Composer Michael Gordon rehearsed, recorded, and premiered his new work Rushes for seven bassoons. Composed with cascading waves of sound, Gordon’s composition transformed the woodwinds into something improbably electronic. A companion piece to his earlier composition Timber (which applied a similar sound layering technique to the Simantra percussion instrument), Rushes is a haunting convergence of digital and analog ambiance. 

Gordon is co-founder and co-artistic director of New York City’s music collective Bang on a Can, and has produced a diverse body of work, ranging from large-scale pieces for ensembles to major orchestral commissions to works conceived specifically for the recording studio. He has been commissioned by Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, the BBC Proms, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and the Sydney 2000 Olympic Arts Festival, among others. 

A sound installation by German artist Thom Kubli, Black Hole Horizon was designed and constructed at Rensselaer in collaboration with the School of Architecture and consultants Zackery Belanger (acoustic design) and David Jaschik (mechatronics). Using the university’s laser-cutting and 3D-milling equipment for the material creation, the production team designed a complex system of air compressors, fluid pumps, and Arduino-controlled mechanisms to create horns that produce tone-generated bubbles. Each bubble is deformed by the energy of the sound produced through the horn, and then bursts onto the room’s white floor. The shapes of the horns, some stretching eight feet long, were based on a model of a black hole geometrodynamic physics. In the installation, spectators could explore the space by walking through the room and witnessing the transformation of sound into ephemeral sculptures.

The New York City-based Wet Ink Ensemble was in residence in the Concert Hall to record their album RELAY. The Ensemble used their signature mix of collaborative performance, mixing voice, strings, winds, percussion, and electronics. The album features the music of Alex Mincek, Rick Burkhardt, Eric Wubbels, Kate Soper, Sam Pluta, and George Lewis—works that were performed and toured for two years prior to being recorded.

The members of the Ensemble collaborate in a band-like fashion, writing, improvising, and preparing pieces together over long stretches of time. In addition to yearly performances in New York City, the ensemble has taken part in numerous tours and residencies, including a residency at Duke University for the 2011-12 and 2012-13 academic years, and residencies at UC San Diego and Northern Illinois University.

Ed Osborn spent an intensive period at EMPAC editing video footage for his installation and performance, Albedo Prospect. Based in part on Arthur Koestler’s reports from a 1931 airship flight to the high Arctic, Albedo Prospect explores polar imagery using video, sound, still images, and text. Koestler’s newspaper dispatches from this journey are part of the public record; the radio transmissions were lost, but these broadcasts were noted for their vivid and entrancing accounts of the terrain. This piece reimagines these lost reports using audio and video, updated with an awareness of how personal, journalistic, and scientific narratives shape our knowledge and readings of polar geographies.

Osborn’s sound art pieces take many forms including installation, sculpture, radio, video, performance, and public projects. His works combine a visceral sense of space, sound, and motion with an economy of materials, and are by turns playful and oblique, engaging and enigmatic.

Laurie Anderson worked on electronics and a custom-built software program for her composition Landfall. Inspired by Anderson’s experience of Hurricane Sandy, Landfall is an evocative meditation on transience. The piece combines texts—descriptions of loss, from water-logged pianos to disappearing animal species—and music that juxtaposes electronics and traditional strings. Dense projected texts were triggered musically via software developed for the work. According to Anderson, Landfall comprises “stories with tempos.” The work was Anderson’s first-ever collaboration with the groundbreaking ensemble Kronos Quartet, a celebrated and influential ensemble that has performed thousands of concerts worldwide, released more than 45 recordings of extraordinary breadth, and commissioned more than 750 new works and arrangements for string quartet.

Laurie Anderson, EMPAC’s inaugural distinguished artist-in-residence, presented a series of events focusing on topics unique to her practice as an artist.

American filmmaker Brent Green was in residence to record a live performance version of his stop-motion animation film Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then. Originally presented as a touring film with live narration and musical accompaniment, Green wanted to create a DVD document of the project. All the video, audio, and design work took place onsite at EMPAC, with every department at EMPAC collaborating to realize the project. Based on the true tale of Kentucky hardware clerk Leonard Wood, Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then uses live action and hand-drawn stop-motion animation to tell an inspiring, poignant, and darkly humorous love story of a man who built a bizarre and sprawling home for his wife by hand in the hope that it would cure her of terminal cancer.

