10/25/2025
Stnic will be one of two local support acts for Jon Mueller’s Iowa City return in just a few short Fridays.
Stnic — (pronounced ‘Saint-Nic’, or ‘Satan-ic) — is an experimental music project from Iowa City, IA. Based in a regular practice of free improvisation, they defy categorization by choosing to play without predetermined styles or goals; there is a constant sense of searching shared by the performers and audience. Embracing absurdity, their music carries elements of noise and postmodern collage while maintaining, or attempting to maintain, sincerity of expression. They emphasize the creative documentation of their process, recording all their sessions on tape and experimenting with different forms of media and production.
Sitting in a nest of splitter cables and extension chords, Patrick O’Connor outputs various toy keyboards, drum machines, a sampler, and numerous media players through a 4-track recorder.
Meanwhile, Levi Brown wrestles with a combination of drums, found percussion, and other acoustic instruments in a never-ending rotation of untested sounds.
Stnic’s secret weapon really-cool-rock is the voice of Jordan Decker, projected through an antique microphone. He tells stories, improvises poems, and utters non-sense, or, I should say, stuff that only makes sense to you.
The most recent addition to the group is Charlotte Leung on saxophone and other wind-blown instruments, fed through a pedalboard and creating varied sounds ranging from squawks and wails to melodies and dense soundscapes.
Together they conjure the weird and wonderful from the ether, like radio-movies from, not just the past, but the deep-sleep-dreams of some whack-o from those days.
