NEW YORK, NY.- Alex Poots, Artistic Director of
The Shed, announced the New York premiere of Sonic Sphere, a revolutionary new architectural space featuring immersive, 3-D sound and light explorations of music by boundary-pushing artists, that began June 9 and will continue to July 7.
The vast, 65-foot-diameter spherical concert hall is suspended in midair in The Shed’s soaring, 115-foot-tall McCourt space. Sonic Sphere is being created by avant-garde consciousness architects Ed Cooke, Merijn Royaards, and Nicholas Christie, and the broader Sonic Sphere community including lighting designer Polina Zakh. Sonic Sphere is based on an idea initially proposed by composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. The artist curation for Sonic Sphere at The Shed is led by Alex Poots.
“We are excited to bring this architectural, experiential statement to the middle of the most vibrant city in the world. This spherical concert hall asks questions about the type of architecture that best serves our cities and communities. How can it adapt to our changing societal needs, bringing us together at a time when technology is driving us apart.” —Sonic Sphere Team
Inside the sphere, an audience of 250 people congregates in specially designed seating and a netted area in the center to experience music as a spatialized soundscape created by more than 100 speakers that move sound above, below, through, and around their bodies. Dynamic lighting on the sphere’s surface completes the hyperreal, multisensory journey. Multiple 45-minute live and recorded sets will be offered each day including:
• Transformative listening sessions and complete recorded albums featuring bespoke remixes of The xx’s essential, self-titled debut album and influential composer Steve Reich’s groundbreaking Music for 18 Musicians
• A playlist tracing one branch of electronic music’s family tree by legendary Detroit techno artist, DJ, and producer Carl Craig and a never-before-heard compilation by hypnotic Brooklyn-based musician, singer, DJ, and producer Yaeji
• Live performances by electronic music producer, drummer, artist, and activist Madame Gandhi on June 9; rising London-based singersongwriter-producer yunè pinku on June 14 and 16; Jersey Club Queen DJ and producer UNIIQU3 on June 23 and 24; and world-renowned pianist Igor Levit on June 30 and July 1 performing Morton Feldman’s Palais de Mari in collaboration with visual artist Rirkrit Tiravanija who is creating a visual counterpoint for Levit’s performances
The Sonic Sphere team works through rapid iteration. The version at The Shed is the 11th and most advanced Sphere so far, after iterations of increasing size and technical sophistication, beginning at Chateau du Feÿ’s creative commune, and appearing since in London, Mexico, at Black Rock City, and in Miami.
“As a teenager I had read in an obscure book of Stockhausen’s Kugelauditorium, which appeared at the 1970 World Expo Osaka fair, alongside the first mobile phone. It was obviously a ridiculously cool idea, far more interesting and important than the phone. In the decades that followed, I became increasingly confused that since 1970 our society had created 15 billion mobile phones but no further spherical concert halls. The Sonic Sphere project aims to re-prioritize shared realworld experience and to make the outer horizons of consciousness accessible to all, in the name of new modes of perception and action for a world that requires them,” said Ed Cooke, Sonic Sphere Co-Founder.
“My first experience of clubbing was during a cold winter in early ’90s Rotterdam. The interference patterns of visual, sonic, and kinetic waveform transmissions that flooded the dance floor and enveloped me were deeply transformative. Along the dance floor’s perimeter, bass-bins sent out shock waves that rattled your ribcage and tweeter horns above them fired a percussive hailstorm into the twitching crowd. Waveform transmissions collided as ephemeral geometries that liquefied the physical architecture, turning the shadows on the walls into windows to infinity. Sound and space had switched sides; steel and concrete were evanescent, and the DJ was an architect. It was my first experience of how the combined forces of music, light, and collectivity can suspend the laws of physics. Sonic Sphere is a sensory laboratory that does exactly that; it bends time, expands consciousness, and punctures our perception of reality,” said Merijn Royaards, Sonic Sphere Co-Founder
“In a visually orientated age, Sonic Sphere centers the wonder of sound and music in an interdisciplinary experience,” said Alex Poots, Artistic Director of The Shed. “The creative invention and sheer ambition of Sonic Sphere offers such a range of possibilities to explore for years to come.”
