Tom Hall presents Trip Computer album launch—a powerful new audiovisual performance marking two decades of exploration in experimental sound, systems, and synthesis. Featuring special guests r beny, Testu Collective, Amma Ateria, and Sharkiface, this event brought together boundary-pushing artists for an immersive night of sonic and visual experimentation.
Synthetic organisms breeding in real-time
The Pacific’s white noise bled through the outer avenues while I waited for the autonomous. The thing slid up, chrome carapace beading with condensation, and carried me through the city’s fog-wrapped vertebrae, Autechre‘s algorithmic mutations bleeding from its speakers. Down into the Mission’s neon-stained concrete, where the Gray Area Grand Theatre squatted like a black box recorder for Tom Hall‘s Trip Computer (Sonoptik, 2025) drop.
I’d clocked Tom Hall here in ’22, Algorithmic Art Assembly, his performance cutting through the noise like a laser through smoke. During the lockdown years—that great flattening—Tom had assembled crowds in virtual space, streaming his Max/MSP consciousness live, building patches in real-time while disciples watched the code bloom into sound. Tonight he’d architected something else: five acts, each one jacked into the venue’s neural system—surround arrays and thirty-foot screens that turned the space into a sensory weapon.
Make no mistake—beneath the IDM surface patterns of his new album, this was raw noise warfare. I’d done time in the trenches: dive bar basements, gutted supermarkets, caves where the ocean tried to reclaim the sound. Noise isn’t heard—it’s absorbed through bone conduction, nervous system overload. But here, through Gray Area‘s rig, we got the full spectrum assault in surgical detail.
Sharkiface—Angela Edwards in meatspace—initiated the attack. Her sonic payload: witchy glyphs and skull fractals morphing across the screens while sound came at us like compressed air through a broken seal. Religious iconography dissolving into cosmic static. The audio equivalent of being hardwired to a turbine, consciousness expanding through pure kinetic force.
Testu Collective brought industrial thunder, organic somehow despite the mechanical pulse. Slow-burn repetition, each wave building pressure differentials in the room’s atmosphere. The visuals: strobing darkness eating light, something vast and hostile assembling itself from raw data.
Amma Ateria—I’d seen her crack reality at a Joshua Kit Clayton show—delivered pure elemental chaos. Microscopic sound particles engineered at the quantum level, each frequency evolved through countless iterations, existing in superposition between states. Sensory buffer overflow.
The crowd had gone horizontal, scattered across the floor in various stages of sonic dissolution. I tracked familiar faces in the gloom: Leidecker/Wobbly running with Negativland‘s culture jammers, Michael Masura Flora from the Santa Cruz underground, Naut Humon—architect of Recombinant Media Labs, still operating at the bleeding edge.
Light beams carved the smoke into geometric fragments ::
When Tom‘s first percussive blast hit, it split the air like a logic bomb. Light beams carved the smoke into geometric fragments while bodies jerked upright, drawn to the stage like iron filings to an electromagnet.
Tom worked between two laptops, a digital shaman channeling UDP packets through ethernet, Open Sound Control messages propagating from Max/MSP to his dedicated Jitter renderer. The sound: synthetic organisms breeding in real-time, binary polyrhythms, glitch artifacts that made your inner ear recalibrate. The audience caught in his feedback loops—swaying to phantom beats, neural patterns hijacked by his algorithmic sleight-of-hand.
For sixty minutes, consensus reality got overwritten. Drill’n’bass acceleration curves flowing into ambient valleys, then ascending into Vangelis-grade emotion—all of it synchronized to visual mutations that burned afterimages into your retinas. The whole room transformed into a single processing unit, wetware and hardware merged through pure sonic pressure.
R Beny closed out the night with glacial drones, cooling our overclocked nervous systems back to baseline. Perfect decompression protocol after Tom’s assault on the senses.
The autonomous carried me back through the city’s grid, but part of me was still processing in that black box, caught between the last beat and the next.
Photography: Korey Luna | Piqued.FM
Trip Computer is available on Sonoptik. [Bandcamp]
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