Lead artist Miho Hatori develops Paris Syndrome, an EMPAC commission and multimedia performance installation that reimagines a rare psychological condition as a story from the near future, drawing audiences into a subtly changing state of perception.

As a companion to his TOPOS presentation The Strangeness of Jazz, Edward George, on turntables, joins UK-based drummer, composer, and writer Paul Abbott for The Strangeness of Drumming, an improvised duo performance to expand upon Abbott’s 2025 experimental album, Slip.

At the center of Slip is Abbott’s long-developing acoustic-digital hybrid drum system, which combines live percussion with synthetic and processed sound in a relationship that is both intimate and unstable. Integrating Abbott’s research into rhythm and his own engagement with the music of D’Angelo, George stretches the continuum of inquiry around drumming across jazz, improvised music, hip-hop, and R&B.

Through turntables, voice, drums, electronics, samples, and sonic fragments, George and Abbott explore overlapping temporalities, rhythms, and ways of feeling groove. Mining archives, not to preserve them, but to recombine and recontextualize them, the duo points toward new sonic futurities. What happens when rhythm becomes a method of historical inquiry? What new forms of listening emerge when groove is treated as both memory and speculation?

The result is a dense and exhilarating dialogue in which intellectual rigor is continually reshaped through improvisation, pressure, repetition, and the liberatory possibilities of sound and rhythm.

Join us after the performance for a reception in Evelyn's café.

Founded on principles of collectivity, experimentation, and deep interdisciplinary collaboration, Improv Spaces fosters community through risk-taking performance and creative exchange. The organization is a vital platform for musicians across New York’s Capital and Saratoga regions, supporting improvisation as both an artistic practice and a social form. 

For TOPOS 2026, Improv Spaces presents two ensembles working at the intersection of experimental music, jazz, and exploratory sound practice: Rock City Falls Trio and Sun Dogs.

Rock City Falls Trio is Alex Chang (harp), Jason Handron (bass), and Adam Forman (drums). The trio integrates jazz language, classical technique, experimental sound practices, and indie-influenced atmospheres into a hybrid musical voice. Moving between composed structures and open improvisation, they emphasize collaborative listening, textural exploration, and cross-genre expression.

Sun Dogs, the sci-fi jazz duo of Dominique Vuvan (accordion, electronics) and Adam Tinkle (woodwinds, electronics), approaches improvisation through speculative and immersive sonic worlds. Vuvan is a psychologist whose research focuses on the neuroscience of music. Tinkle is a multi-instrumentalist and multimedia artist. Together in Sun Dogs, they explore the outer reaches of music. Their debut album, The Solstice Concert, is a semi-improvisational suite of soundscapes, harmonic territories, and synthesizer textures, where hypnotic moon bells, fractured field recordings, and shifting tonal environments open spaces for both play and deep listening.

Their back-to-back sets ask us: How can improvisation create new ways of listening, relating, and imagining together?

Breathing new life into silent cinema, The Silent Light—Michael Formanski (guitar, electronics) and Matt Hardy (drums)—crafts live scores inspired by black metal, doom metal, and experimental sound, reframing classic films through overwhelming sonic intensity.

TOPOS presents the duo’s live soundtrack to Japanese director Teinosuke Kinugasa’s 1926 silent masterpiece A Page of Madness. An unsettling story of a family torn apart by violence and mental illness, Kinugasa’s feverish and visually radical film—renowned for its superimpositions, stark lighting, close-ups, quick pans, distorted perspectives, and dreamlike sequences—remains one of the defining works of avant-garde silent cinema.

Unlike many silent films, surviving prints of A Page of Madness contain no intertitles, and contemporary audiences no longer experience the live benshi narration that originally accompanied screenings in 1926. That absence opens a space for sound itself to take on a narrative role. The Silent Light’s vigorous and muscular score operates not as accompaniment, but as a destabilizing and distinctly contemporary psychological force—moving alongside the film like a spectral presence haunting both the onscreen world and the theater itself.

As image and sound collide in parallel dissonance, subjective and objective realities begin to unravel. What emerges is both brutal and deeply sensitive: A disquieting and exhilarating meditation on madness, memory, and perception.

Join us before the performance for a reception in Evelyn's café starting at 5PM.

Following the success of her multimedia project Salon Mondialité, musician and artist Miho Hatori returns with the world premiere of Paris Syndrome, an EMPAC-commissioned performance created with Michiko Ogawa (shô) and Dan Peck (tuba).

Driven by live sound and moving image, the work reimagines the rare psychological condition known as “Paris Syndrome” as a speculative story from the near future. The condition—most often associated with Japanese visitors to Paris—describes a state of psychological disorientation that occurs when lived experience fails to align with expectation.

In Paris Syndrome, the audience is seated within a shifting field of sound, voice, and image, physically encountering how perception—often unconscious or habitual—is constructed, reinforced, and destabilized. As boundaries between body, memory, and image begin to dissolve, the performance moves between humor, estrangement, and quiet unease.

Both intimate and cinematic, Paris Syndrome asks: What happens when the world no longer appears as you thought you knew it?

Join us in Evelyn's café from 6–9:30PM for snacks and a cash bar. 

Two of creative music’s most heralded luminaries, composer-pianist Vijay Iyer and composer-trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith construct powerful, uncategorizable duets full of subtle emotion, mystery, and spiritual intensity. Their music reveals the improvisational magic of the duo, the expressive individuality of the participants, and the ways that they can, as Smith says, “merge as a single wave, or a single voice.”