Sonic Sphere Creative Team
Created by avant-garde consciousness architects Ed Cooke, Merijn Royaards, and Nicholas Christie as a community project, Sonic Sphere aims to challenge the relationship between technology and experience, and proposes a new type of participatory cultural space: one that allows us to invent and share real-world experiences with each other as well as being a new playground for artists. In the exponential age of AI and VR, Sonic Sphere rejects any notion that consciousness is computation, or that it is solitary, and instead asserts that the path to infinity lies in shared human experience. The Sonic Sphere community embraces rapid iteration and continuous reinvention.
Ed Cooke (Impresario) is a multidisciplinary explorer of consciousness. A former memory champion, he is the co-founder and chairman of Memrise, the popular language learning app; a pioneer of online parties; a published author; and the instigating co-founder of Sonic Sphere, where he leads the team. His writing has appeared in the Guardian and the Journal of Consciousness Studies. He’s currently working on a general theory of parties.
Merijn Royaards (Creative Director) is a sound architect, researcher, and performer guided by convoluted movements through music, art, and spatial studies. The interaction between space and sound in cities with a history/present of conflict has been a recurring theme in his multimedia works to date. His 2020 awarded doctoral thesis explores the state-altering effects of sound, space, and movement from the Russian avant-garde to today’s clubs and raves. He is one part of a critical-essay film practice with artist-researcher Henrietta Williams and teaches sound design for film and installation art at the Bartlett School of Architecture.
Nicholas Christie (Engineering Director) has helped realize a menagerie of unusual structural and sculptural projects, both professionally and recreationally. As delivery lead for the Sonic Sphere, he is now working to take Sonic Sphere at The Shed from dream to reality.
Sonic Sphere Artists
Carl Craig is a multidisciplinary visionary whose eclectic tastes and influences all converge on his “main discipline”—Carl Craig. The Detroit pioneer’s lifelong pursuit of independence and self-gratification is the catalyst behind three decades of innovation and achievement within the realm of electronic music. As the mastermind behind Planet E Communications over the last 30 years, Craig conceived and nurtured a platform that preserves his independence, while also providing a liberating space for a range of international artists. Under a variety of aliases—69, Paperclip People, C2, and many more—he has produced six LPs, the most recent being Versus. His back catalogue includes credits on over 600 remixes for a diverse cross section of electronic music artists. In 2008, Craig was nominated for a Grammy for his rework of Junior Boys’ “Like A Child.” Forever an ambassador for his hometown, Craig pays homage to Motor City with his Detroit Love compilations and events, by spearheading the city’s electronic music festival and running his own artist agency, Detroit Premiere Artists. His creative dedication to Black excellence has led to a series of educational projects in recent years. His “All Black Vinyl” Instagram series, showcasing a record from a Black artist each day of February, evolved into the 2022 “All Black Digital” partnership with Beatport and Quincy Jones’s Qwest TV. More recently, his immersive installation Party/After Party opened at MOCA Los Angeles following its 15-month 2020 debut at Dia Beacon. In 2022, the Carl Craig Synthesizer Ensemble presented at Carnegie Hall’s AFROFUTURISM Festival as well as at the 59th Venice Biennale.
Madame Gandhi is an award-winning artist and activist known for her uplifting, percussive electronic music and positive message about gender liberation and personal power. She began producing music in 2015, after her story running the London Marathon free-bleeding to combat menstrual stigma went viral around the world. She has been listed as Forbes 30 Under 30 in Music, and her 2020 TED Talk about conscious music consumption has been viewed over a million times. “Waiting For Me,” shot in Mumbai, India, won the Music Video Jury Award at SXSW Film Festival in 2021 and her 100% Organically Sourced x Sound MANA nature sound pack won the New Wav award at the 2021 Splice Awards. Her third studio album, Vibrations, was released in 2022, following the release of her previous albums Voices (2016) and Visions (2019). In June of 2022, Gandhi completed a masters in music science and technology at Stanford University’s CCRMA where she spent time in Antarctica sampling the sounds of glaciers melting to create empathy and awareness around climate change.
