::SPATIAL 011 Evan Zierk | Gianna Santucci
Sunday, November 30, 2025
169 Bowery NYC
8:00 PM
Evan Zierk:
“The Five Directions is a live 8 channel realization and expansion of my current work in progress of the same working title. The material was recorded and arranged between January 15 and March 1st of 2025, during time spent on the island of St. John in the US Virgin Islands. The material is sourced from tens of hours of field recordings made using a Crown Sass-p MKii recording system, which delivers hyper real HRTF stereo recordings. The work represents a personally new approach to listening, field recording, and composition that I developed during this period. It is all highly technical, spiritual, and emotional. I travelled to St John with the intention of mourning my father, who passed away on November 30th, 2024. He lived on the island of St. John for 15 years, from 1971 to 1986. Much of my emotional processing took the form of combining my Deep Listening practice and field recording and compositional practices, in essence searching for spiritual traces in the landscape of the island, within myself, and within my interaction with the landscape in the form of musical improvisation in various places and spaces. The material also includes audio recordings taken during two Deep Listening workshops I led while on the island at a community center run by my godmother, called Our Place. The resulting work is an organization, amalgamation and synthesizing of these recordings and experiences. For my New Ear :: SPATIAL performance I seek to expand the current work with additional improvisation with shruti box and microphone, and bowed guitar.”
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Gianna Santucci:
With Sympathy is a spatial octophonic drone installation featuring dozens of snare drums that are activated by a successive series of tones. Microtonal adjustments are made through a live performance causing the strainers on the snare drums to vibrate sympathetically with particular frequencies.
Moved by the drones, the drums become resonate bodies issuing a responsive sound as though it were coming from themselves. Sound in its affective capacity takes up residence in nearby bodies, and invisible system of touch and sensation. The crowd of drums mirror our own bodies, seemingly untouched but responsive all the same. A drum in its static form is an object informed by its potential to be acted upon. With Sympathy imagines an alternative use To activate a drum is to beat, hit, slap, pound, strike it. The drums in this installation are inverted: no longer beat keepers, but beat receivers, humming and vibrating in response to the drones. Drums have a long history as early communication technology, tied inextricably with the organization and movement of bodies in space and time.
This performance complicates their function by eschewing their percussive intentions, allowing for new rhythms and sonic possibilities to unfold. Through the drones, shivering vibrations emerge from the snares, creating overlapping hums that are in turn reminiscent of insects, helicopters, washing machines, HVAC systems. The drums become activated as a crowd, both individuated as their component parts but also existing as a collective body. Layered oscillations take on a complex rhythmic life of their own, amplified by the snares and reminding us that mobilization exists as a possible byproduct of noise.
About the Artists
Evan Zierk is a composer, large-scale audio system technician, and certified Deep Listening practitioner and instructor based in Upstate New York. He works in fixed media composition as well as live improvisation and performance. He is drawn towards projects that involve composing and designing for multichannel audio and site specific artwork. He has worked in the live music world with artists like Post Malone, Blink 182, and Roger Waters. He has also designed sound and systems for media artwork presented at RedCat (LA), The Renaissance Society (Chicago), Power Plant (Toronto) and the ICA (London). Broadly, his work is based on practices of intention, attention, and accessibility in composing and listening (which he views as one in the same). This approach distinguishes listening from hearing, and frames music as something that is endlessly renewable, rather than a limited commodity.
Gianna Santucci is an interdisciplinary artist and percussionist from Merritt Island, FL, currently based in Philadelphia. She received an M.F.A. in Painting at Tyler School of Art with a University Fellowship, and received a B.F.A. in Fine Arts and a B.M. in Music Performance from Florida Southern College. Her work has been recently exhibited in Icebox Project Space, Vox Populi, and Cherry Street Pier in Philadelphia. Recent performances include the ‘Low Tech Electronics Faire’ at the Charles Library, ‘Chilladelphia’ at Thunderbird Hall, and ‘Gallery Perspectives: Rodin’ at the Ashley Gibson Barnett Museum of Art. Her work engages the intersecting spheres of militarized sound, subculture, transmission, and rhythm.
NEW EAR :: 