Max Eilbacher’s Live in Turin doesn’t document a performance so much as it summons a perceptual event. Sound bends into shape, unravels again, and coalesces into something momentarily tangible. Built from sketches of digital systems, spectral forms, and sculpted densities, the piece traverses slow shifts in focus and frames of attention, asking the listener to linger with sounds that seem to fold space around them. Tonal figures don’t repeat so much as reappear, warped and re-lit, like architecture glimpsed from shifting angles. The work moves with intention but never telegraphs its next step. It is heavy with detail but never overcrowded. In Eilbacher’s hands, synthesis becomes both lens and terrain—a way of drawing light around sonic matter to reveal new edges.
Live in Turin is out now on SØVN Records. Max Eilbacher can be reached via his website HERE.
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As always, to start, let’s go all the way back. What are some of your earliest memories related to music and sound? Was there a lot of music around you and in the house growing up?
I grew up in a house where the radio was always on. Diane Rehm’s voice
followed us from the car to the kitchen. Left to itself, my mind just plays a medley of all the NPR theme songs. Stressed out or having the time of my life, my brain has the marketplace theme on blast. My parents kept the dial on the local college or classical station. I played, read, and fell asleep to the radio. Most nights, I’d doze off to a folk program, drift through a new-age show, and wake up around 3 a.m., disoriented, to some late-night DJ playing “out” jazz.
But my first real moment with sound that I can recall was when my mom would play, I think, a Talking Heads CD with a children’s choir in the chorus. I sat in front of the speakers, baffled—how could so many kids’ voices come from those boxes? I knew these super cool-looking stereo and amplifier boxes were creating all these layered, perfectly timed sounds—but how? Were the kids inside the speakers? In another room, being broadcast? Was this happening live?
I just remember the confusion—so many questions at once—it was completely paralyzing and hinted towards some sort of social idea of sound. I remember being bummed I couldn’t play with these kids. Their voices were in the living room, but where were their bodies?
When did you start playing an instrument? And what prompted your first adventures into writing and playing original music?
I started playing in bands and experimenting with editing sounds around the age of 14. It was all prompted by a mix of figuring out the chords to Stooges songs with friends, playing with the GVerb effect in Audacity, and the indirectness of making music as a social encounter.
The description of Live in Turin frames sound as a way of revealing “auditory shadows”—alternate shapes that emerge outside the constraints of light. How did this idea guide the construction of the performance?
I wasn’t consciously thinking about “auditory shadows” when composing this material. I was consciously manipulating a certain mode of perception. A strata somewhere between the emergence and dissipation of perceived shapes. An act of hiding one thing in another, trying to pull events and structures out of these shifting anatomies I like to construct. Making the act of very slowly untangling a cluster of something into a show. But shadows are the happy accident of all these assemblages collapsing and melting on one another.
However, this analogy to light does resonate with me, I studied 3D animation and film as an undergrad. The main takeaways from that time were of lighting objects and scenes, along with editing material on a digital timeline. It was especially revelatory to move between film/video classes—where professors stressed the importance of lighting and then struggling to make work with two poor-quality student LED lights—where with the 3D classes, the instructors would be solely focused on recreating traditional film and commercial lighting rigs digitally rather than exploring the potential of creating and lighting an imaginary space. The lighting possibilities in those programs were wild. Working in 3D taught me more about abstraction and composition than shooting video ever did. I loved the paradigm of working within an abstract 3D space—constantly navigating the tension between constructing traditional perspectives and experimenting with their breakdown. Once you build these alternative spaces or worlds, the question becomes: what are you saying with them?
That’s exactly how I approach digital synthesis, and hence this set. What makes presenting an impulse of overtones to my liking engaging? I am more likely to frame these driving inquiries as someone who has a BFA, more so than a musician. Final Cut Pro 7 and frustration with compression settings had a deeper influence on me than any exposure to music school or the baggage that comes with composer-like thinking. I was having difficulty figuring out how to arrange and present the material I was working on for Turin. As all these new things were very new, and it was especially unmusical to my ears. I was essentially trying to “draw” shapes and cast interesting forms into—and out of—dense slabs of sound. To work with this material was to ask, how integral is the lighting and framing to the choreography of these digital synthesizers? Are there lights welded into the architecture of the sound, or do I need to point more lights at it in a supporting role? What two lines stand out in a mass of scribbles? How do I bring them into focus to create something meaningful? I had a collection of petrologic sonic events—how could I point lights at them to present something interesting? And how do I make that movement more than just a presentation of rocks? How to frame these decisions and endow the act of the transformation with meaning? So the shadows mentioned are a byproduct of how the work came into focus. Which was trying to answer my questions about how my presentation of dancing forms could create and detail a space worth moving through.
You’ve spoken about sound as something that demands a leap from the listener, an act of faith or engagement. What kinds of sonic conditions help support that leap, especially in a live setting?
That’s still something I’m figuring out. I would consider this material a bit difficult and unhinged. What I find interesting, someone else might find punishing, and I think that’s an important part of the leap. Either a suspension of or a dance with their subjective readiness to follow a sound or timeline with me. I have confidence in these sounds, so I want the listener to as well. Once you sent these questions, I went back and looked through my notes—both from when I was building the Turin set and earlier, when I was testing out these sound and shape generators. Between the technical scrawls and all the drawings and markings over a year or so, I found notes on the dialogue from the various party scenes in The Recognitions.
These notes weren’t directly related to the work—there was no clear conceptual or technical connection. It wasn’t like I was trying to reference Gaddis structurally or use him as a framework. It was more like a kind of inspirational poster corner. I happened to be reading the book, the notebooks were lying around, and I was trying to keep track of who was saying what, follow the narrative threads, and absorb these dense, swirling conversational patterns.
