Up to now, we have conducted these explorations in the “industrial cathedrals” at Silo City, a campus of repurposed grain elevators in Buffalo, NY. These immense monuments connect us to the spiritual, historical, and acoustic context of the music we perform, and we search for resistance and energy within these spaces through movement, direction of sound, and careful selection of the musical material.

We perform religious, folk, and art music from antiquity through the Baroque era, ranging in origin among Western and Eastern Europe as well as the Middle East. Past programs have included Bulgarian and Sardinian folk songs, plainchant, Jewish maftirim, and Byzantine chant in dialogue with works by Hildegarde von Bingen, Guillaume de Machaut, Henry Purcell, and Folquet de Marseille, among others. In our duo arrangements of these pieces we recreate the spectra and overall effect of the special timbres that belong to each tradition, while integrating the feedback of the acoustic space.

We are “new music” artists who are fascinated by the sound worlds of early music. Our concerts draw out the sonic relationships among disparate but historically linked musical traditions, as well as the relationships between early music sonorities and contemporary extended techniques such as multiphonics, microtones, and overtone singing. We weave the composed music together into uninterrupted programs, linked by interludes in the form of structured improvisations. We move through the space throughout the performance, finding different reflective positions in the venue and forming ever-changing antiphonal relationships.

The result is a transformative, tactile, and kinetic experience that illuminates and recontextualizes the repertoire performed.

We have presented one to two concerts annually at Silo City for the past three summers, with strong support from our local community. Each year, we delve deeper into both the musical and the acoustic possibilities of our duo and our space. We bring in new repertoire while holding onto favorite repertoire from previous concerts, reinterpreting and re-contextualizing these works with new interludes and spatial concepts. Sold-out audiences have responded favorably to the work that we’re doing, and we are always looking for ways to expand our scope and reach.

In the summer of 2019, as artists-in-residence at the Avaloch Farm Music Institute, we rehearsed new interludes composed by Esin, transformed into full-fledged compositions with additions of pre-recorded / electro-acoustic materials. We’ve been working with Henry Birdsey to bring to life a digital version of the acoustic space at Silo City. Henry has a passionate interest in the acoustic phenomena of Silo City, and is a highly creative problem solver—his ingenuity in multi-channel audio techniques has enabled beautiful recordings of our serpentine, semi-outdoor concerts. He is our partner as we continue to explore new acoustic possibilities.