Bitterviper is the quartet of Nikos Veliotis (cello), Taku Unami (synthesizer), Sarah Hennies (percussion), and David Grubbs (guitar, piano), four individuals who separately are responsible for some of the most striking and wildly idiosyncratic music of the past couple of decades—not to mention the duo collaborations between Grubbs and Unami (the albums Comet Meta and Failed Celestial Creatures) and Veliotis and Grubbs (The Harmless Dust).

David Grubbs is Distinguished Professor of Music at Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. His books include Good night the pleasure was ours and Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording. Grubbs was a member of Gastr del Sol, Bastro, and Squirrel Bait, and has performed with Tony Conrad, Pauline Oliveros, Luc Ferrari, Will Oldham, Loren Connors, Jan St. Werner, the Red Krayola, and many others. 

Sarah Hennies is a composer and percussionist based in upstate New York whose work is concerned with a variety of musical, sociopolitical, and psychological issues including queer & trans identity, psychoacoustics, and the social and neurological conditions underlying creative thought. She is primarily a composer of acoustic chamber music, but is also active in improvisation, film, and performance art. She is the recipient of a 2024 United States Artists Fellowship, a 2019 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award, a 2016 fellowship in music/sound from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and was a participant in the 2024 Whitney Biennial. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at Bard College.

Taku Unami’s work is influenced by science fiction, supernatural horror and weird fiction. He’s the composer of film scores for directors including Isao Okishima and Takeshi Furusawa, was half (with Toshiya Tsunoda) of the group Wovenland, is one-third of the group Hontatedori, and has collaborated with, among others, Annette Krebs, Radu Malfatti, Jean-Luc Guionnet, Jarrod Fowler, and Graham Lambkin.

Nikos Veliotis founded Mohammad with ILIOS and Coti K. (renamed MMMD in 2015). The project has fifteen releases to date on Antifrost, PAN, Improved Sequence, and Modal Analysis. In the 1990s he developed an experimental practice, exploring image and sound, mainly through the cello (which he destroyed during the notorious “Cello Powder” intermedia performance in Glasgow in March 2009); he also performed in numerous groups, most notably CRANC (with Angharad and Rhodri Davies) and Looper (with Ingar Zach and Martin Küchen).