A spectacle of sound and light, Greek composer Iannis Xenakis’s epic work Persepolis 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.

Persepolis 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, Persepolis 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 Persepolis on Saturday, August 30, a rare screening of director Pierre Andrégui’s documentary Xenakis Portrait 1971–72 will shed light on the piece and the strange and fascinating context in which the Polytope Persepolis 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, Pulitzer Prize–winning composer and visual artist Raven Chacon sheds the gravitas of the art world and returns to one of music’s most raw and immediate forms: the band. Drawing on his roots in noise, thrash, and metal (Tenderizor, KILT, White People Killed Them), Chacon channels that energy into an exploratory, almost meditative excavation of American musical traditions: country, folk, and their haunted echoes.

Lazyhorse marks the latest chapter in Chacon’s nearly decade-long collaboration with The Living Earth Show (percussionist Andy Meyerson and guitarist Travis Andrews). Known for transforming the chamber ensemble model into a platform for genre-defying invention, The Living Earth Show builds immersive sonic worlds with their collaborators. After their lauded piece Tremble Staves, Chacon and the duo return with a new vision, this time centering songcraft, improvisation, and the unruly edges of music.

At its core, Lazyhorse is haunted by the spaghetti western—a film genre that injected moral ambiguity into the clean-cut heroics of the American frontier myth. In Chacon’s hands, these disillusioned antiheroes become sonic archetypes, spectral guides complicit in westward violence, leading us through a landscape where distortion, silence, and satire collide.

Commissioned by EMPAC, Lazyhorse assembles a powerhouse lineup: Mali Obomsawin (bass), Miriam Elhajli (vocals, guitar), Steve Hammond (lap steel), Chacon (keys/guitars), and The Living Earth Show. Together, they form a genre-exploding band that dissects and reconstructs the mythology of Americana, stitching together songs that are as biting as they are hauntingly beautiful.

This is no nostalgia trip: Chacon’s topos is resistance. Lazyhorse confronts the violence of empire through sound, turning the stage into a site of reckoning, reclamation, and radical reimagination.

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

Lazyhorse band members 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) record and rehearse material for a commissioned project and performance created especially for TOPOS Music Festival 2025.

The fall 2025 PULSE performance is an original DJ set comprised of original compositions and remixes created by Matthew Campbell, Jourdon Willett, Kyle-Lamar Morgan, Nathaniel Viana, Anthony Coston, and Olakiite Fatukasi, members of the PULSE crew. Set within EMPAC’s Studio 1—Goodman, the compositions are themed around synthesizing old and new media across platforms to create a familiar yet fresh sonic experience.

The spring 2025 PULSE performance DJ's were Matthew Campbell, Jourdon Willett, and Olakiite Fatukasi.

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.

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).