Curtis Roads and Brian O’Reilly
Artist talk and evening concert
UdK Medienhaus, Galerie
Grunewaldstrasse 2-5, 10823 Berlin (Kleistpark)
Thu, 07.05.2026
15h talk
19h concert
https://www.udk-berlin.de/studium/kunst-und-medien/generative-kunst/events/
(Quelle: Curtis Roads; Brian O’Reilly)
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We are delighted to welcome Curtis Roads and Brian O’Reilly to UdK Berlin for an artist talk and evening concert.
The visit marks a rare European appearance of a collaboration now more than two decades in the making — one that has produced the audio-visual albums Point Line Cloud (Asphodel 2004; reissued by Presto!? 2019) and Flicker Tone Pulse (Wergo 2019), alongside Brian’s videos for individual works such as Touche pas, Always, and the recent Modulude.
For the concert, Curtis Roads plays a one-hour set drawn primarily from his recent album Electronic Music 1994–2021 (Elli Records, 2025). Roads spatialises the stereo material live across the space; O’Reilly projects video in counterpoint. The programme moves through the composer’s signature concerns — sound particles, micromontage, multi-temporal scale form — from the early Half-life and Tenth Vortex through to more recent pieces.
In the talk, Brian O’Reilly opens the discussion by outlining his working methods as a video artist, situating his collaboration with Curtis within a wider practice that includes his long engagement with Woody Vasulka and a body of mixed-media drawings. The conversation extends to Curtis’s own compositional thinking — granular and pulsar synthesis, multiscale composition, and the question of how sound and image meet without one illustrating the other. The session is intended as an open discussion with students and colleagues around process, collaboration, and the porous boundary between music, moving image, and graphic notation.
Curtis Roads is a composer, author, and Professor Emeritus of Media Arts and Technology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. A pioneer of granular and pulsar synthesis, he has shaped the field of microsound through both his compositional practice and his books The Computer Music Tutorial (MIT Press, 1996), Microsound (MIT Press, 2001), and Composing Electronic Music (OUP, 2015). He served as editor of Computer Music Journal for many years and has worked at MIT, IRCAM, Université Paris 8, and CREATE/UCSB. Recent releases include Electronic Music 1994–2021 (Elli Records, 2025).
Brian O’Reilly is a video artist whose practice spans moving image, collaborative performance, and mixed-media drawing. Alongside his long collaboration with Curtis Roads — including the Point Line Cloud and Flicker Tone Pulse albums and videos for numerous individual compositions — he has worked closely with Woody Vasulka, whose pioneering electronic image work informs O’Reilly’s own approach to the moving image as a material to be sculpted in time.
In collaboration with Sonic Talks, Bauhaus University Weimar; texts courtesy of Marcin Pietruszewski.
