TOPOS presents the world premiere of a newly commissioned work by celebrated composer-performer Sarah Davachi. The Rose Dialogues, scored for two violas, cello, organ, and electronics, begins with the simplest of musical devices—the canon (or, which can colloquially be thought of as a round)—and spins an oceanic world of unexpected harmonies, haunting melodies, and formal surprises.

The topos of Davachi’s work is listening itself. Her music invites a deep attention, drawing us gently into the slow blossoming of her sonic landscapes. Within the veritable ocean of alternate tunings and temperaments, we are carried by waves of respite and repose, a darker pull that nudges us toward the unexpected.

Joined by musicians Eyvind Kang, Whitney Johnson (violas) and Lucy Railton (cello), Sarah Davachi’s piece moves slowly and with a precise ear for timbre and harmony. Its surprises feel hard-won, emerging from a rigor rooted in early Western compositional techniques: counterpoint, canon, heterophony, polyphony. And yet, her music is timeless, a dilated present that inches towards an uncertain yet harmonious future. A future that, in listening, seems to go on without end.

The premiere performance of Davachi’s The Rose Dialogues & Interludes at TOPOS is preceded by an onstage conversation with the composer.

A spectacle of sound and light, Greek composer Iannis Xenakis’s epic work Persépolis was originally commissioned by the Shiraz Festival in Iran, taking place in the ruins of the Temple of Darius in the Iranian desert on August 26, 1971. The performance—lasting over an hour starting at sunset—included two lasers, military searchlights, huge bonfires, 150 torch-bearing children, and six listening stations outfitted with eight-channel speakers, one for each track of Xenakis’ electroacoustic score.

Persépolis was the second of Xenakis’s Polytopes, large-scale works—from the Greek language poly meaning many and topos meaning place—monumental works that sought to fuse sound, light, colors, and architecture into a single, immersive site of sensory experience. For Xenakis, the topos was not just spatial but sensorial: an encounter with the totality of an intermedial artwork.

Reimagined for EMPAC Studio 1 by sound artist and composer Micah Silver, Persépolis becomes a magmatic mass of noise, snaking its way across a multitude of discrete audio channels. In many ways, Xenakis’s work is less a concert and closer to an extreme weather event: light, color, raw sound, and stagecraft combine to create a dramaturgy of turbulence, compression, and blistering immediacy, then release. Over the course of an hour, the piece overwhelms—and ultimately expands—the senses, rewarding those who listen and watch with openness.

Preceding the presentation of Persépolis on Saturday, August 30, a rare screening of director Pierre Andregui’s documentary Xenakis Portrait 1971–72 will shed light on the piece and the strange and fascinating context in which the Polytope Persépolis was born.

Pioneering producer, composer, and performer King Britt brings Liberation Meditations: A Call to TOPOS, joined by collaborators Suzi Analogue and Myles Ortiz-Green. Within the 39-speaker spatial soundscape of EMPAC Studio 1, turntables, analog synths, and digital textures are marshalled to move bodies–physically, emotionally, spiritually.

This is dance as ritual, rhythm as resistance. The topoi here are movement, celebration, and gathering—a communion forged through frequency and vibration:

“In times of chaos, the practice of centering oneself becomes not merely beneficial, but essential. Music (and movement) have long served as vital instruments of liberation and spiritual practice,” King Britt says, “functioning as forms of sonic centering. Mantras, in particular, have held a profound role in facilitating ritual connections to source energy, often yielding tangible physical and mental healing. These practices have been especially crucial to the endurance and resilience of communities of color.”

Liberation Meditations: A Call draws from deep archives—historic speeches, interviews, fragments of collective memory—reframed and recomposed as mantras grounded in the ethos of freedom. The result is an improvised, immersive, and spatial offering: healing in intent, ancestral in knowledge, futuristic in sound.

Together, King Britt, Suzi Analogue, and Myles Ortiz-Green, seek to elevate the mind, body, and spirit, to create a space for collective resonance and transformation.

For TOPOS, prolific composer-visual artist Raven Chacon turns away from the gravitas of the art world and returns to one of music’s most immediate, elemental forms: the band. Though well-versed in the terrain—having played in metal and thrash groups like Tenderizor, Kilt, and White People Killed Them—Chacon now channels the raw energy and aggression of these genres into an exploratory, almost meditative excavation of American musical lineages: country, folk, and their haunted echoes.

At the heart of this new work lies the cultural artifact of the spaghetti western—a genre of mid-20th–century films shot cheaply in Italy and Spain that infused moral ambiguity into the mythic binaries of the American Western. Its drifting antiheroes, complicit in an empire's dogma and implicated in the violence of westward expansion, serve as spectral guides through Chacon’s sonic landscape.

With the EMPAC-commissioned project Lazyhorse, Chacon assembles a fearless cohort of collaborators. Miriam Elhajli (vocals, guitar), Raven Chacon (keyboards/guitars), Mali Obomsawin (bass), Steve Hammond (lap-steel guitar), and The Living Earth Show (Travis Andrews, guitar and Andy Meyerson, percussion) form a band that dissects and reimagines the mythology of musical Americana, composing a sprawling mosaic of songs that are as biting as they are beautiful.

Chacon’s topos is a political one: a soundscape of critique and reckoning, where satire cuts through silence and each note resists the myth of the West.

The Gasholder House is located at 113 Jefferson St. in Troy, NY.

Raven Chacon and The Living Earth Show return to EMPAC to continue recording new music with their project Lazyhorse. They are joined by vocalist and guitarist Miriam Elhajli, vocalist and bassist Mali Obomsawin, and local Troy lap-steel player Steve Hammond. 

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.