Textures Arc The Points is dedicated to my late teacher Mark Chambers, who was a great composer that often introspect about music. Thank you for introducing me to the world of “Spectra and Pixies” and the world of electronics

Textures Arc The Points was commissioned by the Debris Project; utilizing sound solely from their database.

Engulfed by the many points, as these materials conglomerate within the plane 
Matter as figurative and external

Conglomerates veil the arcs

Meandering through the flow, at times with extreme exaggeration Flow that is never the same
As flow is made up of impermanent elements

Cyclic material that occurs “once”; an ephemeral quality 
Often unfair

Endure with an inner rhythm of
Textures of a phantom-like movement
Veiled by the engulfment of the points

We endure through perception of, not form, but rather

Yielding the flow
And respond to the “through” material

Textures Arc The Points

Binaural mix of one of the sound installation's broadcasts [best listened to with headphones]:



MYCELIUM GARDEN project - winner of EUR ArTec's Symbiosis call for projects

We are building a device for developing sensitive interactions with the mycelium, an organism that facilitates symbiosis, by interpreting the specificity of its electrical expressions. This project aims to take into account the singularity of a mycelium network in a mode of interaction with humans based on listening and attention. This model will attempt to retain the dimension of otherness in sensory interaction.

We will combine our skills to develop an AI model that will enable us to map mycelium behavior and co-compose sounds thanks to the electrical variations recorded and classified. These data will be linked with graphical, textual and sound data to generate mycelium communication modes. This experimental process will enable us to enter into a relationship with a non-human organism, observe its behavior and adjust our behavior in interaction with it. In this way, we will question the notions of intelligence and adaptation in a three-agent composition process, human/AI/Mycelium. How intelligent is the mycelium compared with the human musician and artificial intelligence: what do we mean by this? This installation deals with the importance of recognizing the otherness of non-human and non-animal beings in the ecological project of caring for living things.

PROJECT LEADER(S)
Diane Schuh (CICM - Musidanse - EA1572/EDESTA/Paris8)

PROJECT TEAM
Anne Sèdes, Alain Bonardi and David Fierro (CICM - MUSIDANSE/Paris8) Guillaume Peureux and Julien Schuh (CSLF/Université Paris Nanterre)
Charlotte Janis and Roberto dell'Orco (SPORA)
Stephen Whitmarsh (ICM) Hugo Scurto (ArTec post-doc)
Salim Mohamed Aissi (LIP6 - Computer Science Laboratory - CNRS - Sorbonne University)

IN COLLABORATION WITH
MSH Paris Nord, EA 1572 Esthétique, musicologie, danse et création musicale (musidanse), Université Paris Nanterre

Mycelium Garden - One iteration of the sound installation - phase 1 (2023)

44.5B-FPS (“forty-four and a half billion frames per second”) is the expressive juncture at which my photography, videography, documentarian practices meet my practice as a producer and deejay: sketching, recording, composing, mixing, and producing for spatial audio and for stereo. A portrait of late capitalist existence and a love song for my urban coming-of-age in Brooklyn, Berlin, and Chicago, this soundscape asserts that the mundane always gives way to the divine: that the certainty of beat, pattern, and routine in all things belie that same reverence, that soul-assuaging spirituality, one �finds in listening to the waves crash into the rocks at Promontory Point, so much as when hearing the overhead intercom announce “This is Cottage Grove, trains open on the right at Cottage Grove...” The juxtaposition of field recorded human-made and naturalistic elements aims to trouble the distinction between digital and analog sounds, disrupt the distance between these seemingly unrelated elements, and highlight harmonies of coexistence between the artificial and the natural.

