WXDU & DUKE COFFEEHOUSE PRESENT: BRICKSIDE MUSIC FESTIVAL 2026
SATURDAY, APRIL 4th, 2026 | 1PM
Doors open at 12pm
Tickets ($20 CASH ONLY at door)
Directions to Duke Coffeehouse
The annual Brickside Music Festival returns once again on Saturday, April 4th at Duke Coffeehouse! Presented by Duke Coffeehouse and WXDU, Brickside will feature exquisite performances by artists mentioned below. Doors open at noon; with your Duke ID or a $20 paid ticket, you can enjoy FREE Gussy's food trucks, screen printing by Robby Poore, and art-making activities in addition to musical performances (beginning at 1 p.m.) ranging from fuzzed-out guitars to experimental hardware electronic to intimate acoustic to pastoral post-rock. This year, Brickside will host a panel aimed at exploring music, sound, and literature.
David Grubbs: David Grubbs is Distinguished Professor of Music at Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. He is the author of Good night the pleasure was ours, The Voice in the Headphones, Now that the audience is assembled, and Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording(All with Duke University Press). Grubbs has released sixteen solo albums and appeared on more than 200 releases. He is known for his cross-disciplinary collaborations with poet Susan Howe and visual artists Anthony McCall, Angela Bulloch, and Josiah McElheny, and his work has been presented at, among other venues, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, MoMA, the Tate Modern, and the Centre Pompidou.
Eli Winter Trio: Eli Winter is a composer, self-taught guitarist, essayist, and Houston native. His music synthesizes aspects of folk, rock, jazz, and devotional music, maintaining a waggish disregard for genre constraints emblematic of Chicago, his adopted hometown. His new album, A Trick of the Light, is an elegantly crafted and vibrant collection that finds the bandleader at the height of his powers. His trio features Chicago improvisers Sam Wagster of Fruit Bats (pedal steel guitar) and Tyler Damon of Circuit des Yeux (drums). His concert history spans prestigious music festivals like Primavera Sound and Big Ears, pristine listening rooms, museums, university chapels, laundromat bars, and small rooms in shotgun houses.
Forced Fun: Local supergroup of triangle rockers includes Taylor Holenbeck (heartscape landbreak, Des Ark), Dave Cantwell (Pasha Detecto, Blab School, Tapes on Ten, Teeth of England), and Nate Tarr (Paint Work, Hot Sleepers, Woodear, Uwharria). The fun music Forced Fun brings is nowhere near forced - it’s a vibrant mix of late 90s indie rock post-punk. Their album, somewhere over the painbow, was released in July 2025 and been on WXDU’s heavy rotation this past year.
Little Black Egg: In 2012, Georgia Hubley of Yo La Tengo recorded a one-sided 12” of beautiful, haunting electric guitar works under the name 'Little Black Egg'. Since then, she’s done the occasional performance in that style, playing atmospheric improvisational electric guitar - sometimes solo and sometimes augmented by other musicians - including her bandmates in Yo La Tengo.
Milo Aukerman: Milo Aukerman is a founding member and vocalist of the Descendents, an American punk rock band formed in 1978 in Manhattan Beach, California. The Descendents are considered one of the pioneers of punk, releasing influential early records like Milo Goes to College (1982). They wrote songs about suburbia, growing up, and drinking lots of coffee. Their long-standing lineup consists of Aukerman, Stephen Egerton, Karl Alvarez, and Bill Stevenson. RebUke was created by Aukerman in 2020 as a politically focused ukulele 3-song 45. The songs examined the current political state of the United States and the feeling of outrage & uncertainty that has only intensified over the years. Aukerman’s solo Brickside set will feature acoustic Descendents songs, RebUke and ukulele covers.
Mirah: Mirah first emerged from the flourishing late 90’s Pacific Northwest music scene with the release of her debut LP You Think It's Like This But Really It's Like This. Co-produced by Phil Elverum (Microphones), the album immediately established her as a generational songwriting talent and her passion for recording and producing, initially sparked by her collaborations with Phil, continues to glow to this day. This first album's influence has echoed down to the present day, "shaping the aesthetic of bedroom pop" (NPR). Her most recent album, Dedication, was released in February on Double Double Whammy.
sunshy: sunshy is a Chicago-based shoegaze band formed in college by Wesley Park and Sascha Deng. Noisy, mounting guitar riffs are imbued with glimmering vocals and electronic injections that give their sound a wide appeal, inspired by the likes of Number Girl, Faye Wong, and My Bloody Valentine. Having released their full-length album I don’t care what comes next in 2024, sunshy spent 2025 touring the U.S. and playing alongside the likes of Alison’s Halo (whose song "Sunshy" is the band's namesake), The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart, and Chapterhouse.
Poison Skull: Most recent iteration of industrial electronics by Slex Awing. Bio-mechanic rhythms by way of metallic percussion and visceral synths and noise. Debut released available on new imprint Nerve Kink. Based in Raleigh, NC. Co-founder of New Body Tapes, currently operating Nerve Kink. Previous Duke Coffeehouse performances under aliases Floor Model and Drippy Inputs.
