AUDIUM VI: Rewind
Wonder what San Francisco’s avant-garde sounded like in 1975? Audium celebrates its history with a rare revival of Audium VI– a timeless tape piece by co-founder Stan Shaff, newly reimagined by his son David Shaff.
Field recordings and electronic textures will transport you onto a rumbling freight train, into a fog horn-filled bay, and alongside children’s voices that chase each other around the room. Audium VI was originally composed on tape and premiered in Audium’s then-brand-new home at 1616 Bush Street in 1975, marking the debut of a radical new form of spatial sound performance. One can only imagine what audiences at that time must have thought.
Fast forward 50 years, the technology has changed but Audium’s original aesthetic remains intact. Now, following in his dad’s footsteps, David Shaff has reworked his father’s sounds for Audium’s current system.
To mark Audium VI’s revival, artists and Audium archivists Blanca Bercial and Emma Scully have created an interactive lobby experience with objects from the theater’s historic archive. Audience members can explore tactile relics, rummage through archival materials, and answer a rotary phone with voices from the past. For tech-minded visitors, the all-in-the-dark machinery from behind the scenes- the original Audium control board- will be on display.
To learn more about Audium VI, check out the Audium Archives.
AUDIUM VI: Rewind
Wonder what San Francisco’s avant-garde sounded like in 1975? Audium celebrates its history with a rare revival of Audium VI– a timeless tape piece by co-founder Stan Shaff, newly reimagined by his son David Shaff.
Field recordings and electronic textures will transport you onto a rumbling freight train, into a fog horn-filled bay, and alongside children’s voices that chase each other around the room. Audium VI was originally composed on tape and premiered in Audium’s then-brand-new home at 1616 Bush Street in 1975, marking the debut of a radical new form of spatial sound performance. One can only imagine what audiences at that time must have thought.
Fast forward 50 years, the technology has changed but Audium’s original aesthetic remains intact. Now, following in his dad’s footsteps, David Shaff has reworked his father’s sounds for Audium’s current system.
To mark Audium VI’s revival, artists and Audium archivists Blanca Bercial and Emma Scully have created an interactive lobby experience with objects from the theater’s historic archive. Audience members can explore tactile relics, rummage through archival materials, and answer a rotary phone with voices from the past. For tech-minded visitors, the all-in-the-dark machinery from behind the scenes- the original Audium control board- will be on display.
To learn more about Audium VI, check out the Audium Archives.
From his early career in the 1950s as a trumpet player, composer and teacher, Stan Shaff gravitated towards stretching boundaries and shaping new forms. He explored the nature of sound in relation to movement with Anna Halprin’s Dancers Workshop; curious about sound bereft of traditional tools and structure, he turned to tape composition, working and performing with composers involved with the Tape Music Center. By the late 1950s, Shaff’s work with audio tape led to the need to externally realize sound in the way he conceived of it: as an energy in space. In 1958 Shaff met fellow musician and teacher Douglas McEachern, whose background in electronics enabled him to develop original equipment systems for live, spatial performances. From the first public presentation of these ideas in 1960 through succeeding decades of work with the co-creation and development of AUDIUM – constructed specifically for choreographing sound in space – Shaff has sought to explore and expand the language of space in music composition and performance
Dave Shaff is an electronic music composer, trumpet player and director of Audium. Born and raised in a household full of strange sounds emanating from the basement (father & composer Stan Shaff the culprit), Dave gained an early appreciation of music and sound of all sorts. Dave has designed and performed four multichannel compositions for Audium: Audium 10 (2017), Audium 11 (2019), Sound Hour (2021) and The Depths (2024). He has also remastered Stan Shaff’s Audium V (1969) & Audium VI (1975) for Audium’s modern system.