This October, Eugene Difficult Music Ensemble (EDME) presents their fourth annual New Music Festival, a celebration of composed sound works, with a special focus on those that push composition’s boundaries. EDME's executive director, JP Lempke, describes New Music as "a catch-all term for sounds that are composer-driven, encompassing experimental, improvised, electronic, chamber, and symphonic musics. It is contemporary classical, but without the inherent contradiction embedded in that phrase.”

The festival’s opening concert at Kesey Square features performers from across America sharing personal explorations of the intersections between technology, improvisation, and composition

Gracie Fagan experiments with human perception to comment on the intersectionality of identity and pop culture. Gracie combines audio, projection, performance art, theatre, and dance to create immersive performances and environments not typically found in the traditional concert hall setting.

Varun Kishore is a guitarist and composer from Kolkata, India. His work explores interdisciplinary approaches to music technology, literature, and the audiovisual, with a focus on designing frameworks for composition and improvisation to investigate what he sees as the ‘apocalyptic’ nature of creative practice.

Hermetic Fever is Josh Gerowitz and Louis Lopez, a project inspired by the Hermetic tradition of philosophy, practical magic, potions, and alchemy. Hermetic Fever shared interest in the power of transformation through fermentation, dialectic, and improvisation fuels their musical process.

Adrianna Jasmine Svitak is an interdisciplinary artist from the United States, currently based in Narrm/Melbourne. She works with manipulated acoustic instrumentation, field recordings, cassette tape loops and voice to weave densely textured sonic landscapes. Her sound is characterised by sustained tension, drawing on a sense of loss, longing and nostalgia to create a distinctive and deeply haunting atmosphere.

Born 1995 in Madison, Wisconsin, Jakob Heinemann is a multidisciplinary artist, working in the areas of sound art, free improvisation, avant garde composition, photography and acoustic ecology. Much of his work centers on sonic communion as a means of cultural exchange and solidarity, using sound to understand the community and environments we inhabit as well as our relationships therein. A double bass player, he is deeply committed to improvisation, with roots in the free jazz community of Chicago. He plays in outsider Americana trio Alta Vista and the avant-jazz Devin Drobka Trio.

Artist Mage Chadowitz will also be on hand to light up Kesey Square with their custom psychedelic animations.