Sluicer is a performance system for spatial audio improvisation, adaptable to various output channel configurations from stereo to high density loudspeaker arrays. In this work, two 20-voice, erratic synthesizers operate as a roving “chorus” under the player’s direction. Both synths have a series of multichannel effects designed to work specifically with high order ambisonic signals, allowing the player to create and alter spatial dimensions. As audio flows, the guiding action is like closing/opening gates in a lock on a waterway. The results are timbral and spatial churns, swells, floods and drains, motion in repetition, expansion, and contraction. Sluicer is programmed in Max with tactile interfaces being high resolution, multi-touch control surfaces and a DJ-style MIDI controller.

Sluicer has been performed at Virginia Tech’s Cube Fest 2024 ︎︎︎on 140 loudspeaker channels and at the New Interfaces for Musical Expression ︎︎︎2024 conference in Utrecht, Netherlands, prepared for the 160 loudspeaker channels of the Game of Life Wave Field Synthesis speaker array.

Crossroads blends field recordings made in Soweto, Pretoria, Johannesburg, and Harare in 2018 and 2024 with archived sounds collected during the same time periods. Samples, voices, instruments, and the ambient hum of tea plantation factories weave personal and collective histories, forming a layered dialogue across time and space.

The work also features samples from John Akomfrah's seminal 1995 film "The Last Angel of History." This sound composition responds to Akomfrah's exploration of Afrofuturism and cultural memory, while reflecting on the possibilities of reconnection under the conditions of capital and the nation-state.

Crossroads questions how memories are shaped, distorted, and reclaimed within systems of power. It invites listeners to consider how histories are remembered and how futures might be imagined when boundaries—both geographic and psychological—are crossed.

Transmission / Assembly is a collaborative work by my group Redux with performer / sound artist Joe Cantrell. It is based on a series of recordings made at SRST and Mocoxon Studios in Providence, RI during a particularly cold week in February 2023. Joe took the recordings back to San Diego for editing and passed the results along to me for mixing, mastering and reworking for multichannel presentation during my residency at Elektronmusikstudion EMS in Stockholm that fall. The resulting piece was installed as part of the Society for Arts and Technology’s SAT Fest 2024 in Montréal, QC using the Satosphere’s 157 channel loudspeaker array; this is its US premiere.

In the Winter of 2020, I began cutting my own hair using electric hair clippers. At first, I used clippers to shave my hair so that it was a single, uniformed length. This was simple enough; choose a clipper setting and make contact with hair follicles on the surface of my head. These follicles are an audible pattern that I became very familiar with as a type of score. A haircut is a type of score – if you’re listening for this experience. As time went on, I became interested in different types of non-uniformed fade patterns that could emerge across my hair follicles. This changed what I heard as I cut and also changed the appearance of my hair.

A “fade” is a type of haircut that emphasizes gradualness. This performance centers on a binaural recording from 2025 of me cutting my hair into a fade pattern. The binaural recording is then spatialized and processed, accompanied by a video of me receiving a haircut from my friend/barber in 2015.

AURA is composed of a series of hydrophone recordings from North America’s first waterways to be poisoned by toxic industrial runoff. Sourced in the Blackstone Valley and Atlantic coast, the Susquehanna, Chemung, and East Rivers among other kills and creeks—once exploited to power mills, I’m now mining for sound and connection. Ghosts of shipyards, payphone phreaks, data streams, and feral signals linger in the currents, whispering what was and what remains. The hydrophone recordings were made in every season between 2020-2022. 

The final compositions will be published later this year on the multimedia imprint Spectral Affect. 

Perilymph Parallax (2025) is an exploration of spatial depth through sound field synthesis, ambisonic beamforming, and the physiological production of sounds within the inner ear. Debuting our custom-designed and built wave field synthesis array and IKO speaker system, the work is a study in multidimensional sound diffusion where material is actively reshaped by the listener’s position and movement. In the final section, the auditory system becomes an instrument through the creative application of difference tones—sounds generated by hair cells inside the cochlea and spatially perceived as localized within the ear. Listeners are encouraged to move their heads and place their hands around their ears to discover perceptual nodes where sounds emerge, disappear, and transform. The work was created using a Buchla 200 modular synthesizer and Chechile’s Ear Tone Toolbox Eurorack modules.

