Nada: 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.