Artist and filmmaker Edward George is in residence, researching and writing material for an episode of his podcast The Strangeness of Jazz, which delves into drums, drumming, and the generative possibilities of the musical “mistake.” The podcast covers historical and theoretical context of the subject, drawing from a wide selection of musical examples played in their entirety.

In EMPAC Studio 1–Goodman, renowned violinist and violist Marco Fusi continues his work from a previous residency, recording viola excerpts and pieces by composers Timothy McCormack, Pierluigi Billone, and others, to be published in a volume of contemporary viola and viola d'amore playing from Bärenreiter Verlag.

EMPAC-commissioned project Lazyhorse—The Living Earth Show, Raven Chacon, Mali Obomsawin, Miriam Elhajli, and Steve Hammond—records material for an upcoming record release.

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.

On Saturday, September 5, TOPOS 2026 festival activities begin with a free Community BBQ, catered by Brooks’ BBQ (Oneonta, NY) and open to the public, with Sound House Records of Troy selling and spinning music—a chance for artists and audiences to meet, eat, and keep the conversation going. Vegetarian options will be available.

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.