Shawn Greenlee is a composer, sound artist, and Professor at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) where he leads the Studio for Research in Sound & Technology (SRST) and is the Department Head for Digital + Media.  His recent work explores spatial audio, high density loudspeaker arrays, and erratic sound synthesis techniques.

Greenlee has been active as a solo electronic / electroacoustic improvisor since 1997 and has toured extensively across the US and Europe. Conference and festival performances include New Interfaces for Musical Expression (2024 Utrecht, 2018 Blacksburg, 2015 Baton Rouge, 2014 London, 2013 Daejeon), International Computer Music Conference (2021 Santiago, 2018 Daegu, 2011 Huddersfield, 2005 Barcelona), BEAST FEaST (2017 Birmingham), PdCon16 (2016 New York), Cube Fest (2024, 2019, 2016 Blacksburg), Re-new (2013 Copenhagen), IN TRANSIT (2008 Berlin), and Elevate (2007 Graz), among others.

Greenlee’s solo and group discography spans over fifty releases. He is a founding member of Landed, active since 1997 and known for its deconstructed rock, rhythmic noise, and intense live performances. From 1999-2001, he performed with Six Finger Satellite.

Greenlee holds a Ph.D. in Computer Music and New Media from Brown University. 

Michael Demps’ practice is fueled by a fascination with the nature of being—being in one’s body and more specifically, the social structures that confine the body’s ability to move through the world. It is important to understand that such experiences are different in different bodies in order to develop more empathetic relationships with one another, and celebrate more complex and nuanced ways of being. As an artist, Demps is dedicated to exploring notions of the Black interior through making. This interest permeates his collaborative and non-collaborative projects. During the past year he has had the opportunity to exhibit work that contends with the mapping of an interior interconnectivity to the collective through the personal and through somatic activation. His work ranges from abstract monoprint image generation and ghost printing to creating objects that serve as spiritual markings put forth to hold space for self-discovery, recovery and recuperation. These generative systems of making through recontextualization, improvisation and repetition serve as grounding values of his practice and exist in a fugitive space against authorship as a gatekeeper of racism and capitalism. The current cultural shift due to the pandemic has left Demps searching for ways to move his practice forward and engage with audiences in new ways. 
mjdemps.studio

Mark Cetilia is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice exists at the nexus of analog and digital technologies. Exploring the possibilities of generative systems, Cetilia’s work is an exercise in carefully controlled chaos. Over the past two decades, he has worked to develop idiomatic performance systems utilizing custom hardware and software, manifesting in a rich tapestry of sound and image.

He is a member of the media art group Redux, recipients of a Creative Capital grant in Emerging Fields, and the electroacoustic ensemble Mem1, described by The Grove Dictionary of American Music as “a complex cybernetic entity” whose “evolving, custom-built systems are as important an aspect of the duo’s achievements as their ever-innovative sound.”

Cetilia’s work has been screened / installed at the ICA (London), Oboro (Montréal), O’ (Milan), MoBY (Bat Yam), SoundWalk (Long Beach), and R.K. Projects (Providence). He has performed widely at such venues as Kunstraum Walcheturm (Zurich), the Borealis Festival (Bergen), Café OTO (London), STEIM (Amsterdam), LACE (LA), Roulette (NYC), Goethe-Institut (Boston), Issue Project Room (Brooklyn), Menza Pri Koritu (Ljubljana), Uganda (Jerusalem), Sound of Mu (Oslo), and Electronic Church (Berlin).

His sound works have been published by MORE Records, YDLMIER, Lacryphagy, Interval, Radical Matters, Dragon’s Eye, IYNGES, and the Estuary Ltd. imprint, which he runs with his partner Laura Cetilia. He lives and works in Providence, RI, where he teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design and Brown University. 
mark.cetilia.org

A collaboration between Mark Cetilia and Joe Cantrell, Redux exists as an exercise in destruction and recombination. We examine existing technologies, break them down to their essential components, and re-assemble them into new entities. This practice brings new ideas to light about not only the nature of our technological objects, but also the structures that enable them to exist. In rethinking how systems can be perceived, new ways of using and combining them can be enabled. This includes natural ecosystems, technological infrastructure, and societal interconnections. Redux is the cut that cures — the mosaic that can only emerge when the original is shattered.

