Tapetail Presents:
Alexander Noise & Dylan McKenzie
Saturday, August 29, 8pm
After a 20-year friendship and a mutual admiration for one another's music, Alexander Noice and Dylan McKenzie decided, somewhat informally, that they should finally play together. After only a few improvised sessions, it became immediately clear that a distinct musical language, with its own directions and limitations, had already been quietly established. Through sheer osmosis of late nights listening to records, countless concerts, and the many seemingly non-musical moments that accompany a two-decade friendship, a shared aesthetic and emotional vocabulary had naturally found its way into their music.
The result is a highly personal musical language rooted in the lineage of guitar music, drawing equally from Americana, garage rock, ambient music, experimental electronics, free jazz and minimalism. Their music moves fluidly between beautiful intimacy and reckless abandon, with electronics transforming the guitars into sounds that are often barely recognizable as the instrument itself while remaining deeply connected to its history and expressive possibilities.
Keith Richards once described "guitar weaving" as two guitarists intuitively interlocking their parts, constantly exchanging rhythm and lead roles until they function as a single musical organism rather than two separate players. That idea feels especially resonant here. While Noice and McKenzie's performances begin with improvisation, they are ultimately better understood as acts of spontaneous composition. Their music unfolds as a real-time conversation, with each player continuously shaping the other's decisions. The result is an intuitive musical language that could only emerge from a friendship spanning more than twenty years.
About the Artists
Alexander Noice is a Los Angeles–based composer, guitarist, producer, and bandleader whose work inhabits the space between contemporary composition, improvisation, electronic music, and art rock. Whether writing for chamber ensembles, building electroacoustic works in the studio, or leading his ensemble NOICE, his music is driven by an interest in intricate structures that remain visceral, emotionally direct, and alive in performance.
As both a composer and performer, Noice has appeared throughout the United States, Europe, Australia, Japan, and South America, collaborating with artists including Wadada Leo Smith, Famoudou Don Moye, Vinnie Colaiuta, Tim Lefebvre, Vinny Golia, David Binney, Wild Up, Dorian Wood, and Daniel Rosenboom. He has performed at many notable venues including Walt Disney Concert Hall, REDCAT, Blue Note Tokyo, Roulette, the Hammer Museum, and the Troubadour, as well as festivals such as the Monterey Jazz Festival, MATA Festival, Angel City Jazz Festival, Desert Daze, Sónar Tokyo, and Green Umbrella at the Los Angeles Philharmonic. He has also been an artist-in-residence at Ucross, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and Loghaven.
After emerging as one of Los Angeles' distinctive guitar voices, Noice expanded his practice into composition across a wide range of media, creating works for chamber ensembles, improvising ensembles, film, animation, and multimedia installations. His 2016 solo electronic album Music Made With Voices transformed a single sung pitch from eight different voices into an entire sonic world, revealing an early fascination with finding expansive musical possibilities within tightly defined systems.
Noice founded the six-piece ensemble NOICE in 2014, developing a group language that dissolves the boundaries between post-minimalism, jazz, electronic music, and experimental rock. Described as "acrobatic in its execution and cinematic in scope," the ensemble has become known for performances that blur the line between precision and spontaneity. Their critically acclaimed 2019 debut established the group's singular aesthetic, and a new album is forthcoming on Innova Recordings, the label of the American Composers Forum.
Recent projects include Autotelic, a commission for the Grammy Award-winning percussion ensemble Third Coast Percussion that premiered in 2025, and Perpetually and Forever, an electroacoustic album released on Orenda Records in 2026. Writing in PopMatters, one critic called the album "a wild ride... one that has something for every adventurous listener."
Dylan McKenzie is a Los Angeles-based guitarist, songwriter, and composer whose work spans intimate songcraft, exploratory guitar music, and shape-shifting art rock. His music brings melodic and emotional immediacy together with stream-of-consciousness arrangements, textured abstraction, and resonant hooks.
McKenzie has toured and performed across the United States and Europe with his band Derde Verde, as a guitarist with Josh Haden’s band Spain, and as a solo artist. His performances have included Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Hammer Museum, and KCRW’s Morning Becomes Eclectic. His work has also included improvised scores for silent film, sound installation, and composition for film.
McKenzie is the singer, guitarist, and principal songwriter of Derde Verde, a Los Angeles band he co-founded in 2008. Across several albums and EPs, the group has continually evolved its sound, moving between quiet intimacy, atmospheric experimentation, and eruptive dynamics. Derde Verde has received recognition from KCRW, LA Record, Buzz Bands LA, Aquarium Drunkard, and other outlets. Their 2019 album Slow Light was praised by KCRW as “Best New Music.”
His 2021 solo EP Shell was recorded at home on four-track cassette and brings together songs, instrumentals, electronics, and exploratory solo guitar rooted in acoustic traditions while moving toward lo-fi texture and open-ended form. McKenzie recently returned to Los Angeles after two years living in Brussels, where he became involved in the city’s independent music community, writing, recording, and performing with local musicians, including contributing an original song to Subterranean Songs in 2024, the second release in the collaborative Buddy Mixtapes series.
Tapetail is Automata’s new experimental sound series, launched in October 2022.
Tapetail presents live events and sound installations featuring the work of experimental sound artists.
We are currently looking to present shows and installations that deal with "liveness" where something about the experience is best presented live, whether through improvisation, special acoustic treatment or audience experience. There’s been a lot of great art happening in the virtual and digital world so now we’re turning our focus back towards bringing people together for sound experiences that are best experienced in a live setting.
Automata’s Tapetail series
is curated by Cassia Streb.
If you are interested in proposing work for the Tapetail series,
please fill out this short query form.