Evan Zierk:
"The Five Directions is a live 8 channel realization and expansion of my current work in progress of the same working title. The material was recorded and arranged between January 15 and March 1st of 2025, during time spent on the island of St. John in the US Virgin Islands. The material is sourced from hours of field recordings made using a Crown Sass-p MKii recording system, which delivers hyper real HRTF stereo recordings. The work represents a personally new approach to listening, field recording, and composition that I developed during this period. It is all highly technical, spiritual, and emotional.

I travelled to St John with the intention of mourning my father, who passed away on December 1st, 2024. He lived on the island of St. John for 15 years, from 1971 to 1986. In 1982 he was 32, my current age. Much of my emotional processing took the form of combining my Deep Listening practice and field recording and compositional practices, in essence searching for spiritual traces in the landscape of the island, within myself, and within my interaction with the landscape in the form of musical improvisation in various places and spaces. The material also includes audio recordings taken during two Deep Listening workshops I led while on the island at a community center run by my godmother, called Our Place. The resulting work is an organization, amalgamation and synthesizing of these recordings and experiences.

For my New Ear::SPATIAL performance I seek to expand the current work with additional live improvisation of shruti box and bowed and hammered guitar, using various diffusion techniques including a Max/MSP based motion sensing panner tool that uses data from a motion sensor mounted onto a microphone, and also a 6 coil guitar pickup that allows for discrete output of each guitar string."

::

Gianna Santucci:
With Sympathy is a spatial octophonic drone installation featuring dozens of snare drums that are activated by a successive series of tones. Microtonal adjustments are made through a live performance causing the strainers on the snare drums to vibrate sympathetically with particular frequencies.

Moved by the drones, the drums become resonate bodies issuing a responsive sound as though it were coming from themselves. Sound in its affective capacity takes up residence in nearby bodies, and invisible system of touch and sensation. The crowd of drums mirror our own bodies, seemingly untouched but responsive all the same. A drum in its static form is an object informed by its potential to be acted upon. With Sympathy imagines an alternative use To activate a drum is to beat, hit, slap, pound, strike it. The drums in this installation are inverted: no longer beat keepers, but beat receivers, humming and vibrating in response to the drones. Drums have a long history as early communication technology, tied inextricably with the organization and movement of bodies in space and time.

This performance complicates their function by eschewing their percussive intentions, allowing for new rhythms and sonic possibilities to unfold. Through the drones, shivering vibrations emerge from the snares, creating overlapping hums that are in turn reminiscent of insects, helicopters, washing machines, HVAC systems. The drums become activated as a crowd, both individuated as their component parts but also existing as a collective body. Layered oscillations take on a complex rhythmic life of their own, amplified by the snares and reminding us that mobilization exists as a possible byproduct of noise.

::

New Ear ::SPATIAL features works made [or adapted] for our octophonic cube, and hosts two types of events: the ::SPATIAL Sets, which feature two to three artists per night, and Long-Forms, which is intended for either generative, through composed, or improvised works that can and should be played for several hours to unravel. We are committed to the curation of various presentation formats, such as contemporary sound experiments, electro-acoustic multi-channel composition, improvisation, long-form compositions, fixed media works, non-traditional performance configurations, lowercase artistic presence, and workshops.