The work of Amadeus Julian Regucera (b.1984, He/They) engages with the embodied and acoustical energy of sound and the erotics of its production through concert music, installation, performance art, and video. Since 2022 he is the music curator at the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York.
Hi, my name is Amadeus Julian Regucera and I am a composer, instrumentalist, and curator from Oakland, California, based in Troy, New York. As a composer, I’m drawn to music that speaks with intensity and immediacy, that’s gripping and says something in the most direct way possible about itself and the world it inhabits. As a curator, I’m interested in futurities — what does the music say, about where we’re headed? And as both a composer and curator, I’m interested in how experimentalism can be an invitation into new worlds of possibility and transformation. In this playlist I’ve created, I tried to articulate these points and I hope you enjoy what I’ve offered.
stretchedwoundspeaks by Elaine Mitchener
When Elaine sings, it’s like her entire body throbs, her entire essence pulses. I can hear her physical body in physical space when I listen to her music. In this piece, it’s even more haunting when you hear snatches of melody, like the ghost of a song in a house made of flesh. I’ve seen Elaine perform many times now and it’s emotionally arresting every time.
Overlevered by Charmaine Lee
My favorite piece (song?) off Charmaine’s most recent album, Tulpa. The way her voice and the electronic sounds/processing blend on this record, and especially this song, is so timeless, pointing backwards (analog) and forward (post?-digital); it’s alluring and sensual, almost haptic. The pieces of melody among the glitched landscape are playful yet plaintive, it hits all the emotional buttons at once.
Anxious A/Anxious B by أحمد [Ahmed]
I love listening to [Ahmed]’s process: translating, transforming, renewing — it’s thrilling because you’re hearing the energy transmute and twist and turn in real time. Working from pieces by bassist/composer Ahmed Abdul Malik (and on their most recent album, Thelonious Monk), [Ahmed]’s sense of play is palpable, you can hear the rigor and play come through so joyfully.
Res Sub Rosa by Sarah Davachi
Sarah’s music turns intensity inward. I feel not just an attention to the sound and the music itself, but also a kind of secular spiritualism. The way she draws from early religious music and contemporary music sounds new because she wraps it in this punk rock aura, there’s a roughness here that I can’t explain that separates her from other composers doing work in the same vein. The performers are top-notch and play with a directness that makes Sarah’s music feel electric in its subtlety.
Naldjorlak by Éliane Radigue, Performed by Charles Curtis
In many ways a definite precursor to Sarah’s music, the recently passed Radigue’s music also attenuates my listening in an intense and immediate way, drawing me in, ever closer. In all its formalist trappings, there’s a DIY attitude to her style that is also so punk. I admire the searching and researching in the music, shifting my perception between the sound itself and the sound within myself … it’s the closest to the divine that I’ve gotten in music. (This link is to an excerpt of Charles Curtis’s recording of the piece; I recommend getting the full version on Bandcamp).
Desire by Miho Hatori
I re-discovered Miho’s music during my first winter in Troy — this record was the only thing that got me through it. Within the album’s pop-inflected sound world, she acts as a Dante-esque chanteuse, her voice floating and drifting through dreamlike beats and digital ephemera, always with a hook—however askew — leading the way into a kaleidoscopic future. Desire feels like this: floating but also keeping your head nodding.
Luna Park by Georges Aperghis, Performed by Eva Furrer, Johanne Saunier, Mike Schmidt, and Richard Dubelsky
I saw Aperghis’ Luna Park back in 2012 and it has stayed with me ever since. Its edges, its sharply articulated episodic form, and its intricately woven tapestry of voice, physical gesture, electronic sounds, acoustic music, video, and incisive dramaturgy around surveillance affect an intense, full-frontal blast. This is experimental music theater at its most powerful.
Hitam by HULUBALANG
Kasimyn has been at the forefront of Javanese Futurism with his work with Gabber Modus Operandi, a group that’s just amazing to dance and rock out to. His recent solo work as HULUBALANG is just as intense but abstracted, the violence I hear in the music is refracted, abstracted in a way that permeates instead of assaults (like in Gabber). In Hitam, you can still hear traces of the driving rhythm but the overall musical effect is strangely intimate for all its heaviness. It’s this dissonance that I find super compelling.
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