27th Annual MATA Festival

From June 11-14, 2025, MATA presents its 27th annual MATA Festival, this year in partnership with ISSUE Project Room at the limited capacity 22 Boerum Pl. theater. Featuring four concerts across four nights, this year’s festival explores the concept of INTERGALACTIC INFINITY: Music Between Spaces – music that connects with the diaspora of ancestry and heritage, around ideas of imagination, mysticism, liberation, science fiction, history, fantasy, and technoculture. The New York Times has hailed the MATA Festival as “nondogmatic, even antidogmatic,” while The Wall Street Journal reports that it “tells us a lot about how composers are thinking now.”

This year’s festival opens with Jessie Cox’s evening-length opus Enter the Impossible, written for and performed by the unparalleled Sun Ra Arkestra, with FLUX Quartet and Sam Yulsman. Enter the Impossible is imagined as a space flight, journeying through different musical spaces, including many pieces from Sun Ra Arkestra’s large collection of works, such as “Say” from their recent record Swirling, or the classic Space is the Place, among others. The concert also includes the world premiere of Cox’s “Sound Drape Painting,” inspired by Sam Gilliam’s drape paintings and exploring new ways of hearing musical form and movement through the sonic. Cox explains: “Music as aesthetic experience proposes, or is a site to imagine, ways of spacing – how we come to inhabit and make space and time.” FLUX Quartet will also perform the New York premiere of jazz saxophonist, flutist, composer, poet, and visual artist Oliver Lake’s “One Move” as well as the world premiere of MATA Festival 2025 Early-Career Composer Diallo Banks’ “Sarmad” for string quartet. “Sarmad” is structured around the concept of yati, a principle in South Indian music that shapes musical phrases through systematic variation.