Brent Green is a storyteller, singer, songwriter, and self-taught filmmaker. Green often performs his films with live musicians, improvised sound-tracks, and live narration in venues ranging from rooftops to art institutions such as the Getty Center, the Walker Art Center, the Hammer Museum, the Wexner Center for the Arts, The Kitchen, and MoMA. He lives and works in the Appalachian hills of Pennsylvania.

Commissioned by EMPAC, this interdisciplinary hybrid combined footage Cohen filmed in Nova Scotia over a decade with live music and texts ranging from poems and folklore to local newspaper fragments to scientific research. An artist who has explored and deplored the disappearance of regional character brought on by corporate-driven homogeneity, Cohen described his discovery of Cape Breton as a revelation for its beauty, but one that remains elusive and deeply itself. Known primarily as an urban filmmaker, this work was a rare foray into engagement with the natural landscape. The EMPAC premiere featured musicians from Fugazi, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Dirty Three, and Silver Mt. Zion. EMPAC also screened an earlier work, Gravity Hill Newsreels: Occupy Wall Street (Series One and Two). Cohen has made more than 40 films including personal/political city portraits made on travels around the globe, and portraits of friends, artists, and musicians. His works are in the collections of MoMA and the Whitney Museum of American Art and have been broadcast by PBS, Arte, and the Sundance Channel.

Quote Unquote was an interdisciplinary series presenting work by artists that use an existing text as a departure point for time-based works including installation, film, and performance.

The New York City-based contemporary music group Talea Ensemble was in residence to perform and record the music of Fausto Romitelli, the Italian composer who died in 2004 just as his music was beginning to gain notoriety. This album marks the world premiere recordings of several chamber ensemble works from the composer, described as one of the most promising of his generation. Romitelli took the power of psychedelic rock and the sonic-analysis techniques of the French Spectral school and twisted them together to create a deformed, artificial sound world.

The Talea Ensemble has given many important world premieres of new works by composers such as Pierre Boulez, Tristan Murail, Jason Eckardt, Pierluigi Billone, Stefano Gervasoni, and Marco Stroppa, in addition to Fausto Romitelli.

A collaboration between American Peter Edwards and South African Sabisha Friedberg, The Hant Variance was an exploration of audio composition driven by an audience’s movement through space. The score was inspired by the writings of Vic Tandy and other scientific and metaphysical sources that suggest certain sonic equations yield supernatural experiences. Performing from the center of the room, and using analog and digital sound interfaces, Edwards and Friedberg distributed the sound in real-time through a site-specific arrangement of loudspeakers and subwoofers. After the performance, The Hant Variance was recorded, edited, and mastered for release on vinyl record.

Friedberg’s composition, performance, and installation work draws on the phenomenological and phantasmagorical, exploring perceptual delineation of space through sound, and low-end experiential thresholds; she has performed and presented installations widely in western and eastern Europe, Russia, Japan, and the US. Edwards is an American artist and musician living in Holland, best known for his DIY experimental electronics website casperelectronics. His work has been presented internationally at venues including the MIT Media Lab, Transmediale, Dutch Electronic Arts Festival, and New York Electronic Arts Festival, among others.

American cellist Mariel Roberts was in residence for the recording, mixing, and mastering of her first solo album, nonextraneous sounds. Roberts took over the Concert Hall with an assortment of microphones and a KVM station (keyboard, video, mouse) that allowed her the autonomy to operate on her own schedule. Afterward, the material was assembled and mixed in EMPAC’s audio production room. nonextraneous sounds features music by Andy Akiho, Sean Friar, Daniel Wohl, Alex Mincek, and Tristan Perich.

Roberts has performed at the Kennedy Center, the Guggenheim Museum, Zankel Hall, MoMA, The Stone, Issue Project Room, and Roulette, and has performed internationally as a member of the Mivos String Quartet, as well as with a variety of other ensembles in venues around the world.