bowery Poetry Club; and on Ceptuetics with Kareem Estefan, on WNYU. She is lead singer of the pretty panicks press, and from 2007-2009 she was co-editor for :::the press gang::: She now curates PoetryTV!, and readings at SEGUE, and writes from various locations on the east and west coast.
Inspired by Peter Garland's journal, Soundings, and James Tenney's postcard compositions, the pretty panicks press began as a project documenting the various ways that rock music is represented on the page. In its first year, panicks printed rock compositions on the fronts of five postcards, with artists statements on the backs, and distributed to a mailing list of about 500 physical addresses, and sites including Other Music (NYC), Aquarius (SF), and Amoeba Music (SF/Berkeley). Started while an undergraduate at Mills College, with support from William Winant, and friends in the bay area music community, contributors to the project so far have included John Darnielle, of The Mountain Goats, Sharon Cheslow, Jorge Boehringer, Molly Thompson, Pure Horsehair, and Ches Smith.
Postcards distributed by the pretty panicks press are archived electronically at Deep Oakland.
DITHER, a New York based electric guitar quartet, is dedicated to an eclectic mix of experimental repertoire which spans composed music, improvisation, and electronic manipulation. Formed in 2007, the quartet has performed in the United States and abroad, presenting new commissions, original compositions, multimedia works, and large guitar ensemble pieces. With sounds ranging from clean pop textures to heavily processed noise, from tight rhythmic unity to cacophonous sound mass, all of Dither's music wholeheartedly embraces the beautiful, engulfing, and often gloriously loud sound of electric guitars. The quartet’s members are Taylor Levine, David Linaburg, Joshua Lopes, and James Moore.
Dither's recent collaborators include downtown bagpiper Matthew Welch, composers Eve Beglarian and David Lang, and guitarist/composers Bryce Dessner, Nick Didkovsky, Marco Cappelli, Elliott Sharp, and Mark Stewart. In Fall of 2008, the quartet traveled to Hong Kong to premiere an evening-length theatrical work by Samson Young, “Hong Kong Explodes!”, funded by the Hong Kong Council for the Arts. Dither has also performed extensively in venues in the Northeast, including The Stone, Roulette, Le Poisson Rouge, Princeton University, the MATA Interval series at ISSUE Project Room, and the Performa Biennial. Last year the quartet performed at the Bang on a Can Marathon, giving a monstrous performance of Eric km Clark's exPAT, a Dither commission for "hearing deprived" electric guitar orchestra.
