Before she was playing bass with Marco Benevento and leading her own experimental outfit, Karina Rykman can trace her musical trajectory back to The White Stripes. “A friend in elementary school put an acoustic guitar in my lap and taught me ‘Seven Nation Army,’” she recalls, sitting in Relix’s Manhattan office. “Then, the next 10-plus years of my life have been completely obsessed with music: learning and transcribing solos and riffs, and just trying to surround myself with the best musicians and learn from people.” Rykman spent her early teens playing punk around her native New York City and swindling her high-school jazz band into playing Frank Zappa and Billy Cobham tunes. Then, she switched to bass and landed at Tomato’s House of Rock, an after-school music program where she met future pal Dave Dreiwitz. In Rykman’s eyes, the real watershed moment came when Dreiwitz ran into a scheduling conflict and asked her to fill in for him in Marco Benevento’s band. “It was the most incredible time of my life,” she grins. “I had such a blast, and those three gigs turned into a whole lot more.” Now, Rykman is Benevento’s permanent bassist. (After all, Dreiwitz is busy enough touring with Joe Russo’s Almost Dead and Ween.) And when she isn’t holding down the low-end in the keyboardist’s power trio, she’s busy getting the Karina Rykman Experiment off the ground. Rykman’s new, allimprov band features her NYU pals Adam November and Chris Corsico, and she’s recently put the skill set she’s sharpened in a parallel universe as the general manager for New York concert promoters Rocks Off to good use, weaving in special guests like Nels Cline, Robert Walter, Skerik and Dave Harrington, among others, into her sets. A recent date at Brooklyn, N.Y’s The Bell House even boasted both Skerik and Cline. In her own words: “If you want to hear some trippedout, psychedelic, improvisational music from a 24 year old and her friends with some legendary musicians sitting in, then it’s up for public consumption.”