Peni Candra Rini with Shahzad Ismaily & Andy McGraw / Alex Koi x Kirin McElwain

Saturday October 24 * doors at 6:30, show at 7 * $20-30 * TICKETS

Secret Planet presents…

Peni Candra Rini (b. 1983) is a renowned Javanese singer, educator, and composer fusing Javanese sufi poetry with contemporary composition for Indonesian and Western instruments. She is a master of several traditional forms (primarily gamelan) and is regarded as one of Indonesia’s most daring young composers, one of only a handful of female composers in the country. She has performed extensively internationally, including several world tours as the featured singer for Robert Wilson’s I La Galigo. She is a recipient of grants from the Asian Cultural Council, is a two-time grantee of the US State Department’s One Beat and Fulbright programs, and in 2022 was named an Aga Khan Foundation laureate of the arts.

In 2023 she became the first woman to be commissioned to compose a work for the Mangkunegaran court of Central Java and in 2024 was bestowed the court name Raden Nganten Tumenggung, the highest honor offered by the Raja. In October 2026 Kronos will release an album of her string quartets on the Phenotypic label, some of which they have performed on NPR’s Tiny Desk series.

Shahzad Ismaily is a Brooklyn-based musician, composer, engineer and founder of Figure 8 Recording. Born to Pakistani immigrant parents, he grew up in a wholly bicultural household. Exploring improvisation, tonal shifts and rhythmic movement, the Grammy nominated artist (Love In Exile, Best Alternative Jazz Album) is often referred to as the “Musician’s favorite Musician”. Over the last thirty years he has played electric bass, drums, percussion, guitar, synthesizers and all manner of sound-makers procured in life’s travels. Ismaily has done work for dance and theater pieces, such as the film Frozen River (Oscar-nominated and Sundance award-winning) and Inkboat (a butoh crew from California/Switzerland).

Andy McGraw is Professor and Chair of Music at the University of Richmond in Virginia. He is the author of Radical Traditions: Reimagining Culture in Balinese Experimental Music (Oxford 2013) and Music as Ethics (Oxford 2023). He has co-edited two volumes on Indonesian music: Performing Indonesia, with Sumarsam (Smithsonian 2014) and Sounding Out the State of Indonesian Music, with Chris Miller (Cornell 2022). He has published numerous articles on music and ethics as well as analytical pieces on rhythm in Balinese, Javanese, and Cuban musics. In Richmond he facilitates community gamelan and stringband ensembles and runs a music program in the Virginia prison system.

Alex Koi x Kirin McElwain is a duo of original music for voice, cello, and modular synthesizer.

Kirin McElwain is a cellist and composer working in the realms of experimental, contemporary classical, and improvised music. Weaving together classical and Baroque influences with an affinity for sub-bass and harsh electronic textures, her music explores themes of desire, shame, perfection, and belonging. As a cellist, Kirin has performed on various film and television scores (HBO, National Geographic, Gimlet Media, PBS, NPR Tiny Desk), with contemporary artists (Post Malone, Ioanna Gika, This Will Destroy You), and as part of mixed media installations (the MET, James Cohan Gallery, Neue Galerie) as well as traditional classical and contemporary classical concerts (Carnegie Hall, National Sawdust, Kimmel Center, Roulette), in addition to many community-run venues.

Alex Koi is a composer, vocalist and improvising musician. Combining her diverse influences in Jazz and improvised music, the avant-garde and electronic, her work has been called “primal and futuristic at the same time” [Current Magazine] and “impossibly beautiful” [Stereo Stickman]. She played the combined role of Tracy Dunn/Jillian Gilchrist in Toshi Reagon’s Off-Broadway production of "Octavia E. Butler's Parable of the Sower", the theatrical adaptation of the beloved novel. Her upcoming album "Wake" with cellist Kirin McElwain is slated…