Ptarmigan existed as a project space in Vallila from 2009-2011 and a mobile curatorial/creative platform until 2014. We no longer exist as an organised collective, but this website will continue to serve as an archive of the activities produced as/at Ptarmigan during these years.
Brett Sroka is a composer and sound artist for film, dance, installation and his own ensembles in which he plays trombone and laptop. He has released five records of original music, performed at BAMcafe, the Sonic Circuits Festival, the Guggenheim Museum and the Teatro Fondamenta Nueve in Venice, Italy and scored a variety of films that have appeared at festivals in Maine, Texas, Paris, Hamburg and Beijing.
After graduating from Manhattan School of Music, Sroka made his first record, Hearsay, for the Fresh Sound-New Talent label, with classmates Jason Moran and Eric Harland. He has led the minimal, electro-acoustic trio Ergo on three releases, most recently If Not Inertia from Cuneiform Records, with guest Mary Halvorson. Cherubim, a melody/noise/drone duo with guitarist Yuko Pepe, has just released their debut record with the Zeromoon label. Sroka has received grants from the Queens Council on the Arts, the Finlandia Foundation, twice been a fellow at the I-Park Foundation, a visiting artist at the University of Pennsylvania and the Institute of Electronic Arts at Alfred University. While in residence last past spring at the Vilnius Academy of Art - Nida Art Colony in Lithuania, he completed a new suite for Ergo which will be released in 2015 and developed Sine Qua Non, a performance/sound installation, which was premiered at Roulette in Brooklyn, NY in January of 2014.