Igor Levit, with an alert and critical mind, Igor Levit places his art in the context of social events and understands it as inseparably linked to them. The New York Times describes Igor Levit as one of the “most important artists of his generation.” Levit is Musical America’s Recording Artist of the Year 2020 and the 2018 Gilmore Artist. In June 2022 his album On DSCH was awarded the Recording of the Year Award as well as the Instrumental Award by the BBC Music Magazine. As a recitalist Levit regularly performs at the world’s most renowned concert halls and festivals. He is a regular soloist with the world’s leading orchestras such as the Cleveland Orchestra, the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, and the Vienna Philharmonic. In the 2022 – 23 season, Levit is presenting his new recital program in Berlin, Hamburg, London, Madrid, Milano, New York, Paris, Prague, and Rome. Levit is one of Vienna’s Musikverein’s portrait artists of the 2022 – 23 season. In June 2023 he will join the San Francisco Symphony and Esa-Pekka Salonen for a multi-week residency. In spring 2021, Levit and the Lucerne Festival announced a multiyear collaboration for a new piano festival curated by Levit, with its first edition taking place in May 2023. Born in Nizhni Novgorod, Russia, Levit completed his piano studies in Hanover with the highest score in the history of the institute. In spring 2019 he was appointed professor for piano at his alma mater, the University of Music, Theatre, and Media Hanover. For his political commitment Levit has been awarded the 5th International Beethoven Prize in 2019 followed by the award of the “Statue B” of the International Auschwitz Committee in January 2020. His 53 Twitter-streamed live house concerts during the lockdown in spring 2020 garnered a worldwide audience, offering a sense of community and hope in a time of isolation and desperation. In October 2020, Levit was recognized with the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. In Berlin, where he makes his home, Levit plays on a Steinway D Grand Piano kindly given to him by the Trustees of Independent Opera at Sadler’s Wells. Exclusive Worldwide Management: Kristin Schuster, Classic Concerts
Management GmbH.
yunè pinku, Southeast London-based newcomer yunè pinku layers wistful, syrupy vocals over production that draws from the UK rave canon but with a restless, textural slant. In her music, yunè pinku (yunè comes from a nickname she had as a kid and means “cloudy” in Japanese, while pinku nods to her love of claymation penguin show Pingu) taps into many facets of being a young person in the early 2020s. A love letter to the dance floors that have been deeply missed throughout the pandemic, her music also expresses an apathy that comes with having your life torn apart at such a crucial time, as well as inhabiting a world at the mercy of capitalism and climate change.
Half-Malaysian and half-Irish, yunè pinku grew up in London while never feeling like she was fully welcome there. Traces of her childhood can be heard in the shuffly garage rhythms of her production, although as a teen she was more into ’70s and ’80s music like Joni Mitchell, The Kinks, and the Bee Gees than hip-hop or grime. Nowadays, she likes, as she says, “more experimental, tech stuff where people do something cool vocally with a tune—like combine things that you wouldn’t think to put together.” Having collaborated with rising Australian dance star Logic1000 on “What You Like,” and released her critically acclaimed debut EP Bluff in 2022, yunè pinku is on the cusp of releasing her sophomore solo EP Babylon IX (out April 28). As well as Logic1000, she has been co-signed by Joy Orbison, who invited her to contribute a guest mix to his Radio 1 residency.
Steve Reich has been called “the most original musical thinker of our time” (The
New Yorker), and “among the great composers of the century” (The New York
Times). Starting in the 1960s, his pieces It’s Gonna Rain, Drumming, Music for 18 Musicians, Tehillim, Different Trains, and many others helped shift the aesthetic center of musical composition worldwide away from extreme complexity and towards rethinking pulsation and tonal attraction in new ways. Double Sextet won the Pulitzer Prize in 2009 and Different Trains, Music for 18 Musicians, and an album of his percussion works have all earned Grammy Awards. He received the Praemium Imperiale in Tokyo, the Polar Music Prize in Stockholm, the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale, the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Madrid, the Debs Composer’s Chair at Carnegie Hall, and the Gold Medal in Music from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Rirkrit Tiravanija, born in Buenos Aires, the Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija is widely recognized as one of the most influential artists of his generation. His work defies media-based description, as his practice combines traditional object making, public and private performances, teaching, and other forms of public service and social action. Winner of the 2005 Hugo Boss Prize awarded by the Guggenheim Museum,
Tiravanija was also awarded the Benesse by the Naoshima Contemporary Art
Museum in Japan and the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Lucelia Artist Award.
He has had exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Guggenheim
Museum of New York, the Reina Sofia museum in Madrid, Los Angeles County
Museum of Art, Hirschhorn Smithsonian, Glenstone Museum, Luma Foundation in Arles, and at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam that then was presented in Paris and London. Tiravanija is on the faculty of the School of the Arts at Columbia University, and is a founding member and curator of Utopia Station, a collective project of artists, art historians, and curators. Tiravanija is also president of an educational-ecological project known as The Land Foundation, located in Chiang Mai, Thailand, where he maintains his primary residence and studio.
