After performing in EMPAC’s opening festival, International Contemporary Ensemble returned to EMPAC’s state-of-the-art recording venue to record The Bright and Hollow Sky, an album of the electro-acoustic music of Nathan Davis.

Davis is a New York City-based composer and percussionist whose work blends acoustical and electronic sound sources with fascinating results. Davis has studied at Rice University and, while on a Fulbright Fellowship, at the Rotterdam Conservatorium; he has also explored the philosophies of meditation and tonalities of Karnatic music. Davis has composed pieces for ensembles, including the Calder Quartet and the Ethos percussion ensemble, which have also been featured at the Ojai Festival and at performances of the International Contemporary Ensemble.

Flux Quartet have championed the works of the American composer Morton Feldman for over a decade, finding a way to even perform his second quartet whose duration is six hours. In collaboration with EMPAC, a new recording of Feldman’s first quartet was made to highlight the delicate physicality of the music, specifically recorded to accompany the 3D video project Upending by OpenEnded Group, an EMPAC commission.

Strongly influenced by the irreverent spirit and “anything-goes” philosophy of the fluxus art movement, violinist Tom Chiu founded FLUX in the late ’90s. The quartet has since cultivated an uncompromising repertoire that follows neither fashions nor trends, but rather combines yesterday’s seminal iconoclasts with tomorrow’s new voices. Alongside late 20th-century masters like Cage, Feldman, Ligeti, Nancarrow, Scelsi, and Xenakis, FLUX has premiered more than 100 works by many of today’s foremost innovators, including Michael Byron, Julio Estrada, David First, Oliver Lake, Alvin Lucier, Marc Neikrug, and Matthew Welch.

Listening is an art, and in search of the perfect environment in which to practice it, humans have devoted millions of hours and the heroic efforts of architects, engineers, and craftspeople. EMPAC is a product of that quest. Commemorating his solo performance at EMPAC’s opening last year—Swedish pianist Per Tengstrand will give a recital and talk that reveal the technological breakthroughs that gave rise to Beethoven’s piano sonatas, as well as the innovations that followed from them. The evening will combine musical virtuosity with a provocative, witty take on the relationship between technology and creativity, as evidenced by the way the rapid evolution of the piano summoned forth new kinds of music.

What would it mean to build the city based on what we hear rather than what we see? Bruce Odland and Sam Auinger (O+A) are known for their observation of the urban soundscape and the resulting sound installations for public spaces around the world. Created with production support from EMPAC, my eyes...my ears... is a performance piece that deals with perception, memory and the failure of the “sonic commons.” Based on their unique dual binaural recording process, the 40-minute performance immerses the audience in an extremely detailed spatial audio environment. This piece is intended to be followed by a round table discussion with relevant experts in fields of perception, psychoacoustics, urban studies, architecture, economics, medicine, the environment, and other related fields. While in residence, Odland and Auinger researched possible loudspeaker systems. Using speakers on moving carts, they were able to perform a variety of tests that would inform upcoming performances of this work in the US and Europe.

Taking advantage of the unique sound system built for EMPAC’s 360° screen, composers and sound artists Daniel Teige (Germany) and Volkmar Klien (Austria) were invited to create new works for this 40+ speaker surround sound system. Over two weeks they worked in split shifts, culminating in a joint concert.

Daniel Teige is a Berlin-based composer, sound artist, and sound director specializing in installations, improvisation, and interactions. His quirky sound collages combine ambient sound with elegant musical progressions, for an effect that is both classically restrained and whimsical. Teige is also an expert interpreter of the music of composer Iannis Xenakis, having reconstructed and performed his magnum opus Persepolis several times in Europe.

Volkmar Klien works in various areas of the sonic arts, from electronica to interactive installations and instrumental compositions. Klien was invited to EMPAC to remix a composition—Start-Ziel-Siege, in which washes of electronic feedback float over computer-generated percussion—for dozens of speakers. “Start-Ziel-Siege” is a phrase used in the German racing world that signifies a “start-to-finish victory.”

