Sonic Talk: Point Line Cloud – Curtis Roads & Brian O'Reilly
This semester's first Sonic Talk by the chairs of Acoustic Ecologies and Sound Studies and Experimental Radio features renowned composer and researcher Curtis Roads and video artist Brian O’Reilly. The evening is a collaboration with the chair of Electroacoustic Composition & Sound Art.
We are delighted to welcome Curtis Roads and Brian O'Reilly to Weimar for an evening concert in the frame of Sonic Talks. It will take place at Studio for Electroacoustic Music (SeaM). The visit marks a rare European appearance of a collaboration now more than two decades in the making — one that has produced the audio-visual albums Point Line Cloud (Asphodel 2004; reissued by Presto!? 2019) and Flicker Tone Pulse (Wergo 2019), alongside Brian's videos for individual works such as Touche pas, Always, and the recent Modulude.
Curtis Roads plays a one-hour set drawn primarily from his recent album Electronic Music 1994–2021 (Elli Records, 2025), with possible new works included. Roads spatialises the stereo material live across the space; O'Reilly projects video in counterpoint. The programme moves through the composer's signature concerns — sound particles, micromontage, multi-temporal scale form — from the early Half-life and Tenth Vortex through to more recent pieces.
Curtis Roads is a composer, author, and Professor Emeritus of Media Arts and Technology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. A pioneer of granular and pulsar synthesis, he has shaped the field of microsound through both his compositional practice and his books The Computer Music Tutorial (MIT Press, 1996), Microsound (MIT Press, 2001), and Composing Electronic Music (OUP, 2015). He served as editor of Computer Music Journal for many years and has worked at MIT, IRCAM, Université Paris 8, and CREATE/UCSB. Recent releases include Electronic Music 1994–2021 (Elli Records, 2025).
Brian O'Reilly is a video artist whose practice spans moving image, collaborative performance, and mixed-media drawing. Alongside his long collaboration with Curtis Roads — including the Point Line Cloud and Flicker Tone Pulse albums and videos for numerous individual compositions — he has worked closely with Woody Vasulka, whose pioneering electronic image work informs O'Reilly's own approach to the moving image as a material to be sculpted in time.
Point Line Cloud
Sonic Talk with Curtis Roads & Brian O'Reilly
5th of May 2026, 7pm
Studio für elektroakustische Musik (Coudraystr. 13A, 99423 Weimar)