With Untouchable Bar now sadly closed, we couldn’t turn down the opportunity to host Matt Mottel’s recurring music night in the Lobby at the Ritz on February 10th! This edition will feature Jaap Blonk with a one-night-only band of Hudson Valley musicians – you won’t want to miss it. Matt, local musician, artist, and stroller stroller, is an organizer of music and culture in Newburgh. He’s also, lucky for us, a creative partner on our This is Safe Harbors podcast and forthcoming radio programming, helping to bring Safe Harbors onto the airwaves.

🎫 Tickets available at the door, $10-20 cash donation

Performers:

Jaap Blonk (born 1953 in Woerden, Holland) is a self-taught composer, performer and poet. He went to university for mathematics and musicology but did not finish those studies. In the late 1970s he took up saxophone and started to compose music. A few years later he discovered his potential as a vocal performer, at first in reciting poetry and later on in improvisations and his own compositions. For almost two decades the voice was his main means for the discovery and development of new sounds. From around the year 2000 on Blonk started work with electronics, at first using samples of his own voice, then extending the field to include pure sound synthesis as well as work with analog synthesizers. He took a year off of performing in 2006. As a result, his renewed interest in mathematics made him start a research of the possibilities of algorithmic composition for the creation of music, visual work and poetry. As a vocalist, Jaap Blonk is unique for his powerful stage presence and almost childlike freedom in improvisation, combined with a keen grasp of structure. He has performed around the world, on all continents. With the use of live electronics and interactive visuals the scope and range of his concerts has acquired a considerable extension.

Matt Mottel, local musician, artist and stroller stroller, is an organizer of music and culture in Newburgh. He co-leads Parents in the Avant Garde with his wife, artist Nicole Lattuca, who performed at Chapman Steamer Arts Arts in the Park in June 2026. He programmed the Thursday Music series at UNTOUCHABLE BAR in 2025, operated out of an empty storefront on Broadway in 2023 for a low power FM station 102.1 “Fun on the One” and is the lead practitioner developing the  Safe Harbors Box Office into a Podcast/Radio Station Media Art Studio.

Lea Bertucci is an experimental musician whose works revolve around electronic and spatial extensions of instrument and voice. In addition to her longstanding practice performing with woodwinds, she has created compositions for strings, brass, percussion and other instruments, often incorporating electronics and multichannel sound. With an ear toward site-responsiveness and acoustics, her work has expanded toward installation and non-linear presentations of her music, often staged in hyper-resonant spaces.

Hearn Gadbois is a percussionist/composer, artist/instrument maker who lives in Newburgh NY, previously in the Czech Republic. He started playing congas in funk bands at an early age and his sensibilities evolved through a mess of different hand drums and 1983 saw him living in New York and co-founding the psychedelic band SAQQARA DOGS. He has worked with many notable artists including Yoko Ono, Patti Smith & c & c.

Angel Lau is a percussionist based in Newburgh, NY. While his foundation comes from his classical percussion studies at Purchase College, Angel’s interests in Afro-Peruvian and Brazilian music expanded into different folkloric and modern percussion styles from across the globe. Angel is one of the musicians for “Odeon” by Bessie Award Winner Ephrat Asherie and has toured the US including the Spoleto Festival, Vail Dance Festival, and Fall for Dance to name a few. He is currently a faculty accompanist at Bard College and is in a work-in-progress work by Bessie Award Winner Souleymane Badolo from Burkina Faso. Angel has performed and recorded with artists such as Kala and the Lost Tribe, Wallace Roney Jr., DreHall, Anaïs Maviel, Neil ‘Nail’ Alexander, Birdland Latin Jazz Orchestra, and Kelly Quigley.