The annual April in Santa Cruz Festival (AiSC) returns in 2025 with UC Santa Cruz graduate students, faculty and guest artists.

The April 18 concert is “ambulatory,” moving between the physical spaces that Western concert traditions reify and ceremonialize, and spilling out into other architectural spaces. A new work from composer Michael Fleming explores the acoustics of the khaen, a bamboo mouth organ with origins in Thai and Laotian cultures. Combining his intensive practice with that tradition with spectral analysis techniques, Fleming sources the work’s innovative electronic sound transformations. Forrest Balman blends a live instrumental soloist with electronic sound and video projections to create a rich and enveloping work. These pieces are framed by other engaging new works from Balman, experimental trans-cultural music from Dohyun Jeon, and a composition from Pierre Eghdami that focuses on acousmatics: the study of sonic experience when sounds are perceptually separated from their expected sources and material origins. Several of these works make innovative use of technology, including the new state-of-the-art 15-speaker system in UCSC’s electronic music studio, creating immersive sound environments for these globally-inspired works. Then shifting to a more traditional concert space, the previous concert is framed by three duo performances; the first by faculty Ashwin Batish (sitar)  and Keshav Batish (tabla or pitched drums); the second by award-winning virtuoso kamanche player Siamak Barghi, and Arya Tavallaei on santour, and the third between Fleming (violin) and Nina Barzegar (piano).
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ADMISSION
- FREE and open to the public
- First come, first served
- Limited to the first 25 attendees due to venue restrictions for Part 1 (additional 50 seats available for Part 2)
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ADVISORIES
- Audiences will walk between two venues during this presentation
- Part 1: Music Center Room 191
- Part 2: Music Center Room 131
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PARKING
- Parking by permit, ParkMobile, or $5 cash/credit via the on-site parking attendant (if present)
- Arts Lot #126 is the closest parking lot to the event
- Visitors with DMV placards or plates may park for free in DMV spaces, Medical spaces, or ParkMobile spaces without additional payment, or in timed zones for longer than the posted time.
- More information provided by UCSC Transportation & Parking Services (TAPS) 
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ABOUT THE FESTIVAL
April in Santa Cruz is a decades-old tradition of intrepid music-making, and has featured a global vanguard of musical practices, interacting with local as well as international composers and performers. This year's festival is a dynamic trans-cultural symposium of musical collaboration, which focuses its attention on performing artists whose practices challenge colonial models of music notation and the domination of Western practices in music performance. 
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FULL SCHEDULE OF EVENTS
- Friday, April 18, 7:30 p.m.: Concert 1
- Saturday, April 19, 6:00 p.m.: Concert 2—"Tenanan"
- Friday, April 25, 7:30 p.m.: Concert 3