Taraneh: Taraneh is the punk band of Taraneh Azar, a New York City-based musician, journalist, and visual artist. Taraneh’s late-2025 album Unobsession is deeply cathartic and wholly personal, with vocals oscillating between a whisper and a yell, delicately engulfed in the reverberating, spinning guitar of Ben Arauz, bass lines of Adam Sosnicki, and drumming of Pete Sustarsic. Taraneh is “eternally located in the middle of nowhere,” and songs like "New Age Prayer" and "Spell" take us there too. Her collaborators include Evanora Unlimited on the electro-punk explosion Artificial, and LUCY (Cooper B. Handy) on the ethereal and melodic Reckoning. Additionally, Taraneh’s work as an investigative journalist has appeared on NBC News, USA Today, Dazed, and more.
The panel will begin at 7 p.m. and will be an opportunity to discuss multidisciplinary creative practices — focusing specifically on the intersections of literature, sound, and music. The panel will be a conversation between Professor Maya Kronfeld, Emma Geiger, David Grubbs, Sam Wagster, Tyler Damon and Eli Winter, moderated by R Morris Levine.
Maya Kronfeld: Maya Kronfeld is Assistant Professor of Theory in the Literature Program at Duke University, with secondary appointments in the Philosophy Department and the Music Department. After completing her PhD in Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley, Kronfeld was the Cotsen Fellow in the Princeton Society of Fellows. Her book project, Spontaneous Form: Philosophy, Literature, Jazz integrates studies of literary Romanticism and Modernism with Kantian and post-Kantian approaches to the philosophy of mind and Black Music Studies. Her work appears in Radical Philosophy, Review of English Studies, Jazz & Culture, Philosophy and Literature, Boundary 2, Political Concepts, the Cambridge Guide to Kant and Literary Studies, and is forthcoming in The Cambridge Companion to Philosophy and Literature, The Johns Hopkins Guide to Critical and Cultural Theory, and Toni Morrison in Context. Kronfeld's research areas of focus include Literature and Philosophy, Aesthetics and Literary Theory, Hume, Kant, William James, Bertrand Russell, Rousseau, Victor Hugo, Charles Baudelaire, Edgar Allan Poe, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, English and French Romanticism and Modernism, Jazz and Black Music Studies, African-American Literature, Philosophy of Mind, Critical Epistemology, Cognitive Metaphor Theory. Kronfeld is also a professional pianist who has collaborated with Georgia Anne Muldrow, Taylor Eigsti, Toshi Reagon, Nona Hendryx, Thana Alexa and Sánchez, Nicole Mitchell and Christian McBride, among others, and lent her skills to drummer-led projects by Justin Brown, Blaque Dynamite, Nikki Glaspie and Thomas Pridgen. She is piano faculty at the Stanford Jazz Workshop, and performed most recently at the Newport and Monterey Jazz Festivals. She played keyboards on Nicole Zuraitis’ 2024 Grammy-Winning Album, and her keyboard work featured on Taylor Eigsti's Plot Armor, which won the 2025 Grammy for Best Contemporary Instrumental Album.
Emma Geiger: Emma Geiger is a photographic artist, filmmaker, and musician working with natural materials and analog processes from Hopkinton, New Hampshire. After earning an MFA in Experimental and Documentary Art from Duke University in 2022, she began performing and releasing folk music, her first EP, 'Haven' in 2022, and 'Reverse Bloom' in 2024. Inspired by the rich folk arts community in North Carolina where she now lives, she began incorporating craft into her practice, such as natural dyeing and knitting with raw wool. In 2025 she was awarded the Cassilhaus Biannual Travel Fellowship for her documentary project exploring her family’s ancestral connection to Iceland. While spending time on her family's farm, and at a residency in Skagaströnd, she worked with 16mm film, created phytograms with plants, seaweed, and wool, dyed fabric for a quilt with lupine, rhubarb root, and lichen, and a began work on a book of 35mm photographs. The work created during the fellowship will be shown in Durham, North Carolina at the Center for Documentary Studies in June, 2026.
Sam Wagster: Based in Chicago, Sam Wagster is a pedal-steel guitarist and multi-instrumentalist working across various genres from experimental to Americana. Mute Duo, his long-standing collaboration with drummer/percussionist Skyler Rowe, has released recordings on American Dreams and Astral Editions and toured extensively. He also has numerous solo/ambient pedal steel recordings and has opened shows for Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, Superwolves, and Julie Byrne. As a sideman, he has recorded and toured with Eli Winter, The Cairo Gang, AZITA, and Fruit Bats.
Tyler Damon: Tyler Damon (b. 1987, Cincinnati, Ohio) is a drummer, improviser and educator. He currently resides in Chicago, Illinois. In addition to solo work, Tyler’s contemporary outfits include a longtime duo with saxophonist Dave Rempis, as well as a quartet alongside Rempis, Jason Adasiewicz and Joshua Abrams. He is found frequently in duet with tenor saxophonist Gerrit Hatcher, expanded in trio with bassist Andrew Scott Young. Where Were We, a triad completed by Erez Dessel on keys and Beth McDonald on tuba and electronics, was formed in 2023. Another recent Chicago trio, featuring Paul Giallorenzo and Caroline Jesalva, came to fruition in 2025. Tyler is also often seen and heard accompanying guitarist Eli Winter in the company of Sam Wagster on pedal steel.
More Info:
Instagram: @dukecoffeehouse, @wxdu
Email: duucoffeehouse@duke.edu