Meridian presents an evening with visiting Argentine musicians Adriana de los Santos (keyboard) and Andrea Pensado (electronics) with local musicians M.E. Miller (drums) and Ava Mendoza (guitar).

Adriana de los Santos is a classically trained pianist, born in Entre Ríos, where she made her first music studies. Since 1978 she has been deeply involved in shaping new music throughout Latin America. She says: "The reality of our countries makes it very difficult to work with new technologies. This fact has a direct influence in my aesthetic choices both working alone or in groups. The idea is to produce music which represents our socioeconomic reality and its impact in our culture. This is just one more way of the activism I am involved with not only in music but in all movements which defend the rights of musicians and artists in Argentina and the rest of Latin America."

Andrea Pensado is an Argentinian sound artist, performer, composer and teacher. She started studying music in Argentina and continued in Cracow (Poland) where she lived for 10 years. Her pieces then varied from pure instrumental to mixed genres (instrumental theatre, live electronics, text sound compositions). In 1997, Pensado moved back to Buenos Aires where she crystallized her interests in real-time interaction and interdisciplinarity by co-founding Qfwfq Duo along with Gregory Kowalski. Presently, she mainly plays solos and has performed with, among others: I'd M Thfft Able, Forbes Graham, Walter Wright, Jules Vasylenko, Audrey Chen, Dave Ross, Lou Cohen, Todd Brunel, Junko Simons and Luther Gray. She has been featured in Argentina, Brazil, Poland, Canada, Germany, Austria, France and the US where she currently lives.

Mark E. Miller is a percussionist and vocalist based in the Bay Area. He studied gamelan in Bandung, Indonesia for two years, lived in NYC from 1978-93, playing and recording with Elliot Sharp, John Zorn, Charles Noyes, Michael Beinhorn, Golden Palominos, Arto Lindsay, Fred Frith, Wayne Horvitz, Toykillers, Anton Fier, and many others. Recently Miller has been living in the Oakland area, playing and recording with Henry Kaiser, Larry Ochs, Weasel Walter, Kathleen Supove and many local improvisers. Miller has just completed mixing the new Toykillers record, Awayward, to be released this year.

Oakland-based guitarist/composer Ava Mendoza writes, "My solo work draws a lot from early country and blues tunes, reworked (mangled?) in my own way. In any music context I tend to tread a wobbly line between melodicism, atonality and sonic abstraction. Solo guitar writing and arrangement started out for me as a kind love letter to some classic songs that were near and dear to me. It has turned into more of a love letter to the endless adaptability of songs, to all the different ways they can be personalized--whether through subtle arrangement idiosyncrasies, or through melodic and sonic foraying to the point of waywardness, unrecognizability, and transformation."