Organism: In Turbulence
2024/2025, Solo concert with a century-old pipe organ prepared robotically to sound turbulent patterning
GOLDEN NICA, Digital Musics & Sound Art Prix Ars Electronica 2025 / Lumen Prize, Identity & Culture 2025
keywords: vortext-shedding, edge-tone jumping, hemoltz resonance, acoustic microsound, metastable systems,, transductive resonance
A 1910 Casavant pipe organ is rescued from impending gentrification at a heritage site in Montréal and brought back to life as Organism, an experimental instrument and investigative platform for stochastic patterning via turbulent processes of formation. In this acoustic solo performance, Navid Navab improvises with Organism to explore ways in which its turbulent thresholds manifest unstable timbres and intricate sonic self-organization.
Organism destabilizes the socio-historical tonality of the organ to liberate and sound its hidden turbulent materiality, robotically unleashing timbres unheard after centuries of sonic restraint. The rescued pipes and their pneumatic architecture have been carefully modified to remove aerodynamic ‘edge-tone’ stabilizations that historically aimed to eliminate turbulent flow and its uncontrollable sound world.
During the concert, Organism’s slowly-shifting metastable states allow for the pipes’ energetic thresholds to transductively fall into and out of compatibility with one another, turning each pipe into a vortex-shedding, edge-tone jumping, theatre of spectra and tone. With no digital sounds, Navab aerodynamically shapes the resulting ecology of interdependent timbres into emergent realms, traversing microsonic polyrhythms, post-rock overspill and swampy soundscapes.
PUBLICATION & REVIEWS. selected
[review-interview] 'It’s Alive': Navid Navab invokes the primordial frequencies of nature…, C. Maclean, FIBER, 2025.11
[radio:interview] Culture File, RTE Lyric FM, “Organism,” Luke Clancy, 2025.11 [min 18-28]
[interview] GONZO Circus Magazine edition 188, “NAVID NAVAB,” Lars van der Miesen, 2025.10
[interview-essay] Ars Electronica, “Sound as a Living Process,” M. Schmidhumer + N. Navab, 2025.07
[review] GONZO Circus Blog, “Wilde praktijken,” 2025.07
[video-interview] Art Act Days, AAD Talk “미디어 아트는 협업의 예술이다?…Navid Navab,” AAD Talk, 2024.09
[review] Ars Electronica, “A record: More than 112,000 visits to…,” Mario Schmidhumer, 2024.09
[essay-profile] Espace Art Actuel, “…Organism + Excitable Chaos,” Pia Baltazar, 2024.07
[review] La Devoir, “quand l’artiste révèle une altérité nouvelle,” Galadriel Avon, 2024.07
[review] Lien Multimedia, “Navid Navab traduit les données scientifiques en oeuvre d'art,” 2024.06
[video-profile], The Link Newspaper, “Organism, The Acoustic, Robotically Prepared Organ,” 2023.03
[review] KlasicaPlus, “ledové město pohybu”, MNM concert review, R. Spisarová, 2023.02
[review] Exlaime!, “...Boundaries of Music…”, 2022.02
Organism foreground a new form of listening: one that welcomes indeterminacy and entanglement, allowing material intelligence to speak in its own time and voice. A re-imagining of time, space, and historical memory… a profound and poetic gesture—an invitation to listen differently, and to reclaim what was silenced through resonance, care, and embodied presence.
Jury Statement (short excerpt), GOLDEN NICA, Prix Ars Electronica
Navab plunges us into the experience of sonic and material processes in which the boundaries of mechanical movements, generative algorithms and acoustic materials become blurred and intertwined, to the delight of our ears, eyes and imagination.
Espace Art Actuel, Pia Baltazar, 2024.07
There’s something undeniably visceral taking place …a gut-level sense that you’re experiencing something fundamentally attuned to the secrets of the universe…
It’s a rave – an anarchic, irreverent party on the bones of the defeated organ. It’s productive, not destructive; it’s about giving voice to nature, not speaking for it. It’s a font of liveliness: a ritual of life.
Callum McLean, FIBER, Writing Wildness, 2025.11
…technology now has the power to make the reinvented organ blow noises never produced before.
Le Devoir, Galadriel Avon, 2024.07
Organism sent the audience into trance with its hypnotic sounds. The humming in your chest, the rattling of the technology, the archaic sound creeping through the concrete. “Organism” was no ordinary piece of music. It was an experience, raw, expansive, almost eerie. And above all: difficult to forget.
M. Schmidhumer, Ars Electronica Review, 2024-2025
The performance at Orgelpark exceeded expectations. Navab wrings the most enchanting sounds out of the turbulent Organism. His art lies in an impressive sound palette... After a hellish ride, the audience is very enthusiastic.
GONZO Circus, 2025.07
Exhilarating and surprising. The joy of exploring these breathing resonant structures was accurately conveyed. Plus the horn blowing moments were raw emotive revelations. Sonic effect was so intense that for periods of time, I shut my eyes (as did others, not to avoid seeing but to taste better the contours of the sound)… a remarkable performance. Technically astute and emotionally visceral.
D. J. Johnson ELEKTRA Biennale Concert Review, 2024.06
The organ becomes a transductive, sculptural being, its hidden wilderness exposed. Its pipes erupt in drony soundscapes, organic textures, shedding vortices and jumping edges, becoming something like sentient throats of turbulent song, interrupted occasionally by Navab themselves blowing into organ pipes like horns: raw, breathy interjections that cut through the machine’s chaotic whisperings, grounding the otherwise otherworldly atmosphere in something bodily and immediate.
Eleni Margkou,, FIBER, Writing Wildness, 2025.11
CONCERTS. selected
version 0.1 instrument_early-proof-of-concept, 20min, ensemble
FIMAV: Festival international de musique actuelle de Victoriaville, QC, 2022.05
⋗ Ensemble Music, Commission by the No Hay Banda ensemble
version 0.5 alpha, 25min, solo
GRMS + SMCQ present, La Grande Nuit, Montreal, 2023.02
Montreal / New Musics Festival (MNM), Montreal, 2023.03
Hexagram Gala, Agora Cours de Science, Montreal, 2023, 04
version 0.7-0.8 beta, ~40 min, solo
Mois Multi Festival, La Nef, Quebec City, 2024.02
ELEKTRA: 25th Anniversary, Arsenal Contemporary, Montreal, 2024.06
Ars Electronica, Post City, Linz, 2024.09
Werktank, Leuven, 2024.11 (excerpt)
current version, ~50min, solo
