The Wire Reviews: TOPOS Music Festival

TOPOS
EMPAC, Troy, US

On a balmy Thursday evening, TOPOS, the inaugural event exploring the work of EMPAC’s artists-in-residence and associated projects, comes to life in Troy, New York, a sleepy upstate city in a region known for other institutional cultural touchstones such as MASS MoCA, Bard College and Dia Beacon. While the spectacularly advanced production and performance venue EMPAC has been around since 2008, and has supported the work of artists such as Pauline Oliveros and Maryanne Amacher, it has also maintained a certain mystery, an anomalous spaceship hovering above the working class town. With TOPOS, curator Amadeus Julian Regucera carefully repositions the institution in its surroundings while simultaneously claiming the conceptual space of the studio, creating confluent links between the natural, institutional and political roads that lead there.

For example, cosmic project band Lazyhorse reanimate archetypes of early Americana, slipping into the uncanny valleys through which songs travel as they transform through time and diaspora. Solemnly melodic and often off-kilter, the band occasionally erupt into post-rock freakouts that dissipate into midnight country air along with the sounds of synth and lap steel. The performance is part of an ongoing residency by The Living Earth Show – Travis Andrews and Andy Meyerson – who invited collaborators Raven Chacon, Mali Obomsawin, Steve Hammond and vocalist Miriam Elhajli. All of the instruments, including voice, are marked by profound decay which echoes through the structure and acoustics of the venue, an abandoned gasholder circular brick building in Troy, parts of which have begun to fall away.

Elhajli’s operatic echoes resound with the mantras of King Britt's polyvocal collaboration with Myles Green-Ortiz and Suzi Analogue entitled Liberation Meditations: a call, a hypnotic jam echoing alongside speeches by figures such as James Baldwin and Audre Lorde. The piece haunts the room like a radio transmission, touching down in different points. Presiding above is a slowly rotating disco ball that reflects and refracts the light, a dream machine drawing the gaze upwards.

Even slower are the transcendent, newly commissioned works The Rose Dialogues & Interludes by Sarah Davachi, along with cellist Lucy Railton and violists Eyvind Kang and Whitney Johnson, which packs a lot of intent into an impossibly dense moment stretched out into 90 minutes using the canon – a compositional technique in which a musical element is echoed by a series of retorts stuck in an endless loop. In conversation with Regucera, Davachi invites the audience to consider the politics of decay and the clarity that these extended moments bring.

The final frame comes in the form of an eight channel audio and light performance of lannis Xenakis's Persepolis by Micah Silver, the first music curator of EMPAC. Until now, EMPAC has maintained a somewhat hermetic existence in the avant garde world, focusing on production rather than dissemination, despite its exuberant performance halls. Persepolis is a pivotal piece that captured the cultural vibrancy of Iran when it was first presented in 1971 under the Shah's rule, an era that came to an end with the 1979 revolution. EMPAC, nestled in a cluster of Roman-revival towns in Upstate New York, is feeling the crushing weight of the present, which anticipates the downfall of other spheres: the United States, and with it, the mysterious and hermetic art world that sustained us thus far. Overwhelming at times, its suspended moments allow for levity and reflection, a reminder that liberation awaits if we only dare to leave the decaying empire at our feet and dream.

—Xenia Benivolski