Daughter of the Stars (2024) @ EMPAC (Troy, NY) - Brian Lindgren

Video Description

Premiered at the 29th International Conference on Auditory Display @ EMPAC (Troy, NY) 26 June 2024 by Brian Lindgren Program notes / conference proceedings: https://hdl.handle.net/1853/76316 Composed for the EV (https://youtu.be/9fTjfAB4PN4) Notes: Daughter of the Stars stages a dialogue between mythic cosmology and technological speculation. In the Shenandoah creation story, a Great Spirit gathers the stars above a serene silver lake, where they sing to celebrate its beauty. When an earthquake drains the lake, its waters vanish into the ocean, leaving behind mountains and a river as traces of what was lost. The stars, wandering in search of a new home, return to find the valley transformed yet familiar, naming it “Shenandoah” — “Daughter of the Stars.” When I first moved to Charlottesville, I found myself drawn to this story. Having grown up near Lake Champlain, surrounded by the Adirondack Mountains, I felt both displaced and curiously at home in this new landscape. Encountering the Blue Ridge Mountains for the first time brought an unexpected sense of continuity — as though the terrain itself carried a memory of my past. This cosmogenesis parallels the EV’s project: an instrument that treats the fracture between acoustic and digital not as a problem to be solved, but as the ground from which new sonic identities emerge. The piece experiments with a spatialization system that renders the EV as a shifting topography — sound moving like constellations seeking a new home. By refusing pre-recorded sources, every gesture becomes an irretrievable event, underscoring music as survival within rupture. In this sense, Daughter of the Stars imagines cyborg myth-making as a way to reinhabit altered landscapes. More info: https://brianlindgren.com/portfolio-item/daughter-of-the-stars/