Pitchfork reviews Laurel Halo's Dust, album produced at EMPAC

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"On her third album for Hyperdub, Laurel Halo continues to resist classification and deflect interpretation by treating the human voice like a synthetic material to be molded and shattered."

Recorded at EMPAC in 2015, the full Pitchfork review of Laurel Halo's Dust, is available now.

New York Times profiles Laurel Halo and her new EMPAC-produced record

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"...Breaking up smooth surfaces and scuffing up perfection are some of Ms. Halo’s objectives in her own work. 'Laurel’s music is off-kilter,' said Argeo Ascani, the curator at the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in upstate New York, where Ms. Halo took part in a two-week residency in 2015. 'It’s always a step off, running in a parallel world where the rules are slightly different.'..."

The Fader interviews Laurel Halo about her new EMPAC-produced record, Dust

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"... Working between a black box space and a concert hall, with percussion, piano, and a digital mixer, she spent time recording a wide-ranging palette of zany sounds, making acoustic noises sound synthetic, and vice versa. Those freewheeling sonic experiments formed the psychedelic and adventurous basis of Dust. Dazzling synth and saxophone melodies and incongruous samples zig-zag across this album’s surface..."

EMPAC announces Summer 2017 season

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This summer, the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) will present a special season of programming to coincide with Rensselaer’s inaugural Summer Arch semester. In addition to the production residencies and research projects that are regularly conducted at the center throughout the summer, the season will be punctuated by a number of concerts, film screenings, theater performances, and workshops.

Spring 2017

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JAN 27–28, 2017 — Tesseract

Saxophonist John Zorn releases new album of live EMPAC performance

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In 2012, avant-garde jazz saxophonist John Zorn performed a rare solo set in EMPAC's Studio 2. Zorn's label Tzadik Records has now released an album-length recording of the show, titled The Classic Guide to Strategy Vol. 4. This is the fourth and penultimate installation in a series of solo records that Zorn began in 1983. Filled with wit, drama, playfulness and intensity, the composer's legendary virtuosity and powerful improvisational logic is on full display.