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.
Main Image: Being & Becoming. Pictured (l-r): Michael Shekwoaga Ode, Peter Evans, Nick Joz, Joel Ross. Courtesy the artists.
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.
Main Image: Deforrest Brown, 2022. Photo: EMPAC / Michael Valiquette.
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).
Main Image: Video still, Beautiful Trouble, 2024. Roulette Intermedium. Courtesy the artists.
Beautiful Trouble at Roulette in 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).
Victoria Shen & Mariam Rezaei performing in EMPAC's Studio 1—Goodman in April, 2025. Courtesy the artists. Photo: Michael Valiquette/EMPAC.
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.
Main Image: Tara Rodgers. Courtesy the artist.
Soaring trumpet lines transform into haunting, guttural subtones. Resonant vibraphone ferocity hovers over basslines that throb and sear. Torrential drumming pushes toward episodes of improvisatory sonic exploration that is languid at times, boisterous and frenetic at others.
In a concert performance, trumpet player and composer Peter Evans leads the quartet Being & Becoming. Featuring some of the most forward-thinking young musicians in Jazz and Contemporary music, each of the members of Being & Becoming are widely known for their individuality, virtuosity, and deep musical curiosity and rigor.
The quartet features Evans on trumpet, vibraphonist and synth player Joel Ross, bassist and bass synth player Nick Joz, and drummer Adriel Vincent-Brown. The dynamic and charged lighting design of Azumi O E heightens the alchemic creation and recreation of musical worlds onstage.
Evans' compositions for the band draw from a wide variety of sources, traditional and experimental, with a grounding in improvisational idioms, notated concert music, and an array of experimental approaches. The group has released two albums–their eponymous debut in 2020 and the symphonic work Ars Memoria in 2022, both on Evans’s label More is More.
The last two years have seen the group tour major festivals and venues in the USA and Europe, constantly developing new music. A new album recorded in 2024 at the legendary Rudy Van Gelder Studio in New Jersey will see its release in 2025. All four members are recognized as leading virtuosi on their respective instruments, and have thriving careers as soloists, bandleaders, producers, and composers.
Main Image: Peter Evans. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Gannon Padget.
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.
Main Image: Deforrest Brown, 2022. Photo: EMPAC / Michael Valiquette.
The fall 2024 PULSE performance is an original DJ set comprised of original compositions and remixes created by the PULSE crew. 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.
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.
Main Image: Charles Curtis. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Bradley Buehring.
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.
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.
Main Image: Charles Curtis. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Bradley Buehring.