line upon line presents 2026 Austin Winter Music Festival

Hosted by line upon line January 4th, 6th, 8th and 9th

Thanks to: Rea Charitable Trust, Texas Commission on the Arts and You All!

January 8th

Jessy Eubanks is a singer/songwriter, pianist, composer, and music educator. Originally from Northern Virginia, she moved to Austin to pursue a Bachelor of Music (composition emphasis, voice principal) from the University of Texas at Austin. Since graduating, her focus has been on songwriting and playing piano. As a pianist, she plays for events such as wedding ceremonies, private parties, and at St. David’s Episcopal Church with the Bethell Family Singers, where she also directs the children’s choir. As a songwriter, she performs around the Austin area as a solo artist and with a backing band. Her melancholy, indie-folk style explores themes of love, being a woman, and family connections. She runs an independent music studio in South Austin where she teaches piano, voice, and composition.

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Natacha Diels’ work blends choreographed movement, video animation, instrumental practice, and cynical play to construct worlds that are equal parts wonder and unease. Rooted in collage, collaboration, and the transformation of life into ritual, her compositions forge a poetic logic all their own. Critics have described her music as “brilliant, bananas in the best sense, elegant, eloquent, and loopy” (Steve Smith Night After Night); “a tour de force of reckless imagination and confident craft” (Musical America); “a fairy tale for a fractured world” (Music We Care About), and “the liveliest music of the evening” (LA Review of Books). She is a founding member of Ensemble Pamplemousse (est. 2003), a collective of composer-performers bent on reconfiguring the concert experience, and of WENDY (est. 2024), a trio making continuous sets of experimental theatre that are tender, eerie, and just slightly unstable. Recent projects include Ways to Pass the Day, an opera for two rocks and a mountain, created for Festival Nueva Ópera Buenos Aires (2024); Everything Everywhere, a multimedia spectacle that inquisits the excess of all, in collaboration with Ensemble Adapter (2025); Follow Unfollow, a headphone opera questioning the comfort of comfort— manifested through seductive, beautiful jails— for Ensemble Contrechamps (Festival Archipel, 2025); Somewhere Beautiful, a solo performance in three acts that drifts from life to death, through mechanical rigor and golden absurdity (2022–24); and Beautiful Trouble, an opera for JACK Quartet that assembles fractured moments into a kaleidoscopic meditation on joy, despair, and the human condition (2019–24). Her debut solo album—equal parts confessional and sonic hallucination—was released on Carrier Records in August 2025.

Am I Alive is a new set for theremin-driven snare drum, dismembered metronomes, and perpetually accumulating nonsense phrases that gradually coalesce into crystalline sense. Half-remembered conversations with my machine friends form the work’s text, constructing elaborate stories built of the forever narrowing gap between living (as person) and functioning (as machine). The piece flickers between intimacy and circuitry, drone and chaos, beauty and dissonance, finding solace in its own distorted reflections.

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The Alex Coke & Carl Michel Sextet is a collaborative sextet featuring tenor sax/flute(Alex Coke), guitar (Carl Michel), concert harp (Elaine Barber), pedal steel (Bob Hoffnar), vibes (Carolyn Trowbridge) and upright bass (Dana Wygmans). The sextet explores the boundaries of jazz, classical, new music, folk, improvisation and extended techniques. They have three recordings out on PlayOn Records, “The Emissary” produced during the summer of 2021 and “Emergence” released in 2023. and “Situation,” released in January 2025. The recordings feature original compositions by members of the sextet along with compositions by John Coltrane, Paul Motian, Hildegard, Huddie Ledbetter, Valentin Silvestrov, Carla Bley, Wayne Shorter, Saint-Saëns and Respighi