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.

Luciano Chessa came to EMPAC to reconstruct Futurist composer and inventor Luigi Russolo’s intonarumori (or noise intoners). In collaboration with EMPAC and Performa, Chessa embarked on this reconstruction using his research that revised longstanding misconceptions about their construction, making this ensemble the first sonically accurate portrayal. Chessa brought instrument builder Keith Carey to EMPAC and a small team worked in Rensselaer’s architectural fabrication studios to produce the ensemble of instruments. A demonstration video was also created to share with a number of composers—Blixa Bargeld, Pauline Oliveros, Ellen Fullman, Ulrich Krieger, and Mike Patton—commissioned by Performa to compose new works for the intonarumori to be premiered at New York City’s Town Hall as part of Performa 09. Chessa is a composer and musicologist, and teaches music history at the San Francisco Conservatory. The research done at EMPAC contributed to his book, Luigi Russolo, Futurist: Noise, Visual Arts, and the Occult, published by UC Press in 2012.

Michael J. Schumacher is a composer, performer, and installation artist based in Brooklyn, NY. He works predominantly with electronic media, creating computer-generated acoustic environments that evolve continuously for long time periods. In their realization, Schumacher uses multiple speaker configurations that relate the sounds of the installation to the architecture of the exhibition space. Architectural and acoustical considerations thereby together become basic structural elements.

At EMPAC, Schumacher continued his site-specific, multi-channel sound installations—called Room Pieces—with Room Pieces Troy 2010. Each Room Piece takes on a unique identity based on the space in which it is installed. During his residencies, Schumacher developed his piece for EMPAC’s vast, multi-zone public address system to be experienced in and around the current noise of the building—not only adding a sound environment but reframing the one that already exists.

Musician and multimedia artist Jesse Stiles performs a new live score within Quayola’s brilliant video installation Strata viewed on a massive screen suspended from the ceiling.

Quayola is a visual artist based in London. His work simultaneously focuses on multiple forms exploring the space between video, audio, photography, installation, live performance and print. Quayola creates worlds where real substance, such as natural or architectural matter, constantly mutates into ephemeral objects, enabling the real and the artificial to coexist harmoniously. Integrating computer-generated material with recorded sources, he explores the ambiguity of realism in the digital realm.

Working in both the artistic and the commercial field, Quayola intelligently experiment with mediums traditionally perceived as separate. Currently active as Visual Artist, Graphic Designer and Director, he constantly collaborates with a diverse range of musicians, animators, computer programmers and architects. Quayola creates hybrid works blurring the boundaries between art, design and filmmaking.