Topics in Advanced Facemelting was a live performance of experimental beat-based music in a 19th century Gasholder building in Troy, NY. For sixty-six minutes the Gasholder became a mind-altering, transfiguring structure that few will forget. As the audience amassed and drifted throughout the dome-shaped building, overhead LED sculptures fired like nerves suspended in the air. Arrays of light on every surface shuddered like electric skin as sound blasted off the circular walls and ceiling in devastating tides and waveforms.

Jesse Stiles with his hacked electronic briefcase. Todd Reynolds with a wired violin. Kevin McCormick running LED's like an Incan priest. This unrepeated, epic performance has only now become available to a general audience. Recorded with the highest precision, using a surround formation of microphones, the exact feel of the extraordinary Gasholder building has been captured for the first time playing host to what many have come to regard as a "definitive electro-acoustic performance."

Kevin McCormick - LED lighting,
Todd Reynolds - Violin & Electronics,
Jesse Stiles - Customized electronic music performance instrument ("Hacked electronic briefcase"),
Video documentation directed by Penny Lane & Jesse Stiles