emptyset: 'Dissever'

James Ginzburg and Paul Purgas’ longstanding collaborative production project emptyset crosses performance, architecture-specific installations and recorded work, with their latest set ‘Dissever’ reimagining and reengineering the hardware and exploratory sound worlds of the late-1960s.

First created for Tate Modern’s ‘Electric Dreams’ exhibition on the histories of modern art and technology, the duo are renowned for pushing the possibilities of electroacoustic and computer music via auditory explorations of materiality, acoustic and architectural space, and the histories of electronic and improvised music, experimental media and global sound practices. Live these components are channelled into singular, full-frequency soundsystem physicality.

FRANKIE & Kelman Duran reimagine avant-pop as a dubbed, fever dream of fragmented rhythms, eerie ambiance and cinematic catharsis. Raw cello meets spectral vocals, weightless melodies and broken up beats. Franziska Aigner works at the intersection of music, performance, and philosophy. After studying at P.A.R.T.S. in Brussels, she has shown her own work internationally and collaborated widely across disciplines, including with visual artist Anne Imhof and choreographer William Forsythe. Kelman Duran is a Los Angeles-based producer, composer, and visual artist whose sound fuses reggaeton, ambient, drill, and industrial textures. He’s produced for Beyoncé and composed the score for 2022 Cannes-selected film Rodeo. His sound design is immersive, atmospheric, and cinematic—interrogating space, diaspora, memory, and violence.

Cara Tolmie & Rian Treanor’s collaborative work is a highly kinetic and playful collision of body-centric vocal explorations and intricate rhythmic systems which forms a deliciously disorientating, hypersurreal space of semantic modulations, concrete poetry, cut-up beats and mimicked samples. Singular and tactile, the result is a dissociative dance music that reassembles contorting vocal lines and knotting biomechanics into a network of unstable forms,

The night closes with a much anticipated Bristol debut for GHOST DUBS, Stuttgart’s master of low-end pressure, live dub techniques, and industrial aesthetics. Michael Fiedler has gained international recognition in 2024 with his album ‘Damaged’, on The Bug’s PRESSURE label, and subsequent split release ‘Implosion’. Elements of traditional dub/roots, dub techno, and even shoegaze and drone, are fed through Fiedler’s futuristic sound design and mesmerising, slo-mo dubbed gyrations.