44.5B FPS

performed and written for Mikołaj Rytowski for the ATTACCA Festival 2024; premiered on June 1 at Druckereihalle im Ackermannshof, Basel, Switzerland

recording: Robin Michel
mixed by Isaac Roth Blumfield

The electronics for this work were recorded in part at the SWR Experimentalstudio in Freiburg, Germany with assistance from sound engineers Thomas Hummel and Luis Miehlich

link to binaural version (for listening with headphones): https://soundcloud.com/isaacrothblumfield/strange-symmetry-for-percussion-and-ambisonic-live-electronics-2024-binaural-version-use-headphones

strange symmetry | for percussion and ambisonic live electronics (2024) – stereo version

Where darkness swallows the sky (2024)
from The Memory of Water Vol. II

Premiered by Martine Thomas, viola, Thea Mesirow, cello and voice on March 16, 2024 at The DiMenna Center for Classical Music in New York City, NY.

Where darkness swallows the sky

The Memory of Water Vol. I, the sky moves beneath our feet (2023)
by Camila Agosto

Performed by Martine Thomas, viola and voice, and Camila Agosto, electronics.

About the Piece: 

What if, at the end of your life, your soul dropped into a pool of water—a single drop returning to an ocean, surrounded by other droplets on their separate journeys? As you move forward, you must release the attachments you’ve developed in this lifetime, shedding the layers that defined your identity and individuality. Your memories, roles, scars, and all details that once defined you must be let go. 

The Memory of Water is an ongoing collaborative project that explores the relationship between the natural erosion of human memory and broader ecological concerns through the journey of a life that begins in water and returns to water. This project integrates live composition, improvisation, custom instrument design, poetry, and electronics. Within Volume I, I delve into questions of what is remembered and forgotten, and the impact of change when dealing with loss and grief, through a collection of texts written by Martine Kinsella Thomas, a violist and poet. These texts explore life cycles that start from the ocean and return to the ocean, weaving ecological concern and personal narratives. Volume II continues this exploration through a new collaboration with Martine Thomas and cellist Thea Mesirow. In this volume, we navigate a new environment marked by the murmurs of souls, examining the vulnerability involved in surrendering one’s memory to the distortions of time.


The sky moves beneath our feet - Excerpt

Paracusia III.descry (2019-2020)
by Camila Agosto

World premiere performed by Justin Massey (saxophone) at Lenfest Center for Arts, February 2020. 

Audio Recording by David Adamcyk.

Paracusia III. descry

With the term "countersinging" bioacousticians refer to the vocal interaction between two or more birds of a same species. It often appears to be a territorial negotiation, but it could also be a kind of courtship display or a way to exchange other types of information. During countersinging the individuals behave according to precise rules conveying messages whose meaning, however, we mainly fail to understand. This piece takes some of the evidence at our disposal about countersinging in birds as a starting point to build an evolving interaction between two instruments. 

Written for and premiered at ilSUONO Contemporary Music Week 2025
Michele Bianchini, baritone saxophone; Giacomo Piermatti, double bass
Audio Recording/Mixing/Mastering: Theocharis Papatrechas
July 13, 2025
Chiesa di Santa Maria dei Servi
Sansepolcro, Italy

Countersinging

This is the short edit, the long edit is on Bandcamp: https://ausgesuchtestenohren.bandcamp.com/album/memorial-to-a-long-lost-piano

The present work originates from an intimate engagement with a personal sound archive. In 2017, I recorded the interior resonance of an upright piano that had accompanied my childhood — an instrument now lost, along with the family home in which it stood. These recordings, focusing on the raw timbral qualities of the strings, became the basis for Exercises in Minimalism (2018). The material was subjected to reductive processes: attacks were removed, durations extended, and harmonic overtones isolated and layered to form sustained piano drones. Through this process, the familiar sound of the piano was transformed into an abstract field of resonance, emphasizing texture over gesture and continuity over articulation.

Eight years later, I returned to these recordings and composed a new piece derived entirely from the earlier material. Conceived as a funeral music for the lost piano, the work employs convolution reverb generated from the Hamilton Mausoleum — a site renowned for its exceptionally long and unpredictable echo. The resulting spatialization situates the reconstructed piano sounds within a vast and reverberant acoustic environment, blurring the boundaries between presence and absence, memory and space.

