Across the Open Spaces is forty minutes of unaccompanied choral music that explores distance and confronts loneliness. This is a collection of pieces written for and by KHORIKOS, including commissioned works by Kala Pierson, Evelin Seppar, and Kile Smith, as well as our original arrangements of pieces by Sarah Kirkland Snider, Anna Meredith, Benedetto Marcello, and Hildegard von Bingen.
Also our latest album, Across the Open Spaces is available now in stereo on Bandcamp and Spotify, and in Dolby Atmos on Apple Music and Tidal. Learn more about the album at Navona Records.
We recorded these pieces while standing in a circle around an ambisonic microphone, capturing a balanced sound from all directions, and our performances of this set take a similar form: we stand and sing in a circle, inviting audience members to sit in an inner circle of chairs, for a once-in-a-lifetime live surround-sound experience. Each piece is carefully staged to showcase how music moves between our voices.
At the 2024 Sound Scene festival, we performed the set in two incredible spaces in the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, including inside Laurie Anderson's Four Talks, with gracious permission from the artist. We performed the set again for our NYC audience at Powerhouse Arts' 2025 Community Day and in our album release show at the Sound Mind Center in Dumbo, Brooklyn.
We're so grateful for the artistry and craft of our engineer and dear collaborator Dan Dzula, and to Foundation House for hosting us for our recording and debut performance in 2022.
Our gratitude also to Renee Gladman for her art above, Plans for Sentences #59, 2018