Referring to Smith as his “hero, friend, and teacher,” Iyer played in the AACM icon’s Golden Quartet from 2005 through 2012. Their duo, first formed in the crucible of that band, received sweeping praise for their album A Cosmic Rhythm with Each Stroke (ECM, 2016). Nine years later, with Smith in his eighties, the duo returned with their spellbinding 2025 release Defiant Life (ECM).

As Iyer writes in the liner notes to Defiant Life, “This recording session was shaped by our ongoing sorrow and outrage over the past year’s cruelties, but also by our faith in human possibility.” Defiant Life was named one of the best albums of 2025 by various publishers, including The Wire, Stereogum, Magnet, The Boston Globe, and The Arts Fuse, with San Diego Union-Tribune calling it "one of the most contemplative, understated and moving albums of the year."

Join us in Evelyn's café from 6–9:30PM for snacks and a cash bar. 

Filmmaker, writer, broadcaster, and musician Edward George records a live episode of his podcast The Strangeness of Jazz, an ongoing series that explores the historical, philosophical, and sonic dimensions of music through close listening and archival excavation. Blending commentary with extended musical excerpts played in full, the podcast unfolds as both lecture and listening session.  

For TOPOS 2026, George turns his attention to the generative possibilities of the slip—the mistake, stutter, or rhythmic deviation that opens new musical futures. At the center of the program is Jamaican drummer Sly Dunbar, whose dub recordings and subsequent remixes becomes a point of convergence for seemingly contradictory histories of rhythm and temporality.

George begins with a subtle slip in the groove of a 1985 Dunbar recording, tracing its unexpected resonance with the polyrhythms later associated with hip-hop producer J Dilla while also connecting it retrospectively to Milford Graves’s radical explorations of percussion, improvisation, and the body. In counterpoint, George considers the lineage of master timekeepers through whom Dunbar situated himself: Lloyd Knibb in reggae, Al Jackson in soul, and Earl Young in disco—drummers whose grooves fundamentally reshaped bodily movement and musical time.

Dunbar’s music becomes the connective tissue between these traditions: a space where rhythm fractures, stretches, repeats, and reorganizes our perception of time itself. What emerges is a meditation on drums not simply as instruments, but as technologies of memory, history, and embodied consciousness.

Join us in Evelyn's café starting at 7:30PM for snacks and a cash bar. 

IMA is electro-percussion collaboration of Amma Ateria (electronics) and Nava Dunkelman (percussion), who combine noise music, Japanese poetry, and spatialized sound into a visceral and immersive live performance. Through restraint and release, deep drones collide with metallic lightness and bursts of violence, producing expressionistic industrial intensities that move towards moments of unexpected serenity.

Working with extreme precision and dynamic range, IMA pushes silence and density driven to the brink of breakage, allowing fragility and impermanence to surface from within the overwhelming sonic force. Their music asks: What forms of beauty become possible in the aftermath of collapse?

Performed in the 39-channel ambisonic sound environment of EMPAC’s Studio 1, そして花びらはえ、散りゆく And The Petals Burst Into Flames... unfolds as a stark and vibrant meditation on surrender, destruction, and transformation—an attempt to regenerate beauty through the unstable catalysts of pleasure, noise, and dissolution. 

Join us in Evelyn's café from 7:30–9:30PM for snacks and a cash bar. 

This 75 minute session is dedicated to a movement inquiry and experiment through improvised gestures and the sounding body. Using a practice of embodied research that borrows from cellular science, participants are invited to explore senses of closeness between human bodies and land ecologies. What lives within each of them? What does my body sense when moving closely with, not solely across, the land I occupy? How might moving with closeness as a collective help us disrupt uneven systems governing people and land or even find new possibilities for interdependence? The group may engage with a brief text or memory writing in situ and may move or sound as able in the indoor and outdoor space weather permitting. This space is open to everyone. No experience in movement or vocals is required.

Kayva Yang is a performing artist whose movement navigates across visual media, writing, and living material. Her work deals with intimacies between human and land ecologies, which is rooted in embodied research while also draws on memory, science, and archived history. Her most recent projects Lost 40 and Elastic Elm perform choreographed improvisations on public land and on video. Her work has been presented at New York University's Kimmel Center, Intermedia Arts, Minneapolis, and the Southern Theater, Minneapolis. She was a 2020 Laundromat Create Change Fellow and has been supported by the Jerome Foundation and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. She has danced for Jill Sigman, Dustin Maxwell, Pramila Vasudevan, and Dr. Ananya Chatterjea. She holds an M.A. in Arts and Public Policy from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. She produces performances at The Museum of Modern Art.

The combined forces of the RPI Orchestra and Empire State Youth Orchestra's Symphony Orchestra unite to perform Gustav Mahler's epic Symphony no. 1. The program will be led by RPI music faculty Dr. Robert Whalen, and will also include a performance of Edvard Grieg's famous Concerto for Piano and Orchestra by 2025 Concerto Competition winner Armstrong Wang '27.

To round out the program, ESYO Music Director and guest conductor Etienne Abelin will conduct Bedrich Smetana’s evocative “Vltava” or “The Moldau”, a masterful musical depiction of a river and the surrounding countryside and people who depend on it.

This performance will take place at 7:30pm on March 31st in the EMPAC Concert Hall. Admission is free.