EMPAC Announces TOPOS 2025

Troy, NY–EMPAC / the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at RPI and its curatorial program announce the TOPOS Music Festival 2025. Presenting two world premieres of commissioned projects, two new productions grounded in past present and future, one rare screening of a landmark film, and more, festival events gather artists and audiences to sites in the historic city of Troy for unforgettable musical experimentalism charged with late-summer discoveries, celebrations, and wonder.

TOPOS Highlights

Opening Event: August 28 at 7PM, world premiere of Lazyhorse, presented by The Living Earth Show, with Travis Andrews, Raven Chacon, Miriam Elhajli, Steve Hammond, and Andy Meyerson, and Mali Obomsawin, in performance, Troy Gasholder House.

World Premiere: August 29 at 7PM, commissioned new work The Rose Dialogues & Interludes by Sarah Davachi, in concert with Eyvind Kang, Whitney Johnson, and Lucy Railton, EMPAC Concert Hall.

Late Show: August 28 at 9PM, King Britt presents Liberations: A Call with Suzie Analogue and Miles Ortiz-Green, in performance, EMPAC Studio 1—Goodman.

Remount, Festival Finale: August 29 at 9PM & August 30 at 3PM, Persepolis (1971) by Iannis Xenakis realized by Micah Silver, in performance, EMPAC Studio 1—Goodman.

Film Screening: August 30 at 1:30PM, Xenakis Portrait 1971–72, dir. Pierre Andrégui, indoor cinema seating, EMPAC Theater.

Festival Artists

Prolific composer-visual artist Raven Chacon turns away from the gravitas of the art world and returns to one of music’s most immediate forms: the band. With Lazyhorse, Chacon assembles a fearless group of musicians in a presentation with The Living Earth Show to dissect and reimagine Americana in a sprawling mosaic of songs as biting as they are beautiful.

Celebrated composer-performer Sarah Davachi invites listening as deep attention, and her commissioned new work scored for two violas, cello, organ, and electronics emerges from early Western compositional techniques to take shape with unexpected harmonies, haunting melodies, and formal surprises.

Pioneering producer, composer, and performer King Britt is joined by collaborators Suzi Analogue and Myles Ortiz-Green to draw from deep sound archives—historic speeches, interviews, fragments of collective memory—for an improvised, immersive spatial soundscape that will move bodies physically, emotionally, spiritually.

Sound artist and composer Micah Silver reimagines the second of Iannis Xenakis’s large-scale Polytopes in an hour-long performance for the Studio 1 black box venue, where Persepolis becomes a magmatic mass of noise, snaking its way across a multitude of discrete audio channels as if an extreme weather event.

Location & Venues

TOPOS 2025 festival events take place at EMPAC, located at 50 8th Street on the campus of RPI, and at Troy's Gasholder House, a historic site and venue located at 113 Jefferson Street, in Troy, New York.

Phenomenal festival venues at EMPAC, each equipped with advanced technological infrastructure, include a 1,200-seat concert hall, a 250-seat proscenium theater with 56' (17m) wide cinema screen, and a black-box studio space with no fixed seating. Troy’s Gasholder House is a standing-room venue with an estimated audience capacity of 150 for the TOPOS event.

Venue accessibility information 

Ticket Info

TOPOS 2025 includes select free events and an all-access festival pass for purchase. Information on how to buy festival passes will be available on the festival event page.

Special Thanks

TOPOS Music Festival 2025 is made possible by RPI. EMPAC programs are made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature. TOPOS Media Partners are The Wire and Metroland Now. TOPOS Local Partners are Yesfolk and Sound House Records. Special thanks to Stewart’s Shops.

Media Contact

Amadeus Julian Regucera, Curator

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