An evening celebrating the release of two new albums: Matthew Ryals’ impromptus in isolation (Sound As Language) and Chloe Alexandra Thompson’s They Can Never Burn The Stars (SIGE Records). Ryals will be joined by electronic media artist, Paloma Kop, who will provide interactive visuals reacting to a signal feed via his modular synthesizer. Performances by Melody Loveless and Brian Wenner tip the night into the stacked bill territory. Expect a gamut of left-field exploratory electronics including generative composition, improvisation, and live coding.

Matthew Ryals

Matthew Ryals is a musician, sound designer, and educator based in Brooklyn, NY. Primarily working with a modular synthesizer, his music explores aleatoricism, cybernetics, and unfixed forms. Currently, his research investigates human-machine collaboration and the co-authorship of the resultant material. Tiny Mix Tapes has described his music as “filter[ing] the emotion of the human experience through the cold circuitry of electronics”.

His third album, impromptus in isolation, will release June 17, 2022 on Sound As Language. Elaborating on methods developed for his 2021 release Voltage Scores, the entire album was recorded live without overdubs and merges free improvisation, generative processes, and the multi-sectional forms of classical composition. For this upcoming event and summer tour, Matthew has developed a set of “Performance Patches” centered around various generative processes. In lieu of a lead sheet, each patch serves as a jumping off point for deep, improvisational exploration resulting in an unique and entirely unpredictable performance each night.

Chloe Alexandra Thompson

Chloe Alexandra Thompson is a Cree, Canadian, interdisciplinary artist and sound designer. Her work engages tactics of material minimalism to create site-specific installations that sculpt droning, maximalist experiences out of space and sound, often utilizing multi-channel audio and high-density loudspeaker arrays.

Thompson approaches sound as a means of emotional and spiritual connection – embracing the kinesthetic agency of sound to compose abstract feats of spatialized audio recording and synthesis. Her album, They Can Never Burn The Stars, expands through the sonic spectrum, engaging sub-bass tones to high-pitched sirens whose interactions entangle the spatial experience of listening with the expanded field of embodied proprioception. Waves, in their many forms, arrive and depart as constant companions throughout the album, with their presence evoking this non-static quality of our condition as spatial-acoustic beings. Inspired by a story shared from the Sicaugu Oyate people to Thompson’s family, this work takes at its heart that survivance is sanctified and ensured through the ever-changing relationship of knowledge and tradition to that which is more than human.

Soundings included in They Cannot Burn The Stars were recorded within Thompson’s spatial array installation during a music residency at Pioneer Works in Red Hook, Brooklyn. These recordings include incidental sounds such as footsteps and utterances of the public as they experienced the sonic space of the installation, with their bodies absorbing and reflecting sound into the composition in real time. Thompson sees spatial audio of this kind, as well as other modes of distributed media, as presenting opportunities to decentralize the performer, implicating a more active role to the ‘audience’. To Thompson, the poetic and abstracted allegories formed in these interactions, across any medium, allows for space to both practice and enact possibilities for change.

Paloma Kop

Paloma Kop is a video and sound artist using expanded media processes to produce generative time-based work. The visual patterns and behaviors she produces through feedback systems can resemble organic phenomena such as fractals and fluid dynamics, which form an ambient, evolving multisensory environment. Paloma is interested in exploring the universalities between nature, computing, and chaos. She holds an MFA in Electronic Arts from Alfred University and has performed at events such as Vector Hack Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, and Ambient Church. In this upcoming event, she will collaborate with Matthew Ryals to provide an interactive visual component to his sonic performance.

Brian Wenner

Brian Wenner is a Brooklyn-based music composer, sound designer and performer. His artistic practice combines sample collage techniques and live electronic improvisation to create realtime sound compositions. His solo performances center around improvised sample playback manipulation using a modular system and field recordings.

Wenner has composed sound for dance, theater, multi-channel installation and digital release. Wenner most recently released a full length digital album entitled ‘Black River Hymnal’ in April, 2022.

Melody Loveless

Melody Loveless is a musician, performer, educator, and multimedia artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Her work ranges from live coding performance, generative sound installations, multisensory performance, and more. An active performer and member of the NYC creative community, she has performed around the city in various venues, including Babycastles, Wonderville, (le) poisson rouge, Performance Space New York, and Eyebeam. Past honors include artist residencies (local and international), performances and talks at conferences and festivals, and awards and press for her music. She has presented talks on music education and her artistic practice for various organizations and events including the New Music Gathering, Monthly Music Hackathon, Bates Digital Music Symposium, and Pathways: Art and Technology. As an educator, she has taught in various institutes and organizations including New York University, the New School, Hunter College, Music Hackspace, and Harvestworks. She is also part of the first cohort of Cycling 74’s Max Certified Trainer Program.