This composition explores the intersection of personal memory, acoustic space, and sonic decay. By recontextualizing archival sound within an architectural reverberation, it examines how listening can become an act of remembrance.


Bandcamp

Memorial to a long-lost piano (edit)

The Gardens Between The Pillars

The Gardens Between the Pillars is one of five movements of The Elemental Cycles, where each cycle uses a primary element as the principal character.  In fact, all five cycles are considered works for “cinema for the ear.”  For this cycle, the sole element used is wood, including sound images pertaining to wood.  There are books and creaky doors, wood surfaces where steady and irregular footsteps walk, the flow of trees pertaining to The Pillars, as well as divine and earthly creatures, and pure and warpy, rough music to accompany this cinema for the ear.

The Gardens, first and foremost, are made up of interior and exterior scenes, motions and projections, and the emergence of figurative and explicit sounds from the decentralization of The Pillars.

In search of a narrative, doors open and close, pages turn,
The duality of images that represents:

Theory and Knowledge
Beauty and Violence
Life and Death
Temptation and Enlightenment

The duality of these sound-images contains the same motion ‘not two’: Advaya
The Pillars points at transcending this duality through 
The reallocated sound images, sound function, and motions
As ways to navigate The Gardens Between

The Pillars¬ are the paths, which reveal the interconnection of the natural, the inter-complexity of the nurtured, and the intervening of scenes through insertion
Which often feel that what is represented is horrific and cruel

We recognize from the far plane The Gardens as a gestalt labyrinth
Up close we perceive the many, many paths and narratives
Between The Pillars, we are presented implications of sounds that have neither beginning nor end

A wanderer severed from illusion in the infinite forest
An area of the Everblossom trees, a life of fleeting beauty 
It is the worldly sculpture of the Bas and High-Relief 

Realms of the Divine and Mortal

An immersion of boundless rhizome—a chiasmus of sonic ascription
An immersion of all materials of wood perceived 
A duality must be understood to walk the way broadly 
And you will hear it in everything 


The Gardens Between The Pillars

Camila Agosto is a composer, interdisciplinary artist, and educator whose electroacoustic music examines how
we perceive sound and vibration, exploring their physiological, mental, and emotional impacts. In her work, Camila collaborates with
musicians, visual artists, choreographers, and instrument builders, seeking to uncover intersections across artistic fields. Her work
includes both fully notated and improvisational compositions emphasizing timbral and textural exploration. She aims to reveal the
sonic potentialities of acoustic instruments while highlighting the human element in live performance. Her projects encompass
acoustic and electroacoustic concert works, interdisciplinary collaborations with visual media and dance, installations, and fixed media
creations.

Camila was honored to be the youngest fellow to be accepted to the American Academy in Berlin and is a recipient of the Fall 2023 Berlin Prize and Deutsche Bank Fellowship in Music Composition from the Academy. Her music has been commissioned and performed by leading artists and featured by venues throughout the United States and abroad. Camila is currently an ABD doctoral candidate at Columbia University in Music Composition.

David Quang-Minh Nguyen is an audio engineer, sound designer/re-recording mixer, and composer of concert music. His current interests lie in composing acousmatic works that explore multi-channel loudspeaker expansion, various types of sound spatialization, and immersive audio.

Recognized nationally and internationally, David has had his works presented at the June in Buffalo New Music Festival, where he received individual master classes with Harvey Sollberger, Martin Bresnick, Roger Reynolds, and Brian Ferneyhough. He was an active participant in the Festival DME under the direction of Åke Parmerud, Musique & Recherches Académie d'été de composition électroacoustique under the direction of Annette Vande Gorne and João Pedro Oliveira, and the Sounds Around Me Festival under Thomas Gorbach. He was also selected by Master Artist Robert Normandeau for a residency at the Atlantic Center for the Arts.

