About Us

Pittsburgh Sound Preserve is a community music organization dedicated to finding, promoting, and celebrating creative music in Pittsburgh. Among our activities are the following:

  • A fortnightly community improvisation series, presented every other Monday at Bantha Tea Bar.

  • An every-other-monthly zine that features pieces by Pittsburgh creatives, available in print and online.

  • An up-to-date calendar of unusual music in Pittsburgh.

Pittsburgh Sound Preserve is a soon-to-be nonprofit. For more on how to support our mission, contact us here.

Who We Are

tre Seguritan Abalos – Director of Communications

Trē Seguritan Abalos (“tree”) is a Filipina-American sound artist improvising with flutes, field recordings, and text. From San Jose, CA, Trē plays in live ambient duo GLO-TREE with GNM / Gloria Mwarage (guitar) as well as projects with JADED, Pittsburgh Sound + Image, electronic musicians BusCrates, Hellcat Sneer, Adam Kantz, David Bernabo, Herman Pearl / Soy Sos, and the Dylan Zeh quartet playing music of Sam Rivers. Trē also curates unmade place, a series of live improvised sound + text experiments at The Big Idea Bookstore, Abolition Coffee, Telephone.

Mai Khôi – Director of Public Relations

Mai Khoi is a Vietnamese singer, artist, and activist. She rose to stardom in 2010 after winning the Vietnam Television song and album of the year awards. After growing increasingly uncomfortable submitting her work to government censors, she nominated herself for the National Assembly a pro-democracy platform. Her campaign sparked a nationwide debate about political participation and culminated in a meeting with Barack Obama in 2016. Today, she leads efforts to promote freedom of artistic expression in Vietnam for which she was awarded the Vaclav Havel International Prize for Creative Dissent and the Roosevelt Four Freedoms Award for Freedom of Speech.

Mark Micchelli – Executive Director

Mark Micchelli is a pianist, composer, improvisor, technologist, scholar, and educator based in Pittsburgh, PA. He can be found playing all types of music, including contemporary classical, experimental pop, straight-ahead jazz, progressive Latin music, and lots in between. Mark serves as musical director and arranger for Mai Khôi’s stage show Bad Activist, and is in a long-running piano+electronics duo called Teeth and Metals alongside electronicist Alex Lough. Mark is currently completing his PhD at the University of Pittsburgh, where he splits his time between the Jazz Studies and Composition/Theory departments.

Eli Namay – Program Coordinator

Bassist and organizer Eli Namay is from a Syrian / Lebanese immigrant community in Charleston, WV. After studying music at Columbia College (2008-13), along with teaching music, Eli worked in various creative and heritage music scenes in Chicago and continues to be a regular in the free jazz / improvised music community there. He has also been deeply involved with community organizing around prison and police abolition, Medicare for All, labor issues, and more. Now located in Pittsburgh, Eli is a graduate student worker at Pitt studying the creation and destruction of cultural space through both a large scale economic, and small scale emotional / behavioral lens.

Jay Rauch – Production Coordinator

Jay Rauch is in no particular order: a Pittsburgher-Seattlite-Bostonian (pittsboseattlurgheronian), teacher, improviser, reader of science fiction, partner of Michaela, scholarly writer, patcher of noisy electronics, bassoonist, discoverer of the Super Snorkel, interlocutor with artists of all mediums, cook.

Jay is pursuing a Ph.D. in composition and theory at the University of Pittsburgh. He holds an M.M. in composition from the University of Washington and a B.M. in composition and theory from Boston University.