Ash Fure
Boston, MA
Ash Fure’s full-bodied sonic experiences work on the senses in startling ways. Called “purely visceral” and “staggeringly original” by The New Yorker, Fure’s live performances and multisensory worlds mobilize the elemental force of sound, the social muscle of listening and our animal capacity to sense. A finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Music, Fure has won two Lincoln Center Emerging Artists Awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rome Prize in Music Composition, a DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Prize, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant for Artists, a Fulbright Fellowship to France, a Schloss Solitude Fellowship, a Stuttgart Composition Prize, a Darmstadt Kranichsteiner Musikpreis, and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship from Columbia University. Her work has been commissioned by The New York Philharmonic, Klangforum Wien, Ensemble Moderne, Diotima Quartet, International Contemporary Ensemble, and the BBC Scottish Symphony, among others, and featured at MOCA Geffen, Big Ears, Berghain, CTM, Unsound, The Venice Biennale of Music, Peak Performances, Lincoln Center, Milano Musica, Witten, IRCAM, and many more. Fure holds a Ph.D. in Music Composition from Harvard University, is Associate Professor of Sonic Arts at Dartmouth College where she directs the M.F.A. in Sonic Practice, and is co-artistic director of The Industry LA.
Ash Fure and Xavi Aguirre, Animal: A Listening Gym, 2023. Installation and Spatial Sound Performance. Photographer: Brooke Holm
Ash Fure and Xavi Aguirre, Animal: A Listening Gym, 2023. Installation and Spatial Sound Performance. Photographer: Brooke Holm
Ash Fure and Xavi Aguirre, Animal: A Listening Gym, 2023. Installation and Spatial Sound Performance. Photographer: Brooke Holm
Ash Fure and Xavi Aguirre, Animal: A Listening Gym, 2023. Installation and Spatial Sound Performance. Photographer: Brooke Holm
ANIMAL [the underground]
Ash Fure is a composer and sound artist who co-artistic directs The Industry LA and is Associate Professor of Sonic Arts at Dartmouth College.
Artist BioElephants stop in lockstep silence when they sense danger. Whole herds will go still on a matriarch’s cue and wait like statues until she moves. Scientists understand this startling behavior as integrated threat response: they halt so they can hear the horizon. In the face of risk they listen, fiercely, together.
Steeped in this image of herds on alert, adrenaline-soaked and aligned in focus, ANIMAL reimagines opera as sonic training ground: a visceral field of full-bodied sound that activates our animal capacity to sense.
Created by sonic artist Ash Fure and produced by The Industry, the project debuts in 2025 in a site-specific staging in LA, taking over a cavernous concrete basement with a massive empty pool inside. 32-channels of speakers and subwoofers activate this architecture as a resonant force, while custom full-bodied sound machines, developed with architect Xavi Aguirre, spread throughout the space like stations at a gym. This circuit workout functions not to force participation but to up the ante of body investment, to blur the lines between doing and watching, agent and witness, alone and together. Moved through en masse by a migratory crowd, it aims to amp the focus, exercise the senses, and activate a heightened social sphere that operates entirely outside language. ANIMAL interrogates the social force of sound and the primacy of listening to our power as a herd.