Often, the mark of excellence in electronic music and sound art is the ability of the composer to hide their identity and virtuosity behind an inscrutable bank of machinery or within the ambient acoustics of the space in which the piece is performed. Whether or not this obfuscation is willful, it results in a genre of music that is vastly diverse in both its effects and technical configurations. In this conversation between Mark Fell and France Jobin, two masters of their understated craft will step forward to engage in dialogue and answer questions about the aesthetics, techniques, and politics of their work.

Fell has been in residence at EMPAC to develop Recursive Frame Analysis, a new work for sound, light, and dance; meanwhile, Jobin has been working on the premiere of a multi-channel sound piece for the Concert Hall.

Mark Fell is a multidisciplinary artist based in Sheffield, UK. He is widely known for combining popular music styles such as electronica and techno with more academic approaches to computer-based composition, with a particular emphasis on algorithmic and mathematical systems. As well as recorded works, he produces installation pieces, often using multiple speaker systems. He started his career in the ’90s house and techno scene as one half of electronic duo SND and released The Neurobiology of Moral Decision Making earlier this year on label The Death of Rave.

France Jobin is a sound/installation artist, composer, and curator residing in Montreal, Canada. Her installations express a parallel path, incorporating both musical and visual elements inspired by the architecture of physical spaces. Her works can be “experienced” in various music venues and new-technology festivals across Canada, the United States, South America, South Africa, Europe and Japan.

Computers are amazing tools for the generation and manipulation of massive amounts of data in real-time—tools that allow artists, musicians, and researchers to procedurally explore new paradigms of audio and visual interaction, co-opting bits and bytes “on-the-fly” into stunning digital canvases for our enjoyment and contemplation.

Modern computing technology has empowered a generation of creatives to engage their audiences directly as interactive partners rather than passive consumers. The creative and commercial successes of immersive game experiences predict an adventurous future, and have already acclimated audiences to nonlinear forms of storytelling while feeding our growing need to take an active role in our own entertainment. The room is prepped, so to speak, for a new age of procedurally generated, media-rich art and music, which eschews linearity and embraces the dynamism inherent in our tools.

Researcher and composer Rob Hamilton explores the converging spaces between sound, music, and interaction. His creative practice includes mixed-reality performance works built within fully rendered, networked game environments, procedural music engines and mobile musical ecosystems. His research focuses on the cognitive implications of sonified musical gesture and motion and the role of perceived space in the creation and enjoyment of sound and music. Dr. Hamilton received his PhD from Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) and has joined the Rensselaer community this semester, serving as Assistant Professor of Music and Media in Rensselaer’s Department of Arts.

When Oneohtrix Point Never (aka electronic musician Daniel Lopatin) was last at EMPAC, he and visual artist Nate Boyce developed and debuted a multimedia stage show for the world tour supporting his 2013 album R Plus Seven, released by Warp Records. Upon returning in 2015, he was in residence to develop and premiere the live stage show for his upcoming Garden of Delete world tour.

Daniel Lopatin is known for creating intricate electronic music that is characterized by its emphasis on melody and hypnotic pacing, conceptually stylized structures, and extreme use of audio-processing techniques. Early incarnations of Oneohtrix Point Never date back to the mid 2000s and drew heavily on the stylistic forms of cutout-bin ambient and new age records, combined with the structure and abrasiveness of noise music.

Newer work has focused on sample-based constructions, while  R Plus Seven drew on procedural poetry and ersatz instrumentation to produce a cryptic meditation on the materiality of sound itself. In addition to his own studio work in 2014/2015, Lopatin toured with Nine Inch Nails, produced Antony's album, and exhibited an installation in collaboration with Boyce at MoMA PS1.

Due to unforseen circumstances this event has been canceled. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Holly Herndon’s musical range and depth has positioned her as a definitive figure in contemporary sound, forging ties between avant-garde composition, protest music, and electronic dance pop.

Equally at home in clubs, concert halls, and museums, her intricate, thoughtful textures both call the listener to action and to dance. Employing her voice and breath alongside digital tools, Herndon’s compositions approach the laptop as an extension of the human body, responding to the fractured intimacy of the internet age with a resolutely contemporary electronic music that is as tactile as it is referential.

Born in Tennessee, Herndon broke out from her formative years in Berlin’s minimal techno scene to repatriate to San Francisco, where she currently lives and studies as a doctoral candidate at Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). Her newest album, Platform, has been heralded as a breakthrough work in the burgeoning genre of experimental electronic music.

Commissioned in collaboration with MOMA PS1, Herndon will present a new multi-channel audio work in Studio 1.

In a performance that juxtaposes jazz with extreme metal, guitarist Mary Halvorson and bassist Colin Marston played solo sets hailing from opposite sides of the musical spectrum. 
 
A composer, bandleader, and improviser, Halvorson is renown for her elastic, sometimes-fluid, sometimes-shredding, wholly unique style. A student of famed improviser Anthony Braxton, she studied jazz at Wesleyan University and the New School before becoming a member of several of Braxton’s bands and a contributor to six of his recordings. Her education deepened with stints in no-wave guitarist Marc Ribot’s quartet Sun Ship and Mr. Bungle bassist Trevor Dunn’s Trio-Convulsant. Her longstanding trio has been named a “rising star” by Downbeat Magazine and critics have called her “NYC’s least-predictable improviser” and “the future of jazz guitar.”
 
