Empty Editions Launch ConcertEmpty Gallery

Empty Gallery is pleased to welcome back Eli Keszler and Rashad Becker for an extended duo performance in our renovated space. Eli and Rashad initiated their musical collaboration at our invitation in 2015 and have since been progressively developing this work during extensive tours in America and Europe. Both among the most distinctive soloists in contemporary experimental music, they have managed to cultivate a striking musical vernacular in their duo performances, which take diverse influences including free jazz, psychedelic rock, electroacoustic composition, and various ethnic musics as a starting point. This shared sound world collapses binary oppositions such as natural/artificial, acoustic/electronic, and organic/synthetic into a complex and vibrant musical ecosystem which makes one imagine improvisation from an alien planet or the ritualistic music of a future society. This performance comes on the heels of a week-long recording residency in Hong Kong developing a collaborative album for the gallery’s record label, Empty Editions.

Following this performance, New York based artist, musician, and publisher James Hoff (of PAN and Primary Information) will present the Asia debut of his recently developed audio-visual performance, HOBO UFO. Taking ambient radio frequencies used for data transmission as raw acoustic materials, Hoff composes complex rhythmic soundscapes which seem to embody the inner life of communications networks. These same frequencies are simultaneously used to generate a dynamic visual component based on Google’s Street View technology, where a disembodied spectator - the “hobo ufo” - erratically wanders Google’s digital representations of public streets in an exploration of surveillance, data networks, and machine intelligence.