Nada presents two nights of electronic music entitled Sound, Systems, and Psychoacoustics, featuring work by composers on their label roster and other sympathetic voices in the computer music world. Both nights will include an audiovisual installation by composer Pooch Karton. Sound, Systems, and Psychoacoustics is curated by Michael Masaru Flora.

Ellen Phan is an artist working primarily in the field of computer music. Therapy-specific methodologies are employed as source material, modulated through a variety of processing and synthesis, with an aim to access one’s resource state. Her work is a distinctly hallucinatory psychoacoustic sound world aimed directly, with intent and focus, at the subconscious mind. She is based in Los Angeles.

Gabriel Labov Dunne is an artist, musician and designer that creates systems of light, sound, and form. Subspectral, an experimental sound project, explores architectures created by acoustic phasing, subharmonic deep-earth frequencies, spectral rhythms, and natural overtones that result in somatic, grounding and meditative structures of spacetime. A San Francisco native, he’s shown work internationally at venues including Barcelona Festival Sonar, Interferenze Italia, and is included in the permanent collection of NY MoMA.

Pooch Karton is the nom de guerre of Christian Langheinrich, a multidisciplinary artist born in Chicago in 1970. Through recordings, performance and installation, Pooch Karton explores the multivalent nature of sound with an ever shifting set of interests and strategies. He has released work on Dream Disc and Nada (which he co-runs). In 2019, he co-founded In Situ - Festival for Electronic Music and Sound Art in Minneapolis, and has composed music for film.

Sound, Systems, and Psychoacoustics

Sound, Systems and Psychoacoustics spans two back-to-back days of performance at Indexical, presented in collaboration with Nada. The mini-festival outlines a contemporary practice in the tradition of electronic music while dramatizing the auditory process as material in itself. The artists featured in this festival foreground the act of listening, offering a means of better understanding the dynamic systems (whether auditory, musical, or human-machine) at play, as well as opening space for aesthetic exploration and meaningful critique. These five featured artists work in aesthetic and theoretical threads spanning psychoacoustics, visual and auditory illusions, and generative systems of sound synthesis and composition.

For 10 years, Nada has been slowly yet steadily supporting contemporary electronic music and radical sound work through a series of releases, performances, and festivals, primarily based in Minneapolis but extending online and throughout the country. Emerging from the DIY CD-R label scene of the 2010s, Nada’s releases have spanned ambient music, computer music, electroacoustic composition, IDM, free improvisation, and noise. Nada’s identity—always in flux—has been shaped by the community in which it is entangled, including collaborative projects with designers, artists, researchers, and scholars from a range of influences and practices. These projects have taken the form of limited edition art objects, recordings, edible cassettes, cleansing sprays, happenings, and multimedia installations. Never one to rest on its laurels, Nada is propelled by the synergy of its collaborators and the exploration of present and speculative futures of music.

This series of performances is curated by Michael Masaru Flora, who lives in Ben Lomond and co-runs Nada with Christian Langheinrich.