Marston is one of the most powerful figures on the New York death-metal scene, playing with groups such as Behold…The Arctopus, Dysrhythmia, Krallice, and Gorguts. His complex and technically demanding music weaves jagged rhythms with unrelenting energy to confront listeners with a wall of pure sonic force. Marston also runs a recording studio called Menegroth, The Thousand Caves in Queens where he records, mixes, and masters many forms of music. His prolific output includes extreme metal, progressive/experimental rock, avant garde improvisation, free jazz, new music/modern classical, and ambient genres.

The electronic music of composer France Jobin can be described as "sound-sculpture," revealing a minimalist approach to complex sound environments where analog and digital methods intersect. While her music often makes use of restraint and limit, she isn't one to shy away from extremes.

Her skillful interplay between highs and lows, louds and softs, creates an intricate narrative, which stretches the listener's perception and continually refocuses attention. Using an array of specifically placed loudspeakers numbering in the dozens, Jobin will present a new work built for the EMPAC Concert Hall.

France Jobin is a sound/installation artist, composer, and curator residing in Montreal, Canada. Her installations express a parallel path, incorporating both musical and visual elements inspired by the architecture of physical spaces. Her works can be “experienced” in various music venues and new-technology festivals across Canada, the United States, South America, South Africa, Europe and Japan.

For WITHIN 2, Tarek Atoui will present his approach to performing sound in relation to anticipation, tactile sound, visual noise, gestures, and the multimodal nature of hearing. The workshop is a platform for performance, research, improvisation, and spatial composition that explores not only auditory perception among our diversity of listening abilities, but the social relations of public space, techniques of visual communication, and architectural tactility.

Atoui presented the project's first incarnation, WITHIN, as a series of performances and workshops during the Sharjah Biennial in 2011 and has continued to research principals of sonic architecture (in particular, the system of DeafSpace, developed by Hansel Bauman at Gallaudet, Washington) in the development of instrument-building techniques. During his time at EMPAC, Atoui will work with Distinguished Research Professor of Music Pauline Oliveros to engage students in designing and building new instruments and interfaces for performance.

WITHIN 2 is presented in collaboration with Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley.

Returning to EMPAC after his 2013 multi-venue installation and performance, British artist Mark Fell presents Recursive Frame Analysis, a new work for light, sound, and human movement. As with many of Fell’s previous works, Recursive Frame Analysis emphasizes highly formalized aesthetic strategies: arrangements of intensely saturated light, raw synthetic sound, disrupted rhythmic structures, and kinetic systems that urge the audience to their perceptual and cognitive boundaries.   

Taking its title from a therapeutic technique (RFA) developed in the 1980s, Recursive Frame Analysis refers to the cognitive patterns around which behavioral relationships and interactions develop; typically these are thought of as “stuck” and therefore also somehow problematic. The frame in the case of this performance could refer to the semiotic or the phenomenological.

The work engages with and responds to vocabularies of shapes developed by New York-based choreographer and dancer Brittany Bailey and performed by Bailey and Burr Johnson.

Mark Fell is a multidisciplinary artist based in Sheffield, UK. He is widely known for combining popular music styles such as electronica and techno with more academic approaches to computer-based composition, with a particular emphasis on algorithmic and mathematical systems. As well as recorded works, he produces installation pieces, often using multiple speaker systems. He started his career in the ’90s house and techno scene as one half of electronic duo SND and released The Neurobiology of Moral Decision Making earlier this year on label The Death of Rave.

Brittany Bailey has worked as a dancer/choreographer in NYC since 2008. She graduated from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts in 2008 and went on to train with Merce Cunningham. Bailey has performed with Marina Abramovic, Michael Clark Company, and Robert Wilson. Along with creating performance works for her dance company, Bailey is currently the choreographer on performances with Christopher Knowles, Mark Fell, and a solo dance with visuals by Louise Bourgeois and text by Gary Indiana.

From three stylistically distinct corners of the global beat scene, a trifecta of dance-music heavyweights descended on Troy for a late-night concoction of hip-hop, house, and techno.

Harlem-based sample queen vhvl builds dark, knotty collages from source material that can be both elemental and intimate at turns. Hers is a brand of hip-hop steeped as much in the rivers and forest of the Hudson Valley as in the concrete hustle of the city. Her 2013 debut myrrh drew comparisons to early Flying Lotus, and in 2014 she released a split cassette with Ras G on Stones Throw Records.

LA beat-scene veteran Daedelus is one of the most inventive and prolific figures to have emerged from the legendary weekly showcase Low End Theory at LA club the Airliner. Taking a decidedly baroque approach to his craft, the tech-savvy maestro conducts bottomless banks of sound from his preferred device—the gestural Monome. He’s released 15 records with taste-making labels such as Brainfeeder and Ninja Tune, as well as collaborations with Prefuse 73, Busdriver, and the Gaslamp Killer.

London-based producer and DJ Ikonika has fast become a star of Hyperdub Records, one of the most esteemed purveyors of UK bass music. Her 2014 EP Position built on a career that has synthesized house, dubstep, grime, garage, electro and R&B. When she isn’t touring globally, she runs the label Hum + Buzz.

Icelandic composer Davíð Brynjar Franzson was in residence to develop technical concepts for his work The Cartography of Time, for bass clarinet, cello, trombone, piano, and live electronics. A generative installation for four performers or standalone electronics, the piece is constructed from a handful of sound fragments and composed responses to them. Each sound reflects how each performer involved in the project approaches their instruments as well as how they interact with their immediate sound environment. The result is an environment constructed from these sound fragments, distributed through the performance space.