Redux was awarded a multi-year grant in Emerging Fields from the Creative Capital Foundation for their monolithic sound installation Callspace, which uses cellular technologies to explore the audio potentials of unutilized, inaccessible space. Their work has been presented by The Dog Star Orchestra (Los Angeles, CA) and installed at the Société des arts technologiques (Montréal, QC), Machines with Magnets (Providence, RI), and SoundWalk (Long Beach, CA). They have performed at such venues as REDCAT / Disney Hall (Los Angeles, CA), XFest (Dorchester, MA), Black Lace (Providence, RI), Cold Spring Hollow (Belchertown, MA), and Wave Farm (Acra, NY).

reduxproject.com

Will Johnson is an audio artist from the Bronx, New York. His work centers on blackness -- the material and immaterial conditions of space that shape sound into movement and historical record. He holds a B.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies from NYU-Gallatin. He is the recipient of the Jerome Foundation Fellowship for Sound Art/Composition (2018) and the McKnight Foundation Fellowship for Musicians (2019). His commercial work includes licensed sound for Acura, Beats Electronics, HBO and collaborative contributions to 2016 grammy-winning best electronic album Skin. His live performances have been commissioned by Lincoln Center, the Kitchen and MASS MoCA.

Maralie Armstrong’s multi-mediated works emphasize the evolution of spiritual and emotional expression via technology and seduce poetics from human-machine interaction. Her research probes the multifaceted interrelationships of gender and spirituality as well as appropriated uses of technologies throughout time. Her work includes performance, sculpture, photography, video and sound.

As a performer/vocalist/dancer, Armstrong has toured over a dozen countries with the projects Valise (solo), Humanbeast, Assembly of Light, Tem Eyos Ki, Bloodhuff and Soophie Nun Squad. Her collaborations in choreography and dance have been seen in a Nick Cave Soundsuit performance, Bonedust’s Fruit of the Ash and in Hana van der Kolk’s The Third Thing. Her work has also been featured in Vice Magazine, The Fader and the RISD Museum’s online journal Manual, among other publications. 
maralie.com

Alex Chechile is a sound artist, composer, and electronic artist whose work develops in parallel with research in neuroscience, psychoacoustics, and the biomechanics of hearing.  With a particular interest in the relationship between sound and the body, his immersive compositions, installations, and performances aim to bring transparency to otherwise invisible processes in biological and technological systems.

Questions that arise in his artistic work lead to formalized studies, and the results cyclically inform his sonic practice. Chechile is a leading researcher on the psychoacoustic study and creative application of difference tones, which are sounds that are generated in the inner ear and are perceived as localized within the head.  His work exhibits how difference tones expand layers of sonic material to include sounds outside the acoustic space, as well as how they create an additional nested layer of spatial depth between loudspeakers and ears.  Moving beyond the established two-tone difference tone paradigm, Chechile’s behavioral research shows up to seven additional types of difference tones are reliably perceived from multi-tone acoustic stimuli.  In his series of pieces On the Sensations of Tone (2010— ), Chechile explores the physicality of sound and spatial depth using difference tones, and his Ear Tone Toolbox is the first widely available collection of software and modular instruments for evoking the phenomenon. 
alexchechile.com

Joe Cantrell is a sound artist specializing in installations, compositions, and performances inspired by the consequences of technological objects and practices. His work examines the incessant acceleration of technology and media production, its ownership, and the waste it produces. In the rush to get the newest and shiniest things, the less new and less shiny are cast off: today's hot commodity is often tomorrow's garbage. In solidarity with these abandoned objects and the hands that put them together, Joe makes electronic feedback soundscapes using only discarded, obsolete and / or broken technology. It's a physical collaboration: the machines listen to themselves and act accordingly. Joe offers suggestions to them and they make sound together.

Joe has presented his research, art and performances for audiences around the world, including the Society for Electroacoustic Music in the US, the International Computer Music Association, the New Instruments for Musical Expression conference, as well as artist residencies in New York, London, Beijing, and Rotterdam.

 joecantrell.net