5.5. »Point Line Cloud« – Curtis Roads & Brian O'Reilly @ Sonic Talk
This semester’s first Sonic Talk, hosted by the chairs of »Acoustic Ecologies and Sound Studies« and »Experimental Radio«, invites audiences to a special evening: renowned composer and researcher Curtis Roads presents a multichannel audio and video concert together with video artist Brian O’Reilly. The event takes place in collaboration with the chair of Electroacoustic Composition and 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.
Time:
Tuesday, 5 May 2026, 7 p.m.
Location:
Bauhaus-Universität Weimar
SeaM
Coudraystraße 13A
99423 Weimar