The three-day festival gathers a broad cross-section of composers associated with the legendary and now defunct Mills College Music Department for a series of performances driven by questions around legacy, institutional memory, and creative regeneration. The festival is named after famed musician “Blue” Gene Tyranny’s Seven Years of Crazy Love, a compilation featuring musicians from the Mills College community released in the late seventies.

Participating artists have been directed towards recordings from the 7000+ item audio archive at the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills, and invited to create new works inspired by their finds and/or create new realizations of these historic compositions.

With the loss of institutional support at Mills comes an opportunity to disentangle the values and aesthetics of individual artists from those of the institution. New space opens to reimagine what creative community looks like and how it is organized, and this festival aims to take a step in that direction. One lesson we have learned from our participation in the Mills music community is the value of experimentation for its own sake. At the very least, we aim to honor this essential tradition.

The festival is curated and organized by Sally Decker, Brendan Glasson, Briana Marela, Michelle Moeller, Matt Robidoux, and Mitch Stahlmann in collaboration with Laetitia Sonami, who realized a version of this project in her final seminar at Mills.