SOS Lightshow’s Billy Gruber, who regularly provides a visual component to accompany “The Outside Presents.” (Photo via SOS Lightshow, Facebook)
‘The Outside Presents’ experimental sounds in new space
- Published: April 2, 2026
This weekend, those who love or are curious about experimental music will get the chance to hear some new sounds in a very new space: “The Outside Presents,” the experimental music series curated by WYSO 91.3 FM host Evan Miller, will be the first public event held in the community space at WYSO’s new Union Schoolhouse studio.
Currently in its third season, “The Outside Presents” will present its third quarterly offering of the season, “Media as Medium,” on Saturday, April 4, beginning at 7 p.m.; admission is free. Every artist on the bill works with tape — reel-to-reel, cassette or eight-track — bending physical media into new sound.
Miller said he chose WYSO’s new performance space while the Foundry Theater, the series’ usual home, remains closed for repairs following water damage earlier this year. He said he plans to return to the Foundry once it reopens, but for now, the WYSO space offers a reliable alternative.
“There’s plenty of parking here, and it’s easy to find,” he said. “It’s convenient to be able to do everything in-house.”
The space has yet to fully define what it can and will be, Miller added; it has the capability to host shows like “The Outside Presents,” social gatherings or on-air performances with an audience. As for how sound will move through the room, Miller said, that element won’t fully reveal itself until the first sounds hit the air.
“The acoustics are untested,” Miller said. “It’ll be interesting.”
The space also opens up new possibilities for SOS Lightshow’s Billy Gruber, who regularly provides a visual component to accompany “The Outside Presents.” Miller pointed to a built-in camera and screen setup that can be turned back on itself, creating a kind of infinite video feedback loop — an effect that he said Gruber immediately appreciated.
“[Gruber] saw it and said, ‘Oh, that’s perfect. I can work with that,’” Miller said, adding that the exposed brick in the space will also become part of Gruber’s canvas, adding another layer of texture to a show centered on artists who manipulate physical media.
The show’s lineup includes Philadelphia-based ambient artist Rose Actor-Engel, who performs as Apologist and incorporates field recordings and chance operations into layered compositions. Via email this week, Actor-Engel said the “physical restrictions of using tape” extensively in her work create a helpful perimeter in directing the outcome.
“In general, I’m interested in intentionally creating boundaries or rules surrounding how my music gets made, and tape is a really natural way to do that,” Actor-Engel wrote. “For live performance, I am interested in using elements of chance or rules to create different outcomes with the same set of live materials. Over the last few years, I’ve been rolling dice during live sets, and the score determines what decisions I have to make during the set.”
Also on the bill is Oberlin’s Aaron Dilloway, who manipulates eight-track tapes with an intensity Miller described in almost visceral terms.
“He is really something to see; it’s almost like he’s being possessed on stage,” Miller said. “Along with the tapes, he uses weird effects; he’ll hold a contact microphone in his teeth and he’ll be [using a bow on] different things. Nobody does what he does.”
And for the first time since “The Outside Presents” debuted in 2023, the lineup includes a Yellow Springs-based artist, Daniel Rizer. A longtime figure in the Dayton-area noise scene, Rizer has not performed publicly in about a decade.
“I guess I’m bringing him out of retirement,” Miller said with a laugh.
Though he hasn’t been on stage in 10 years, Rizer told the News this week that he hasn’t stepped away from the work in that time.
“I’ve never stopped recording and playing,” he said. “Having a decade to just focus on new approaches and strategies for sound-making with no clear release or performance in mind has been liberating.”
Rizer said his path into noise music began in his youth, rooted in a restless, inborn curiosity. After cutting his teeth on punk and hardcore, he said he “just never wanted to stop going deeper,” digging through mail-order catalogs and magazines, making handwritten lists of artists and labels to seek out.
“I definitely read about noise before I ever heard it,” he said, recalling early encounters with such artists as Merzbow and Masonna in the late 1990s.
It wasn’t until moving to the Miami Valley in 2000 that he found the Dayton music scene and connected with experimental musicians; he credited Matthew Reis, who creates and performs as Developer, for deepening his knowledge by lending him “stacks of CDs,” and later collaborating to make noise together. Rizer said the collaboration was the beginning of a practice that has only deepened in the years since.
“My curiosity, interest and desire to learn more about strange and unusual music has never ended,” he said. “The well is deep and it never runs dry.”
Working primarily with reel-to-reel tape machines, loops and analog synthesis, Rizer builds sound through physical interaction, cutting, splicing and manipulating tape in ways that introduce instability as a core element.
“Working with magnetic tape media to me feels organic, unpredictable and exciting,” he said.
And the results are never the same twice, he said; the age of the tape he’s using, the condition of the equipment or even whether he had “a good day or a bad one” can shift what emerges.
“All of this will drastically alter the results in the end,” he said.
That unpredictability carries forward into performance, where he said gesture becomes part of his sound. Rizer described reaching into the tape path itself: stopping, stuttering, letting loops catch and warp, or stepping back entirely as sounds evolve on their own.
“I love building up a chaotic and layered loop of sounds and then just sitting back and listening to it shift and change without my interaction,” he said. “Improving these layering and looping techniques, adding more percussive sounds and introducing atonal melody via analog synthesizer into my sound is what I have been at the past 10 years.”
He added: “I think this Saturday will sound a bit different than what people may remember, but it should remain familiar.”
Rizer said he’s used to performing live in something like a “small, dark and smoky basement,” where friends and strangers are shoulder-to-shoulder, rather than the brighter, more open room filled with a likely seated audience that the WYSO space will offer. A father now, and less inclined to perform in the party-forward spaces he frequented a decade prior, Rizer said he’s looking forward to having his children attend a noise show in “a space that will be welcoming to them.”
To that end, he said he’s preparing a set that’s “maybe quieter and slower in evolution.”
“But who knows,” he added. “Maybe the sound system will beg me to test it.”
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