Maggi Payne is an electronic/electroacoustic music composer, video artist, recording engineer, historical remastering engineer, and flutist. Her works often incorporate images ranging from those of nature to the abstract. Her works have been presented in the Americas, Europe, Japan, Hong Kong and Australasia. Her works appear on Aguirre, The Lab, Innova, Lovely Music, Starkland, Asphodel, New World (CRI), Root Strata, Centaur, Ubuibi, MMC, Digital Narcis, Music and Arts, Frog Peak, and/OAR, Capstone, and Mills College labels. She received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Bourges, Prix Ars, several awards for her video works, and a residency at Montalvo Arts Center.
Payne taught Electronic Music, Recording Engineering, and Composition at Mills College, in California, where she was Co-Director of the Center for Contemporary Music from 1992 to 2018.
Through Space and Time invites listeners on a mysterious immersive journey through images they imagine while experiencing the work, whether the images be vast deserts, the frozen Arctic, the lunar surface, Saturn’s rings, or beyond. Sounds and events conjure earthly images of nature: wind, storms, rain, dark nights, and sunlit days as well as unearthly images, at times suspending, at other times either contracting or expanding the fabric of space and time.
At times multiple spaces coexist in this work. There is always a sense of place, an atmosphere, in this acoustic construct. The sounds are choreographed in an expanded three-dimensional space beyond boundaries, with no walls, ceilings, or floors to constrain them.
This work was composed using a Moog IIIP synthesiser, and composited in Pro Tools. It was commissioned by Francisco Lopez for Audiosphere: Sound Experimentation 1980–2020 exhibition, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain.
I create immersive environments, inviting listeners/participants to enter the sound and be carried with it, experiencing it from the inside out in intimate detail. The sounds are almost tactile, visible, tangible. A narrative of the imagination exists, allowing each person experiencing the work to thread their own paths through their mind's imagination and their body's physical engagement. Inherent spatialisation architects and sculpts the aural space where multiple perspectives and trajectories coexist.
Each sound is carefully crafted, full of potential, its slow unfolding revealing great intricacies, with inherent spatialisation built in. All of my work is sound-driven: each grows and evolves similarly to crystals forming under a microscope.