Since their formation in the 1980s, Japan’s Boredoms have been exploring the proposition, as one of their members, Yamamoto Seichii, puts it, that “sound is everywhere. It is anything. And whatever we think is interesting sound, we begin to collage it together....but don’t take so seriously what we’re doing." The Boredoms’ Boadrum 9 show continues that tradition of omnivorous, free-ranging aural play. Its centerpiece is a circle of nine drummers—a step down from the 88 they once brought together on a New York stage but enough to generate a field of densely-layered ambient percussion that will literally shake anyone who enters it. Yet within that field, the listener encounters unexpected pockets of deep and meditative calm.

Opening for the Boredoms is the Atlanta trance-punk band Deerhunter, whose reverb-heavy sound incorporates influences from girl-group to garage. This special show at EMPAC, the kickoff to the New Nothing series takes place in the round, a reconfiguration of our classical concert hall into an environment for music and light spectacle.

Composer David Lang presents four new works in conjunction with films by four ground-breaking visual artists: photographer William Wegman, filmmaker Bill Morrison, videographer Doug Aitken, and conceptual artist Matt Mullican. The compositions in ELEVATED range from the densely orchestrated Men (trombone, English horn, bass clarinet, baritone sax, keyboard, viola, cello, and double bass) to the spare and delicate Wed, whose solo piano provides an apt accompaniment to Wegman’s film of one of his haunted Weimeraners at play. Morrison’s grainy footage of an iceberg rising majestically above a heaving sea is paired with the martial drumbeat and sinuous, meditative cello and guitar of How to Pray. And Lang reworks the Velvet Underground classic Heroin as a somberly beautiful duet for voice and cello. All pieces are performed by Canada’s Contact Ensemble. The resulting collaboration forges new pathways—both neural and aesthetic—between music and cinema, hearing and sight.

Taking advantage of the cycloramic potential of EMPAC’s Studio 1, German composers and sound artists Daniel Teige and Volkmar Klien present works created or adapted for a 360° aural environment. Daniel Teige’s quirky sound collages combine ambient sound with spare, elegant musical progressions, for an effect that is at once classically restrained and whimsical. Volkmar Klien will be remixing his recent composition Start-Ziel-Siege, in which washes of feedback float over computer-generated percussion, for the dozens of speakers in Studio 1. The result of their Multichannel Residencies is music of absorbing—even entrancing—complexity that surrounds and immerses the listener.

EMPAC can be seen as a big instrument that bridges the world we can see, hear, touch and move around in, the world we can experience, and the intangible realm of digital computers that can only become meaningful when it is connected to our experience through sound, light, images, movement or anything our senses can perceive. While in the Old World, Johannes Goebel built non-traditional instruments out of wood, metal and plastic; when in the New World, he programmed instruments in digital code. (For a few decades he also played music on ready-mades like pots and pans, scrap-metal and radios, wrenches, defunct pianos and garden hoses.)

3:00 PM – WORKSHOP

In the workshop, Goebel will show some of the instruments he built, talk about how digital and physical worlds influenced each other in his instrument building and compositions, and how musical instruments are tuned more by culture than by human genes. He will play recordings of music created on the instruments.

7:00 PM – CONCERT

In the concert, electronic pieces will be played that were composed under the influence of both computers and centuries of instrumental music: among them, Of Crossing the River, a piece of exact duration that seems to be of greatly varying length to each listener and at different times when listened to repeatedly.

Miguel Azguime, a composer, percussionist, and poet from Portugal, began work at EMPAC with his team on a new multimedia performance piece, A Laugh to Cry, including stereoscopic projection, a small chorus, and several onstage musicians. An evening-length work featuring himself as soloist, the piece was based on a variety of texts in several languages: Gertrude Stein, Antonin Artaud, James Joyce, as well as contemporary Portuguese poets. The work was premiered at the Warsaw Autumn Festival in 2013.

Azguime’s previous opera Salt Itinerary toured America, Canada, Europe, and Asia; in its performance he spoke and sung in five languages, and used a combination of real-time algorithmic audio and video. Azguime has composed instrumental and/or vocal works with and without electronics, electroacoustic music, sound poetry, including music for sound installations, theater, exhibitions, dance, and cinema. He also dedicates himself to the promotion of contemporary music as artistic director of the independent label Miso Records and of the Música Viva International Festival.