The spring 2025 PULSE performance is an original DJ set comprised of original compositions and remixes created by Matthew Campbell, Jourdon Willett, and Olakiite Fatukasi, members of the PULSE crew. Set within the 360º screen in EMPAC’s Studio 2, the compositions are themed around synthesizing old and new media across platforms to create a familiar yet fresh sonic experience.

The People Using Live Software and Electronics (PULSE) working group and lab is a forum for Rensselaer students interested in producing live audio by experimenting with musical hardware and various digital audio workstations (DAWs). The lab culminates in a performance hosted by EMPAC at the end of each semester.

Facilitated by Jonathan Givan, PULSE meets every Wednesday, 5–7PM when classes are in session, in EMPAC Studio Beta.

To get involved, or for more info, please contact Jonathan Givan.

Constantly evolving scenography, kaleidoscopic lighting, jittery electronic sounds, and evocative video projections underscore Ontopoiesis, an EMPAC-commissioned work of experimental music theater. Composer Rama Gottfried, with production designer Anna Paniccia and the experimental music piano and percussion quartet Yarn/Wire, explore new and diverse forms within the intersections of music, experimental theater, and sculpture.

What connects us to our world and shapes our experience of it? How does the world we sense and feel change and grow with us? And how do we in turn shape the world?

The sounds of Ontopoiesis’s whimsical world are multifarious: bowed piano strings form clouds of fuzzy distortion; hyper-detailed, granularly-synthesized caterpillar feet; digital lightning storms and open-air ambisonic field recordings. Through a sonically and visually rich palette of musical characters and landscapes, Ontopoiesis seeks to express life as a self-organizing, self-creating phenomenon–one that ties us deeply to our surroundings, forming unique, subjective experiences. Digital and analog synthesizers mix with Yarn/Wire’s virtuosic acoustic and amplified sounds to create blooming percussion textures and complex, interweaving rhythmic patterns. Micro and macro sounds combine to form a vibrant, emergent theatrical ecosystem of sound.

Experimental musicians and turntablists Victoria Shen and Mariam Rezaei are in residence in Studio 1—Goodman to rehearse and record new music developed over the last year, to debut in their April 2025 performance.

In the EMPAC Concert Hall, renowned violinist and violist Marco Fusi records 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.

Being & Becoming, a quartet of creative improvisors featuring Peter Evans on trumpet, vibraphonist and synth player Joel Ross, bassist and bass synth player Nick Joz, and drummer Michael Shekwoaga Ode, are in residence in EMPAC Studio 2 writing and recording new music.

In his residency in Studio 1—Goodman, DeForrest Brown Jr. tests and records material for a new album project Rhythmanalytics. Brown is developing virtual instruments and building out a sonic toolkit for the album. His process orients itself towards capturing sound’s motion within the studio, using the venue itself as part of his instrumentation.

During a residency in the EMPAC Theater, composer Natacha Diels and JACK Quartet create new video documentation for Diels’s multimedia work Beautiful Trouble (2024).

A ubiquitous fixture in DJ and electronic music for the better half of the last century, the record turntable has been utilized as an instrument in innumerable ways since its conception. Experimental musicians Victoria Shen and Mariam Rezaei explore and push the musical limits of turntablism in a thrilling and dizzying concert performance of new music for unorthodox instruments and objects where DIY sensibilities meet the audio technological capabilities of EMPAC's Studio 1. Extreme sonic textures and physical gesture substitute for traditional musical elements like melody and harmony, questioning commonly accepted modes of music and meaning making.

Victoria Shen is a sound artist, experimental music performer, and instrument-maker based in San Francisco, whose sound practice is concerned with the spatiality/physicality of sound and its relationship to the human body.

Mariam Rezaei is a multi-award winning composer, turntablist, and performer. She previously led experimental arts projects TOPH, TUSK FRINGE, and TUSK NORTH. Rezaei’s acclaimed music has been described as “high-velocity sonic surrealism” (The Guardian) that “harness[es] extreme technical prowess” (Boomkat).

This event requires everyone to wear a mask in the venue.⁣ Masks will be available on entry.⁣

Multi-instrumentalist composer and electronic music historian Tara Rodgers produces a retrospective concert of selected works from the past 20 years, diffused in an immersive 4.1 sound system.

Rodgers’s research and music explore electronic sound as material and metaphor, with studio practice as a hands-on parallel to study of the long history of electronic music and sound. Her music is described as combining “rigor and reverence... bold in the precision and subtlety it takes to mix such signals with thrill and grace and restraint” (NPR Music), “carrying her listeners along through deeply felt, deeply connected sonic energy that embodies joy, transcendence, and positivity” (Routledge).

The concert juxtaposes her wide-ranging work across styles and methods, from generative computer music written in SuperCollider, to electroacoustic compositions featuring piano improvisation, to pulsing ambient and techno tracks.

As a historian and multidisciplinary scholar, Rodgers has also published essays in foundational volumes in contemporary studies of music, sound, technology, and culture. Her book Pink Noises: Women on Electronic Music and Sound (Duke University Press, 2010) brings together twenty-four interviews with women in electronic music and sound cultures who expand notions of who and what counts in matters of invention, production, and noise-making.

After the concert, Rodgers is joined by Rensselaer Arts graduate student and renowned DJ Rekha Malhotra, along with Director of the Center for Deep Listening at Rensselaer Stephanie Loveless for an onstage conversation and Q&A.