Exploratorium’s ‘Resonance’ Series Brings Experimental Sound Back to the Museum

San Francisco is blessed with not just one, but two science museums that cater to adults with weekly after-hours events. Tactile domes and planetariums — not just for kids! Over the past decade, the Exploratorium’s After Dark and the California Academy of Science’s NightLife (both on Thursdays), have become go-to date nights. Both offer drinks, DJs and hands-on, thematic activities.

But only one museum throws experimental sound performances into the mix. The Exploratorium’s Resonance series, which restarted after a long hiatus last summer, is a pocket of boundary-pushing noise in the midst of a building-wide party. The season kicked off Aug. 21 with a performance by Evicshen, and closes May 28 with Circuit des Yeux.

Wayne Grim, a longtime Exploratorium employee and the curator of the series, says the shows are all about offering audiences something they haven’t heard before. “Whether it’s through someone doing something more experimental, or through music from a culture that they’re completely unfamiliar with,” he says, “or instruments that they’ve never seen before, or a process of making music that most people are completely unfamiliar with.”

For Evicshen’s season opener last August, San Francisco artist Victoria Shen unleashed her self-described “chaotic sound” in the museum’s observatory, manipulating conventional and handmade instruments as the sky darkened around the Bay Bridge behind her. 

Artists are invited to work with the museum’s fabricators and scientists. Play, essential to the spirit of the Exploratorium, is welcome. “When we invite people, we say … ‘Would you like to experiment? What would you do if you could do anything you wanted to — you don’t have to do your regular set or your regular thing,’” Grim says.

Despite Shen’s foray onto the observatory deck, most Resonance performances happen in the Kanbar Forum, a 200-seat theater with a deluxe Meyer sound system. According to Grim, “It’s a small, intimate space that is just a really great experience for the audience.” Each show is thoroughly documented, including the Q&A that follows each performance. The videos are uploaded to the museum’s YouTube afterwards.

For the May 28 show, fans of Circuit des Yeux (celebrated, experimental Chicago musician Haley Fohr, who has a four-octave range) will get to experience Wordless Music, a voice piece Fohr first performed in 2019. The hour of resonant voice and durational drone is now a duet with Alan Sparhawk of Low. At a recent show at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, Fohr wore a crown of butterflies, Sparhawk a ghillie suit. Fohr called the performance “not for the faint of heart.”

This kind of rare occurrence — a piece that’s only being performed a few times across the country — is exactly the type of Resonance programming Grim hopes to reestablish as the series continues. “I would like the Exploratorium to be more known as a place where sound is really important, and sound is something that we’re really excited to work with,” he says.

“I would just say keep your eyes out — or keep your ears out — for new things,” he adds, “because we’re going to have some really exciting shows coming up in the future and I hope to see more people there.”

‘Resonance: Circuit des Yeux featuring Alan Sparhawk’ takes place Thursday, May 28, 7:30 p.m. at the Exploratorium (Pier 15, San Francisco).