Lumiadome: Black Rain Ensemble

Four musicians. No setlist. No leader. A storm system, assembling itself in real time — directly overhead.

Black Rain Ensemble is a Minneapolis-based improvising electronic quartet, and their music is built the way weather is: pressure meeting pressure, currents crossing, nothing planned and nothing repeated. Dathan Boardman (guitar, effects), Mykola Haleta (laptop, processing, electronics, guitar), Christian Langheinrich (synthesizer), and Lee Noble (synthesizer, tapes, keyboard) listen their way into each performance — four independent voices converging into slow-building electric atmospheres, textures dissolving into drones, guitars refracted through machines until the sources blur.

This is a group with serious depth behind it. Noble is a fixture of the American experimental underground — co-founder of the No Kings Record Co. label, with releases on Bathetic, Hands in the Dark, and Moon Glyph, and performances from the Walker Art Center to festivals across Europe and Japan. Haleta has spent two decades in the international electronic avant-garde, collaborating with the likes of Max Cooper and Keith Rowe, with work presented everywhere from Sónar Barcelona to SXSW. Langheinrich — who records and performs as Pooch Karton — co-runs the Minneapolis experimental label Nada and co-founded the city's InSitu Festival for Electronic Music and Sound Art. And in a twist only this scene could produce, Haleta and Boardman are both acclaimed type designers by day — two artists who spent careers making marks on paper, now making them in sound and light.

Which brings us to the room. This is improvised electronic music in 360: the quartet performs through Lumiadome's spatial audio system, each voice given its own place in a sphere of sound — drifting, crossing, and colliding around fewer than 100 listeners. And Boardman pulls double duty, sending live imagery across the dome's full 360-degree projection surface while his guitar feeds the mix — image and sound improvised from the same pair of hands.

Rain on all sides. Lightning overhead. Come stand inside the storm.