DURATIONS: An Evening with Terre Thaemlitz [Live Piano] + Conversation with Ciarán Finlayson

The legendary house producer, DJ, and writer Terre Thaemlitz [aka DJ Sprinkles] will perform her first composition for solo piano live at Roulette. The performance will be followed by a conversation with Triple Canopy contributing editor Ciarán Finlayson, who will speak with Thaemlitz about her music as well as her criticism, which often takes up the defects of a culture industry that offers artists “exposure” instead of wages.

Starting in 2024, Terre Thaemlitz began a new series of durational piano solo performances. Unlike Thaemlitz’s computer-composed Rubato Series digital piano concerts of the past, these current performances are acoustic and played on a grand piano (180 cm or larger). Each show consists of a new composition using improvisational systems, with occasional prepared-piano techniques. While sonically more dynamic than Thaemlitz’s notorious 32-hour-long acoustic piano piece, Meditation on Wage Labor and the Death of the Album (2012), this new series continues the minimalist, ambient, and neo-expressionist piano playing developed over the past three decades in Thaemlitz’s various electroacoustic and house albums.

The first performance of this series took place in June 2024, as a close to Trajal Harrell’s five-year stint as resident choreographer at the Schauspielhaus Zürich. Both Harrell and Thaemlitz have their own histories within the US voguing ball scene, and both have continually examined the tensions between culturally minor and major audio movements. On that night, Harrell gave the final performance of her acclaimed group choreography for Keith Jarrett’s Köln Concert, followed by what was lightheartedly billed as Thaemlitz’s “Zürich Concert.” Thaemlitz’s longtime collaborator Mark Fell was quick to note, “You’re no Keith Jarrett”—the stylistic and ideological incongruities between Jarrett and Thaemlitz being the point.

The performances are not recorded, streamed, or archived. This is in keeping with Thaemlitz’s longstanding no-recording policy, rooted in a critical rejection of today’s homogenizing archive industries. This policy began in the early 2010s, in specific reaction to sudden federal and corporate financial interests in building LGBT archives, which went against Thaemlitz’s own strategies of the closet, invisibility, secrecy, withholding, and remaining culturally minor. It is also a means of interfering with the audio market’s and audiences’ tendencies to fetishize recordings of Jarrett-style “you had to be there” performances. Rather, Thaemlitz privately records the preparatory sessions leading up to each show. These will eventually be self-released through Comatonse Recordings as collections containing four to five separate takes, giving a sense of what happened at the live performances while still refusing to settle on a single take as “the one.”

Presented in collaboration with Triple Canopy.

Roulette members – please email membership@roulette.org for more information about member discounts.

Triple Canopy is committed to cultivating unconventional, unassimilated forms of thought and expression, and to meaningfully supporting the people who produce them. The magazine collaborates with contributors on artworks, essays, fictions, conversations, performances, and books [among other media] from conception to realization, navigating the digital and physical realms where ideas and audiences take shape. In doing so, Triple Canopy strives to not only analyze but alter the structures that influence whose voices are heard, whose stories are circulated, and whose experiences are valued.

Founded in 2007 and based in New York City, Triple Canopy is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, has been certified by W.A.G.E., and is a member of the Coalition of Small Arts New York City (CoSA NYC).

DURATIONS Festival is a week-long, multi-disciplinary exploration of sound and connection. Now in its fifth iteration, the festival’s programming is its most robust yet, with seven days of music, talks, and…