Who is the Rhythmanalyst and what is his laboratory? Following on his spring 2023 project Speakers That Speak to You, artist DeForrest Brown Jr. returns to EMPAC to ask: what comes after techno? How do we imagine new models of the music studio and of distribution, and how might these feed back into ways of capturing and assessing the sonic profile of technology today? This program offers a demo and preview of Brown’s new project, Rhythmanalytics, intended to culminate in a new album as well as a book.

Rhythmanalytics finds sound tunneling through space, through the ear, and then linking back to larger infrastructures of post-digital futures. Using the studio space as a meta-instrument, Brown explores non-repetitive rhythms and tonal shifts, probing rhythm as both techno’s primary means and as a way of calibrating the material conditions of production and logistics.

In addition to a live listening session offered during the event, Brown joins music scholar Louis Chude-Sokei in conversation to explore questions raised by Brown’s new project and their shared interests around Black culture, music technology, and discourses of Afrofuturism and posthumanism. A key question in Brown’s new project is sonic compression: of live performance into recording, of dimensional sound into a file, acoustic into digital matter.

The INTERFACE seminar series was created in collaboration with the Office of Research with a mind toward presenting some ideas about the technology and research opportunities that the EMPAC building will provide.

Possible topics include visualization, acoustics, cognitive science, haptics, graphics, etc. So put on your twirly cap and cummon down and join us for a discussion with our amazing Rensselaer professors and their research that is sure to blow your socks off!

Within | Without Limit: Music for Cello is a series of two solo performances from internationally acclaimed musician Charles Curtis. The two programs feature delicate yet visceral works that challenge—and reward—the listener, opening up new musical landscapes both outside and within the work.

The second program takes full advantage of the generous acoustic properties of the Concert Hall while also showcasing repertoire that asks the listener to attend to subtle processes of transformation and speculation. Composer Carolyn Chen’s Rara Avis (2015) draws from the early-17th century piece Woodycock—anonymous in both authorial attribution and in its peculiar evocation of an elusive woodland bird. Éliane Radigue’s Occam V (2012) continues her series of solo and ensemble pieces Occam Ocean, written for individual instrumentalists; each performer’s technique and relationship to their instrument provide the foundation for the musical material. Curtis’s own Unfinished Song (1998), a work for multiple cellos and sine waves, is an immersive, swirling, and contrapuntal work influenced by the harmonic world of alternate tunings, renaissance music, South Asian raga-style improvisation, and the song structures of popular music.

Program

• Woodycock (17th c.)
• Anonymous
• Rara Avis (2015)
• Carolyn Chen
• Occam V (2012)
• Éliane Radigue
• Hélas! et comment (14th c.)
• Guillaume de Machaut
• C’est force, faire (14th c.)
• Machaut
• Unfinished Song (1998)
• Charles Curtis

Within | Without Limit: Music for Cello is a series of two solo performances from internationally acclaimed musician Charles Curtis. The two programs feature delicate yet visceral works that challenge—and reward—the listener, opening up new musical landscapes both outside and within the work.

NALDJORLAK

Composed specifically for Curtis and premiered in 2005, French composer Éliane Radigue’s hour-long Naldjorlak exists at the instrument’s limits—at the threshold of resonance and its disappearance. The result is what Radigue calls, “a wild and frail, versatile and volatile world of sounds” that pierces through to an intense intimacy. Performed in Studio 2, this performance is a rare opportunity to experience this intensity up-close.

Ticket holders are invited to a reception after the performance.

Program

• Naldjorlak (1963)
• Éliane Radigue

In the context of the Ephemeral Organ series, Steffani Jemison revisits a recent performance work combining sculpture, movement, and narration to create a new iteration for video.

Composer and artist Raven Chacon are in residence in EMPAC Studio 2 with San Francisco-based experimental music duo The Living Earth Show to begin preliminary recording for a new work to premiere in fall 2025.

Visual, sound, and performance artists Katherine Simóne Reynolds and A.J. McClenon return to further develop their video collaboration, Gestures Investigating the Good and Not So Good In Relationships – As Shown to Us by Blondell Cummings (2022), from its previous online format into a three-dimensional, multi-channel installation with live performance interventions.

As part of the Ephemeral Organ series, SHAWNÉ MICHAELAIN HOLLOWAY’s residency investigates the mutual possibilities of technology and body to track, mediate, and generate a theatrical experience through trigger mechanisms and machine learning.

Bassem Saad and Sanja Grozdanić develop a new version of their performance Permanent Trespass while in residence. They draw on projection, sound, and stage possibilities of Studio 1—Goodman to expand the work—originally script-based—into a kind of cinepoem. After premiering the commissioned new performance, the artists remain in residence to edit the film version of the project, which debuts at NW Aalst as part of Bassem Saad’s exhibition Century Bingo.

Sharlene Bamboat is in residence with collaborator Kaija Sirala to develop Bamboat’s one-channel, feature-length Both, Instrument & Sound into a multi-channel installation. Working in Studio 1—Goodman, the pair test out the project across multiple screens and draw on the immersive audio capabilities of the venue to edit the installation’s sound score.