Maybe consequential things happen in those scenes, but it’s also a lot of noise. Well-composed and sculpted noise, and they serve each other. When you can decipher who’s speaking and why, the conversations reveal these inverted meanings. Lines meant to be profound can feel pedantic, yet when everything is taken together, when you zoom out, the macro form creates this exhausting, tangled sense of beauty.
There’s also a lot of silliness. It’s playful, but not clownish. If an exchange or dialogue or a character’s action is absurd, it’s rendered through some profound, almost psychotic archetypes that flatten back around to being silly. I think a sense of play is an important condition for me. These moving and conflicting tones are difficult; they play with one another, as does the form. It’s not funny, their haptics and presences are intense and serious, but not lost in their own sonic signifiers.
Normally, a condition I find important is working within my notion of a minimalist framework—trying to get a lot out of very little. Or even if the work seems like a lot, it has some throughline or trace of a simple idea, either in the process or the compositional guides. But for this piece, I tapped into this idea of mass in a new way. The summation of this work is still simple, but the output of what I was working on was dense and busy. For the first time in a while, I was reducing an output from this material rather than creating lots of events and stacking them together to make a whole. Gaddis’s parties aren’t exactly an analogy for this, but they feel like they could offer some answer to a set of conditions.
Live in Turin was built from “sketches” of systems and ideas. How do you typically begin sketching in sound, and what did those early materials sound or feel like in this case?
In early 2023, I was traveling a lot for work. I love working on trains, planes, and in hotel rooms—sometimes I even prefer these environments to my studio. In transit, I can’t go anywhere or get too distracted. I want a kind of micro-escape from my surroundings, and there’s nothing else to do but focus. If I have an eight-hour train ride or a few hours alone in a hotel, I can dig in, figuring out a technical problem or getting absorbed in a sonic or conceptual study. When I’m on a train or have Czech’s Got Talent on in the background in a hotel room, I can build synthesizers or manipulate recordings in some cooked way—it’s great.
The simplest way to describe my process is that I set up a “system” and let it run—then I adjust, tinker, and re-launch. I’ll listen for long stretches, jotting down notes and making micro or macro adjustments along the way. Sometimes I’m building and shaping the system around a conceptual or auditory idea; other times, I’m tinkering with something I’ve already made, trying to push a past idea in a new direction.
This might involve configuring ways to generate sound, experimenting with a compositional method, or trying to translate some imagined sound structure into reality. I have pages and pages of these kinds of studies. And when the material finally starts to feel like it’s going somewhere, when it starts to feel like it could click, I’ll begin consolidating my written notes and digital workspaces to turn it into a “piece.”
You often use modular systems and generative structures. In this particular performance, how did you balance control and unpredictability?
I work for many hours in the studio, I construct something, I refine it until I have something I feel is worthy of presenting, even after that, it will go through a few more rounds of refinement. I have no interest in improvising or applying the standards of instrumentation to my live practice. I don’t find that anything is added by introducing unpredictability in my live performances. I have no interest in creating an experience where both the audience and I undertake a journey of mutual discovery around sound or performance. My generative structures are highly refined and dialed in. I don’t know if they are really generative anymore. If I am working with some sort of self-playing or mutating system, I know exactly the different paths it could take. I do not want any surprises for myself.
So for the show in Turin, there was a fixed, recorded component that I spent many months working on. That component is entirely made of two of my own approaches to digital synthesis and the different ways to give them interesting shapes and existence. I used this Turin gig as a reason to coalesce these things into a presentable piece. On top of this very set element of the piece, there are these things I call “sonic actors,” which are either these masses of self-refining/playing sound generators, or a way to process and generate feedback from the fixed audio component. So there’s this timeline that’s set, but then I have all these actors running alongside it, taking the audio in or singing right next to it. I can mix, sculpt, and push them around, and add multiple other layers. I am a big fan of control. I want people sitting, listening, and paying attention in a similar manner to the way I am.
Across your work—in installations, sculpture, and live performance—sound seems to function as both material and environment. What stays constant as you move between formats?
Sound is the material that shapes the environment. It’s especially good at reminding us that environments are highly malleable phenomena. For me, there’s a constant play between mental auralization and the biomechanical function of hearing—a tension that heightens the “collective individual” experience of sound. I’m drawn to the audible trace that blurs the boundary between inside and outside, wherever that boundary might be drawn.
Now that you’re based in Berlin, has your sense of space, silence, or noise shifted at all since leaving Baltimore? Has the city shaped your current work in any unexpected ways?
Germans are a very inward-facing people. Daily life—on the streets or in
casual interactions—tends to be quiet. It often feels like people are silently waiting in the bushes for someone to slightly break a rule, just so they can remind them of it. Even basic neighborly exchanges are minimal.
I was socialized in a more Southern style of interaction. In Baltimore, people nod, wave, say hello, and talk—not just to correct someone. We collectively break rules. The city had a much higher noise floor. Joyous and tumultuous human sounds were constant. Police helicopters overhead, cars rattling from subwoofers—that was part of my daily soundscape. People have more life in them and better fashion.
There was no being shielded from the intensity of life that Baltimore produces. While in Berlin, there is a lot more silence, and class is laid out and experienced in a much different way. I can feel those things have changed my work, but I can’t articulate it yet, maybe in a year or two more.
And lastly, to close, what are some of your favorite sounds in the world?
I adore the sound of the heaters in saunas, all these clicks and percussive hits following some oddball pulse variations.
Foxy Digitalis depends on our awesome readers to keep things rolling. Pledge your support today via our Patreon or subscribe to The Jewel Garden. You can also make a one-time donation via Ko-fi.
