LAB 2026: The Instrument, Romance, Bee Boy by Guillermo E. Brown
Event Schedule
The Industry celebrates the return of its LAB series, in partnership with REDCAT, featuring new works in opera by renowned artists Guillermo E. Brown, Carmina Escobar, and Matana Roberts.
Guillermo E. Brown presents a triptych of performative strategies, playing with and about time inside a maximalist, roulette-like approach. With The Instrument—a boundary-pushing performance system fusing drumming, singing, electronics, and custom sensors—a 30-inch, gong-like projection surface becomes both drum and screen, encoding touch into sound and image to shape stories in the ether. Romance, inspired by Claude McKay’s novel Romance in Marseilles, distorts storytelling through the manipulation of time, place, and space. In Bee Boy, Brown charts metamorphosis and community, letting change ring out as a percussion-driven rhythm of resistance.
Guillermo E. Brown is an American musician, vocalist, performer, and record producer. He pushes music performance to new heights through musical collaborations, sound installations, and singular theatrical works. Splitting his time as a solo performer under the moniker Pegasus Warning, and as a musician, he has been featured on over 50 full-length recordings as a drummer-vocalist-electronics/collaborator with David S. Ware, William Parker, Matthew Shipp, Vijay Iyer, Mike Ladd, Roy Campbell, Anti-Pop Consortium, Anthony Braxton, DJ Spooky, El-P, Carl Hancock Rux, Vernon Reid, DJ Logic, Latasha Diggs, Dave Burrell, George E. Lewis, Mendi & Keith Obadike, Victor Gama, Arto Lindsay, Spoek Mathambo, Jamie Lidell, Saul Williams, CANT, Mocky, Twin Shadow, Grisha Coleman, Suphala, and Nia Andrews, among others. From free jazz ensembles to The Late Late Show with James Corden, he demonstrates his expertise in disciplines that combine experimental musical performance with a sense of political urgency.
