HOLOCENE’S 22ND ANNIVERSARY NIGHT 1- Quadrophonic sound featuring: Byron Westbrook Marcus Fischer Sanae Yamada – 21+

First emerging from within New York’s experimental music scene over the last decade and a half and now based in Los Angeles, Byron Westbrook has woven intricate tapestries of sonority that bridge the worlds of sound art, installation, avant-garde electronic music and synthesis. Westbrook creates sculptural and immersive compositions, with highly acclaimed releases on imprints like Shelter Press, Important Records, Root Strata, Hands In The Dark, Umor Rex, and Ash International, presentations at the Walker Art Center, ICA London, MOCA Los Angeles, MoMA PS1, MaerzMusik, Akousma and Rewire Festivals, as well as residencies with Headlands Center, Civitella Ranieri Foundation, ISSUE Project Room, EMS Stockholm. 

For this evening at Holocene, Westbrook presents his work Translucents (Shelter Press, 2024), in an expanded, multi-channel audio configuration. Inspired by viewing the color panels of abstract painter Blinky Palermo, Translucents explores the concept of “audio after-image”. The piece presents a series of immersive ‘audio images’, where each consecutive scene is influenced by the residue of the previous one, in a perceptual play with memory, presence, and time.

“Byron Westbrook’s Shelter Press debut is his most mesmerizing album to date – a set of electroacoustic pieces that advances the rough blueprints laid out by legends like Maryanne Amacher, Bernard Parmegiani and Luc Ferrari.. if you’re at all interested in electroacoustic music, ‘Translucents’ is just about as good as it gets.” (-Boomkat)

Marcus Fischer is an interdisciplinary artist and musician based in Portland, Oregon. A first-generation American artist who creates, collects, and transforms sound into immersive, layered compositions that accompany performances and exhibitions. Site-specific assemblages of exposed speakers, tape loops, and objects are characteristic of his installations, paired with melodies of restraint and tension. He has released numerous recordings—both solo and collaborative —on 12k, a label that has decisively defined and developed its own concept of minimalism in the realms of experimental and ambient music. Fischer contributed two sound works and two performances to the 2019 Whitney Biennial and has been selected for residencies at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Rauschenberg Residency, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art and MacDowell. In 2024 he was awarded The Ford Family Foundation’s Hallie Ford Fellowship in the Visual Arts  as well as the International Music & Composition Fellowship from the Montalvo Arts Center’s Sally and Don Lucas Artists Program.