New York-based quartet Yarn/Wire performed an evening of work by contemporary German composer Enno Poppe, including the world premiere of the EMPAC-commissioned piece Feld. The program also featured Tonband, Poppe’s co-composition with Wolfgang Heiniger. Yarn/Wire were in residence to record both pieces for future release.
Incoming Rensselaer freshman are invited to an electronic dance music mini-festival run by students for students.
As a part of Navigating Rensselaer and Beyond (NRB), MashUP! is the culmination of a two-day workshop where students learn to work with professional-caliber digital audio, video, and lighting technologies. EMPAC’s production team mentors participants to guide them through the process of producing a big-stage EDM event. On the final night, participants stage a full-scale dance party to help welcome the incoming class.
Main Image: MashUP!
A night of outer-orbit house music with Chicago experimentalist Hieroglyphic Being.
You find a vinyl record out in the desert, faded and with no markings. Upon returning home, you place it on the turntable and are enveloped by distorted, raw, rhythmic pulsations. The sound gives you a glimpse into another world, another way of existing. It works its way inside of you, and you begin to subtly move. This is the sound of Hieroglyphic Being. Also known as Jamal Moss, the Chicago-based producer and record-label boss (Mathematics) has spent decades prolifically releasing music into the outer orbits of house culture. Occasionally donning aliases such as Sun God, IAMTHATIAM, and Africans with Mainframes, Moss refers to his sound as “cosmic bebop,” “rhythmic cubism,” and “synth expressionism,” embracing the mystical power of dance music to move bodies and expand minds. In 2015, Moss joined forces with Sun Ra Arkestra bandleader Marshall Allen and the J.I.T.U Ahn-Sahm-Buhl for We Are Not the First, an avant-jazz ode to musical ancestry and sonic transcendence.
IRCAM researcher Markus Noisternig was in residence in the Concert Hall working on a combination of EMPAC’s Wave Field Synthesis System and a 64-channel Ambisonic Dome, while interfacing with Rensselaer’s Blue Gene Summer Computer to calculate time reversal for 3D audio positioning.
Mexican artist and composer Laura Luna creates a new multimedia concert performance inside EMPAC's 360-degree panoramic screen.
A photographer turned video and film artist, Laura Luna began to experiment with music in 2013. Perceiving sound as a powerful art form for enhancing memories and narratives, she recorded sounds around her that triggered emotions and memory fragments, building them into a rich tonal music. Using field recordings, voice, a modded Atari computer, a Gameboy and various synths, she constructs sounds to describe fantastical scenes and narratives, creating soundtracks for sublimely fogged-in worlds inspired by the sort of science fiction that deals in the eerily heart-rending.
In 2014, she released the experimental album Isolarios inspired by stories about lost cosmonauts, expeditions without return, magical realism, and the works of Italo Calvino. With a passion for machines, generative narratives, and the complexities of memory, Luna has developed audiovisual performances, installations, and interactive works where different materials and technologies coexist.
Luna will perform at EMPAC following a production residency in Studio 2 aimed at creating a new multimedia concert performance inside EMPAC's 360-degree panoramic screen.
NOTE: Capacity for this performance will be very limited, as the audience will be within the panoramic screen. Advanced ticket purchase is recommended.
Main Image: Laura Luna during her production residency inside EMPAC's 360-degree panoramic screen. Photo: Mick Bello/EMPAC.
Bringing together Swedish upstart Toxe with British veteran Actress, this evening promises hard-edged beats tinged with mystery and mayhem.
One of the most stylistically elusive figures in UK electronic music, Darren Jordan Cunningham has been releasing music under the name Actress since 2004. Mixing club-ready techno with dark ambient and experimental sensibilities, Actress has built a catalog of iconic and genre-defying albums on Ninja Tune and Warp while headlining shows at the world’s dance-music proving grounds, such as the Barbican Center and Berghain Berlin. In April he released AZD, which Cunningham describes as “Non dance based civilian mind groove, mapped to an external soul beyond the collapsing black hole…Music is chaos R.I.P Music.” Part of the AZD project is an expanded live show that aims to integrate various MIDI and synthesizer technologies into one intelligent musical instrument that Cunningham calls “the music vitamin of the Metropolis.”
Opening the show is Toxe—AKA Tove Agélii—the Swedish producer who arrives at EMPAC for her first American performance. The Stockholm-based DJ is quickly becoming known for her aggressive beats and anything-goes mixes.
Main Image: Actress in Studio 1. Photo: EMPAC/Rensselaer.
A five-day intensive workshop on the technical, theoretical, and practical issues surrounding spatial audio platforms, particularly focused on Wave Field Synthesis and High-Order Ambisonics. Hosted by EMPAC at Rensselaer along with IRCAM (the Paris-based Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique), and HUSEAC (Harvard University Studio for Electroacoustic Composition), this workshop will give participants the opportunity to experience large-scale, complex audio setups in pristine acoustic environments.
Information on EMPAC's Wave Field Synthesis system.
A force within Latinx culture and the rising genderqueer electronic aesthetic (alongside Arca, Lotic, Rabit, etc.), Elysia Crampton has described her style as “severo,” a word suggestive of the raw textures and violent juxtapositions she creates with source material ranging from American pop to cumbia, hip-hop, ratchet, and South American metal. A descendent of the Aymara people indigenous to Bolivia, Crampton made waves with last year’s. A sister piece to the theatrical production Dissolution of the Sovereign: A Timeslide into the Future, the album was written in the style of an epic poem, taking inspiration from the story of the Aymara revolutionary Bartolina Sisa, whose severed limbs were paraded through the Andes after her execution at the hands of Spanish colonists.
Conjuring history, myth, and dream while deftly collaging the sonic trappings of a world in flux, Crampton’s electronic compositions are ranging emotional narratives that seek reconstitution and sovereignty.
Opening the show was Oakland-based synth artist and techno producer Russell E.L. Butler. Exploring themes of transplantation, evolution, and healing, Butler dedicated their recent EP I’m Dropping Out of Life to the “black, brown, trans, queer, and gay folks of Oakland,” especially those who tragically died in the December 2016 Ghost Ship art collective fire.
Jazz trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire comes to EMPAC with his celebrated quartet. Signed to the legendary label Blue Note Records, Akinmusire is a rising star in American Jazz. At 19, he began touring professionally with saxophonist Steve Colemen, before studying with Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, and Terrence Blanchard at the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz.
In 2007, he won both the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition and the Carmine Caruso International Jazz Trumpet Solo Competition. Akinmusire has since worked with jazz icons from Vijay Iyer and Aaron Parks to Esperanza Spalding and Jason Moran, recording two albums as a bandleader, including 2014’s The Imagined Savior Is Far Easier to Paint. In 2015, he contributed to rapper Kendrick Lamar’s Grammy-nominated album To Pimp a Butterfly.
Sam Harris — Piano
Harish Raghavan — Bass
Jeremy Dutton — Drums
Main Image: Ambrose Akinmusire Quartet on the theater stage in 2017. Photo: EMPAC.