As part of Sean Griffin’s second residency, EMPAC presents three video installations that cover the past six years of his integral collaboration with the artist Catherine Sullivan. Sullivan’s work comes out of theater, but has become primarily realized as multi-screen video installation with Griffin scoring and collaborating on the overall aurality of the work, in one case even authoring a pseudo-Neanderthal language used throughout Triangle of Need. In The Chittendens, the 16 actors execute elaborate movement structures, vocalize, and portray distinct attitudes from within characters embodying stereotyped identities of 19th and 20th century America. Existing somewhere between/beyond the formal approaches of Yvonne Rainer, Mike Kelley, and Anton Webern, the work is highly structured, beyond catharsis, and full of embedded cultural critique. In Triangle of Need, the far-flung, conceptually mosaic work takes the idea of the Neanderthal as its source metaphor but explodes into fractured narratives ranging from Nigerian email scams to figure skating. Triangle of Need, pairs seductive cinematic conventions with provocative ideas about evolution, human behavior and social inequality. D-Pattern is an exuberant work in which the emergence of narrative erupts from automata-like compositional/choreographic structures. Originally a live performance, the throng of actors/dancers in the piece perform repetitive movements that embody and effuse certain attitudes — and through the colliding and recombination of encounters a micro-history begins to unfold for the viewer. It's like a Ouija board, Griffin says, a conjectural machine spelling out something that isn't really there.

Upending, a work commissioned by EMPAC, is a stereoscopic theater performance, an actor-less drama of disorientation and reorientation that compels us to rethink our relationship with the material world. Using ordinary flat photographs and processing them with non-photorealistic rendering and stereoscopic HD video, Upending transfigures familiar objects, spaces, and persons in ways that are both beautiful and uncanny. Upending takes the form of live 3D cinema and has the viewers’ eyes probing the projected imagery almost as if touching its light, feeling for the illusory surfaces of things as they cross the threshold from abstraction to likeness.

Upending is enacted on both perceptual and thematic levels. Ordinary objects, spaces, and bodies are probed and queried from unfamiliar perspectives, so that viewers become exquisitely aware of their own perceptual processes and of their minds’ continual attempt to spin out meaning from what their eyes take in. The play of images is accompanied by an EMPAC-produced recording of Morton Feldman’s First String Quartet by the FLUX Quartet that places the listener, literally, in the center of the ensemble, with every sonic gesture articulated across space simultaneously. Through this aural lens, the moving image becomes almost balletic, even as the projected play of light allows the audience to hear Feldman as never before.

Yvon Bonenfant, a vocal and interdisciplinary performance artist, collaborated with EMPAC staff to produce Beacons. The work was inspired by a simple, ubiquitous feature in our environment: the flashing beacon light. The work was a collaboration with David Shearing who generated a video landscape—replete with flashing highway lights, antenna beacons, ocean buoys, and lighthouses­—that explored the ways humans signal to one another. Often working in the dark, the artists recorded layers of landscaped sound using the rhythms, structures, and poetic resonances of the lights as inspiration and experimented with screen, speaker placement, and lighting to balance the acoustic against electronic sound, and live lights against the just-perceptible physical body doing the singing. Premiered at EMPAC, the piece went on to tour seven venues in the UK in 2011.

A UK-based Canadian artist, Bonenfant is also senior lecturer in Performing Arts and director of Research and Knowledge Exchange at the University of Winchester, UK, and an overseas associate of the Institut d’Esthetique des Arts et Technologies of the University of Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne.

From Lisbon, musician Rafael Toral presents a collection of his Space Studies, a series of works exploring different combinations of gestural control and sonic palette. Each study is an interdependent spatial and aural exploration that together create an instrument of Toral's own design. These instruments require visible performance techniques that in many cases are more akin to dance than to what we think of as part of a laptop or electronic music performance (clicking, knobbing, mousing, buttoning).

Is listening to a recording of a bottle somehow still listening to a bottle? What about the wind around a glacier or a hammer? New works using up to eighteen loudspeakers by composers Doug Henderson (Berlin), Seth Cluett (Paris), and Natasha Barrett (Oslo) lead the listener into questions of what is real,true, or important in identifying the concrete origin of a sound used in the work. What are the possible, or meaningful, transferences of time and place in audio works beginning with documentary-style sound recording? Is it possible to deliver an acoustic photograph? Is that the intention of the composer? And in either case, can we perceive it like that? Or what is it all about? Zeroth Channel is a series of concerts using a variety of approaches to "multichannel sound diffusion" an area of musical practice since the 1950s where composers have used space, the location and way a sound literally takes up space. .. where a sound comes from as important to the art as pitch, rhythm, timbre, or other traditionally "musical" concerns. In the past decade many techniques have come to the fore, several quite mathematically complex, that allow composers greater amounts of control, both compositionally and in performance, over the soundfield and the possibility to create a three-dimensional sense of aural place. The series title, Zeroth Channel, refers to the ears and the mind of the listener. This is the “zero”. So the listener can be seen as the “zeroth channel”— amongst all the other audio streams, the one where it all comes together. And while the technological setup in this kind of music is often dauntingly elaborate, the technology should “disappear”, and the audio streams, however many there are, give way to the role of the zeroth. The title serves as a reminder that even when lots of technology is used to create the possibility of experience, we are our own, active mediation, to it. The “zeroth channel” is you, the listener.