His works have been presented at more than fifty national and international events, and he is a laureate or finalist in numerous competitions.  He has been published on ABLAZE Records' Electronic Masters Vol. 7 and received an honorable mention at the XII° Destellos Electroacoustic Competition 2019 for his work Misprints.  He also placed 2nd in the XIII° Destellos competition for Adumbrations, was a finalist for the PRIX CIME 2019, and won 2nd place for the ASCAP/SEAMUS Award for his work Weight Stranding. In 2021, his SEAMUS-commissioned piece Whale Song Stranding was selected for presentation on the SEAMUS 31 CD and received the Ars Electronica Forum Wallis selection.  David was awarded the Prix CIME 2023 Residency Award for Whale Song Stranding.  His work Texture Arc the Points won 1st place in the ULJUS Međunarodno Pijanističko Takmičenje Smederevo Competition and 2nd place in the prestigious Concours Biennal de Composition Acousmatique Métamorphoses.

David Q. Nguyen holds a BM from Old Dominion University, where he studied with Andrey R. Kasparov and Mark Chambers.  He also graduated at the top of his class from The Omega Studios School of Applied Recording Arts & Sciences with a focus on Audio Engineering in the Music Industry and Film/Television.  He has received his Master and a Doctor of Musical Arts degree at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where his primary teachers are Reynold Tharp, Erik Lund, Eli Fieldsteel, Sever Tipei, and Scott A. Wyatt.

Acousmatic music, sound art and field recordings from Vienna and elsewhere.

contact: isaac.blumfield@gmail.com

Isaac Roth Blumfield is a composer from Saint Paul, Minnesota, currently based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He writes experimental music for acoustic and electronic instruments which explores resonance, materiality, and memory through expanded sonic approaches towards instruments and objects. His music looks for the strange spaces between subjective and unconscious experience, exploring uncanny places between beauty, pain, and strangeness.
His music has been influenced through  through work with performers such as ensemble sonic space basel alumni, Schallfeld Ensemble, violinists Austin Wulliman and Chris Otto, line upon line percussion trio, Ensemble Modern, Barcelona Modern Ensemble, guitarist Francesco Palmieri and Jamie Monck, and Quartetto Maurice at programs such as the Bludenzer Tage zeitgemäßer Musik, the Banff Centre for Creativity, Yellow Barn Young Artists Program, New Music on the Point, Valencia International Performance Academy, Ticino Musica Festival and Freie Universität Berlin im Sommer.  
His music has been broadcast on Swiss Public Radio and supported by the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation, Fondation Nicati - De Luze, and the Hirschmann Stiftung. He graduated with his Bachelor's degree in composition at New England Conservatory in Boston and a Master's degree in composition at the Hochschule für Musik FHNW in Basel, Switzerland and is currently pursuing post graduate studies at the Universität für Musik und Darstellende Kunst in Vienna. His primary teachers have included Stratis Minakakis, Timothy McCormack, Caspar Johannes Walter, Svetlana Maras, and Clara Iannotta. He is currently a PhD candidate at Harvard University, studying with Chaya Czernowin and Hans Tutschku.

fearlessly and spitefully made
inquiries: contactpanty@proton.me

UPCOMING
Dec 06 @ Bando Blowout
Dec 13 @ Elastic Arts
Dec 19 @ Smartbar
Jan 18, 2025 @ TBA

PAST
April 24 @ Cafe Mustache
April 28 @ PHL
May 3 UPSETTING RELEASE PARTY @ CHI
May 18 @ CHI
May 24 @ Stankbugzzz
June 7 @ Groove Salon
July 7 @ TBA, CHI
July 13 @ Pritzker Pavilion
Aug 15 @ Pritzker Pavilion
Aug 17 @ McKinley Park
Aug 25 @ Blacktivities (soundbath)
Aug 30 @ Out in the Night

diane schuh /// composer, researcher & landscape architect

New tracks tagged #spatialization