The Wire Reviews: TOPOS Music Festival 2026

TOPOS
Experimental Music and Performing Arts Center, Troy, US

For a music gathering, this second TOPOS festival in Troy, New York, is heavy on lectures. That's perhaps fitting for the facilities on the upstate campus of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and indeed most of those presentations are performative, even musical.

Day one is about history. Not musical history so much as the African history from which centuries of Western music have arisen, and from the perspective of writer and broadcaster Edward George. His freewheeling opening monologue touches on racial imperialism, Bo Diddley, Richard Pryor and the connections between Duke Ellington and disco. Then his film Black Atlas traces the transatlantic slave trade through archival images (with a soundtrack by Paul Abbott, Crystabel Efemena Riley and Seymour Wright). Following the screening, George discusses the film in a conversation with poet Fred Moten (who sadly didn't perform himself).

George opens day two with a live podcast recording focusing on reggae drum legend Sly Dunbar, who died in January. Later that evening, the percussion and electronics duo IMA (Amma Ateria and Nava Dunkelman) provide the first musical performance. The room resounds with dense reverberation and spoken word, encompassing and massively present under undulating white and blue lights. With deep, moaning bass and whispers and static overhead, the sound is more about top/bottom than left/right. Immersive, submersive and structured, it's a little like being underwater: music for sophisticated fish.

The third evening begins with the duo of Vijay lyer and Wadada Leo Smith. From the first notes in the piano's lower register, the large theatre sounds stunning, warm and full. Smith leans deep into the low microphone and plays soft melodies. His playing drips with compassion and concern. lyer moves from the Steinway to a Fender Rhodes, initially so delicately that it sounds like a haunted music box. With outboard electronics, he reaches into something like the highest registers of a pipe organ. They play music for the church we deeply need. At length they build into a trumpet concerto in which the orchestra is layers of white noise, disembodied voices, cavernous echoes and street sounds.

Miho Hatori is probably still best known as half of Cibo Matto, and her performance of Paris Syndrome recalls their 1999 album Stereo Type A. It's another lecture in a sense, although rich with electronics and tuba, about the institutions and contracts built around love and sex, pushing through the PA at considerable volume, given dimension through the theatre's Ambisonic system.

The final day begins with a lunchtime barbecue followed by two concerts by area groups. The Rock City Falls Trio play appealing, open-form improv for harp, double bass and drums, occasionally drifting into amplified dissonance. The accordion/clarinet duo Sun Dogs use Frippy loops and a Disklavier piano to craft engaging, thick abstractions. Then George is back, working the turntables, telling stories, dropping names and needles alongside drummer Abbott laying stuttered staccato with a strong sense of space. By the penultimate set, having George on 40 per cent of the programme proves a bit much.

TOPOS concludes with a bang: The Silent Light's live score to Teinosuke Kinugasa's 1926 Japanese silent film A Page Of Madness. This harrowing, hallucinatory film is given a melodic, pounding, ambient, riff-heavy soundtrack by the duo. When an onscreen riot erupts in the asylum, it becomes a mosh pit spanning a century. The unspoken star of the fest, though, is the building itself. Each of the four acoustically pristine spaces in the 2008 hall seems to take pains to meet the musicians' intentions, making listening a pleasure.

—Kurt Gottschalk