“Bobby McFerrin’s greatest gift to his audience may be changing them from spectators into celebrants and transforming a concert hall into a playground ... ” – Los Angeles Times

A solo performance by the inimitable vocalist, improvisor, conductor and musical enigma whose singular career includes performances with major symphony orchestras, several unusual ensembles of his own design, audience-participatory improvisations, 10 Grammies and one of the most popular songs of the 20th century. McFerrin, the son of two opera singers (his father, Robert McFerrin Sr. was the first African American soloist at the Metropolitan Opera) is perhaps most widely known for the 1988 hit song Don't Worry, Be Happy. The popularity of that song—which won Grammies for both Record of the Year and Song of the Year, and hit #1 in nearly every country in the world—was astounding. Not to mention, a little unlikely for a tune created on the spot in the recording studio. But McFerrin's reaction to the song's mammoth success was in keeping with the spontaneous nature of its composition: He took a sabbatical from touring and recording to seriously study conducting, working with mentors such as Leonard Bernstein and Seiji Ozawa. From his early career as a pianist, through his groundbreaking work as a vocal improvisor, to his stint as a pop superstar, to his conducting of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra and his appointment as creative director of the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, and beyond, McFerrin's life in music has transcended expectation. This concert at EMPAC will be no exception.

Composer Sean Griffin has created large and small-scale concert works, collaborative sound and video installations, film scores, and many projects in between. While in residence at EMPAC, Griffin created and then presented Hitting Things, Saying Things, an evening of performances that spans work that Griffin refers to as “percussion theater.” These staged compositions use ploys such as an aurally driven, virtuosic game of pattycake, theatricalized misuse of household objects, and other dissolutions of music performance into the terrain of theater.

Performers included Don Nichols, Greg Stewart, and Aiyun Huang and the show featured the premiere of a new work for Huang, an acclaimed soloist from Montreal whose theatricality as a performer blends music with theater. Encompassing many languages, styles, media, and forms, Griffin states that his unique compositional works “rely on interdisciplinary incongruities positioned at the intersection of sound, image, performance, and the archive.” His works have been commissioned and presented internationally; Griffin lives and works in Los Angeles.

Along his unusual path for a composer, Sean Griffin has created large and small-scale concert works, collaborative sound and video installations, film scores, and many projects in-between. This spring Griffin will be in-residence twice, working on two new projects and each time sharing some of his recent work with the public. Hitting Things, Saying Things is an evening of performances that spans work that might best be called percussion theater. These pointedly staged compositions use such ploys as an aurally-driven, virtuosic game of pattycake, theatricalized misuse of household objects, and other dissolutions of music performance into the terrain of theater. The show will feature the premier of a new work for Aiyun Huang, the acclaimed soloist, finished as part of Griffin’s residency at EMPAC. Performing will be Don Nichols, Greg Stewart and Aiyun Huang.

Best known for his darkly humorous stop-motion animated films that touch on themes of love, death, salvation and the underworld, filmmaker Brent Green will perform live with a series of his recent short films. Guest musicians, including the extraordinary Brendan Canty (Fugazi), Howe Gelb (Giant Sand) and Jim Becker (Califone) will accompany Green’s intense narration, which ranges from quiet, vulnerable storytelling to cathartic fumes bordering on the evangelistic. The self-taught animator is part 21st-century folk artist, part rock star, part confessional poet and part Blakean visionary. In live performance he screens a stop-motion autobiography of rich, idiosyncratic symbology to an accompaniment of raw Americana, harrowing and beautiful in its fragility. Green’s work lives in, exemplifies and tests that very trait, human fragility: We are by no means sound, he keens over Telecaster strain, not even weatherproof.

The new early music ensemble Quicksilver presents a concert of brilliant and virtuosic music from the avant-garde of the 1600s. Italy in the early 17th century was not just the home of the new science of Galileo, but of a nuove musiche or new music as well. Composers were experimenting with the emerging genre of the sonata — an abstract work for instruments — and discovering ways of creating elaborate and theatrical musical conversations between the players. This new music is full of abrupt contrasts, dramatic shifts of texture, and spectacular solo writing, as well as infectiously rhythmic dance movements and heartbreakingly beautiful melodies.