Byron Westbrook + Maria Thrän & Afroditi Psarra

Name: Byron Westbrook + Maria Thrän & Afroditi Psarra
Start: 2026-04-18T20:00:00-07:00
Location: Chapel Performance Space at Good Shepherd Center

Schedule

Sat, 18 Apr, 2026 at 08:00 pm

UTC-07:00

Location

Chapel Performance Space at Good Shepherd Center | Seattle, WA

4649 Sunnyside Ave. N, 4th floor, Seattle 98103 (Wallingford)
$5 - $20 sliding scale at the door
More info: https://www.waywardmusic.org/
Byron Westbrook presents a multichannel version of his acclaimed electroacoustic work, Translucents; Maria Thrän and Afroditi Psarra conduct real-time radio wave manipulations.
Byron Westbrook
Translucents
First emerging from within New York’s experimental music scene nearly two decades ago and now based in Los Angeles, Byron Westbrook weaves intricate tapestries of sonority bridging the worlds of sound art, installation, avant-garde electronic music and synthesis. He works between immersive installation formats and music performance, utilizing a wide array of sound design, synthesis techniques and field recordings. Westbrook’s practice approaches sound in a structural way, where the architecture of a listening space becomes a key collaborator in his concerts. His work has been presented internationally at major institutions and festivals. Inspired by optical phenomena occurring while viewing the color panels of abstract painter Blinky Palermo, Translucents explores the concept of “audio after-image”. The work presents a series of audio scenes, with the intention of imprinting on the listener’s mind in order to influence the way each consecutive scene appears. It is a play with memory, presence, and with time, experimenting with dynamics between perceiving presence in the space where one is listening vs the perception of an external space or place. For this concert, Translucents is presented in an expanded immersive form that differs from its published release. “…his most mesmerizing album to date – a set of electroacoustic pieces that advances the rough blueprints laid out by legends like Maryanne Amacher, Bernard Parmegiani and Luc Ferrari…if you’re at all interested in electroacoustic music, ‘Translucents’ is just about as good as it gets.” – Boomkat
Maria Thrän and Afroditi Psarra
Live signals, live bodies (in conversation)
Through different embodied antenna systems — a swinging wire tuned to the electromagnetic field, and diy/handheld/wearable antennas — we receive and process transmissions at the Hertzian spectrum in real time. Our performance is a practice of co-tuning, interference, and spatial resonance; an improvisation with invisible fields — received through software-defined radios, and processed through live electronics and SuperCollider. Architecture, bodies, machines, and noise converge in a listening practice that resists control and invites uncertainty.
Maria Thrän is a Berlin- and Seattle-based interdisciplinary artist, performer, and Ph.D. researcher in the University of Washington’s DXARTS program. Their immersive kinetic installations and performances integrate mechatronics, spatial sound synthesis, light, and video to explore rhythm, memory, and more-than-human communication. By transforming exhibition spaces into responsive perceptual systems, Thrän invites audiences to resonate with their own ecological entanglements and to consider how bodies, voices, and technologies can operate as instruments of memory, protest, care, and resistance. Their research-driven practice examines ecological interdependence, technological agency, and the poetics of signal and noise through speculative approaches to preservation. Thrän’s work has been presented internationally in solo and group exhibitions and developed through residencies around the globe.
Afroditi Psarra’s research focuses on the interweaving of art and science through the creation of artifacts with a critical lens. She sees the praxis of crafting technological artifacts as an act of resistance against black box systems. One that contains embodied knowledge and carries with it oral histories of intergenerational practices. One that can transcend cultural and ethnic boundaries, and can be transmitted through direct engagement with materials. Likewise, she sees the use of electronics, open software and hardware, and the act of creating collectively as means of cultivating digital commons that have the potential to empower individuals through shared knowledge. She believes that the ability to craft your own technology is a powerful tool for world building, one that enables you to speculate about alternative presents and plausible futures.