I drove an hour from DC to Baltimore, convinced I'd be the least qualified person in the room, with only self-taught stage crew experience.
I went anyway....
...because there’s knowledge that does not live in books, Discord servers, or online tutorials. It lives in embodied learning and repetition, in hikma that you can only get by watching people who know what they’re doing move through space.
Ambient Church‘s Baltimore debut took place inside the historic Lovely Lane Methodist Church. The headliner was Laraaji, celebrating the 45th anniversary of Ambient 3: Day of Radiance (1980), his seminal collaboration with Brian Eno
Laraaji is a visionary musician and spiritual guide whose work helped define ambient music itself. He studied music and theater at Howard University, later working as a comedian and off-Broadway actor in New York before turning toward Eastern mysticism and sound as spiritual practice.
In the late 1970s, he electrified a pawnshop zither and played in Washington Square Park, where Brian Eno encountered him. Their collaboration, Ambient 3: Day of Radiance (1980), became a cornerstone of the genre.
Laraaji often speaks about music as refuge. As a child, sound and imagination offered him escape from the tyranny of adults. That spirit of play carried into his later work, including his globally recognized Laughter Meditation workshops, which aim to awaken joy and the inner child. His performances are built from electronically modified zither, hammered dulcimer, kalimba, synthesizers, voice, and natural sound.
Over Indian food, I got to talk with him (and the Ambient Church team) about the work I do making sound with code, similar to the underlying mechanics of DAW software and borrowing from music libraries. His experimental work is quite literally a precursor to everything I’m doing now. I’m still starstruck. He’s impacted me in ways I never knew, and he’s hilarious.
Baltimore is like another home to me and others in the DC metropolitan area. I’m very familiar with the tech and arts scene from living and studying at Morgan State University, and the city yearns for more new media art events. Back in the day I studied Computer Science during the day and ran a graffiti art business at night, not knowing my interests would converge later in life. It’s great to know one of the fathers of sound art came up through humble beginnings in the same ecosystem. Morgan and Howard recognize and adorn each other as is very common in HBCU networks, and this encounter really hit home in many intersections.
I discovered Ambient Church in 2022 through NYC designer networks, as New York is the tech-arts capital here in the States.
They’re a deep listening experience founded in Brooklyn in 2016, bringing together generations of sound artists to spark intergenerational exchange and illuminate an underacknowledged lineage of sonic exploration.
Figures like Zach Lieberman, one of the founders of SFPC and OpenFrameworks, has performed his live code at their events over the years.
They’ve been doing this across the East Coast, but Baltimore had never had one. I give a lot of credit to my colleague Sebha for sparking my intention to explore volunteering. We were looking for venues to potentially do a live code show in the DMV and one day she said, "what if we just try a church?". When I saw Ambient Church was coming to Baltimore and looking for setup help, I put it on the vision board as something LiveCodeDMV could emulate.
The churches selected for Ambient Church are stunning, and the choice for Baltimore was Lovely Lane Methodist Church.
The present building is on the National Register of Historic Places and named one of the American Institute of Architects’ "One Hundred Most Important Buildings in North America".
So the day came and call time was at 3pm with doors opening at 7pm. Upon arrival I met the founder of Ambient Church, Brian, and I embarrassed myself by asking if he was “Brian Eno” with bright eyes. Very cringe, but hopefully it did not leave a negative first impression.
I was one of the only volunteers for this specific event apart from a sound art professor at MICA and, as said before, I had never been on a stage crew apart from some of my own events.
I toured the building with a Reverend. The performance took place in a dome-shaped sanctuary enclosed in wine-red walls, a grand gold organ at the center, and a mural of the divine heavens above. There was also a mezzanine/balcony to fully experience the event, which rightfully served as premium seating.
Before the event, I had a conversation with Rev. Levon D. Sutton that became one of my favorite memories of the year. He gave me a history lesson about the church—the denominations, architecture, and the symbolism embedded in the building, his thoughts on inviting new kinds of communal activation into the space. We talked about secular and sacred and where that intersection lives, where you walk on the line between them.
He spoke about redefining what it means to come into a church, using the architecture to call people toward healing in ways that align with the sacredness rather than disrupting it. While sitting with him I took a second to thank him for replying to that email, the email that initiated Baltimore’s debut Ambient Church for me to experience. By doing this he set a precedent for alternative networks into a space for devotion and belonging. People could come into the space that Sunday and re-contextualize what worship meant for them. That openness and possibility is beautiful to me.
I met with the head of crew (I forget his name), another technologist specializing in spatial immersive studio design and XR. When we had some time to break, I learned about how he set up his own theaters in NYC and Europe.
Live visuals were performed by Sage Jenson (MxSage), a Berlin-based media artist who transformed the sanctuary into a living, responsive audiovisual environment. They’re not pressing play on pre-rendered video. The software they use is theirs, and they are performing live throughout the entire show, mixing and manipulating in real-time, so no two performances are the same. It is not branded as live coding but that is what it is—computational, improvisational, the body of sound and the visuals moving together—and they were familiar with legends like Char Stiles. There actually wasn’t much time to sit down and go through their process, but they did kindly open up their workspace after the event to explain many of their decisions. I urge people to check out their website.
For the actual setup process I didn’t know what to expect. I told the team my experience, how I’m not a sound engineer, but I do have a lot of vocabulary built up from studying livecode.nyc docs and experience setting up projectors and designing spaces for immersive events.
What I learned:
-The show visuals were hosted through a single projector (Panasonic RZ120 WUXGA - 12,000 Lumens)
-How to map the projection to the architecture of a church
-How to use headlamps so the crew can simultaneously work on projection setup and performer setup
-How to work with red walls, which make projection difficult, and still get a gorgeous result
-How to set up speakers and run XLR cables
-The concept of sound apex—when you are thinking about interior and spatial design, you also have to think about how people will receive the speakers, how sound moves through a room
-How to use gaff tape and the importance of marking a stage so the performer has no tripping hazards
I am grateful the Ambient Church team opened up their space for a learner like myself, and that I have the ability to pass the knowledge forward. If it seems like you can just get up and go do things like this, well yes...but it also takes intention and privilege to take time out of your day, to go deep enough to discover niches that seem hidden until they are not. I showed up scared, was welcomed by all without discomfort, and left more qualified to do this another time. I recommend volunteering for anyone looking to get deeper into immersive events.
About Me
I’m a computational designer based in Washington, DC. I work with sound data as material: translating and visualizing it with creative code and I’m building what I call Sonic Identity Systems.
repost from: https://www.data-v.site/posts/ambient-church/