No one is swaying or sweating under a dizzy shimmer of a disco ball, but you wouldn’t guess that by listening to the sound pulsing through the room.
It’s a mild Saturday afternoon at the Main Library at Goodwood, the palatial host of the Baton Rouge Maker Faire. And inside, rushing from the speakers toward rows of uninitiated listeners is an intense and cinematic sonic landscape.
Slightly dark, in a Germanic folklore way. Sweetly epic, in a Hans Zimmer way. Completely created live in the moment by three composers with their hands on keyboards—the computer kind—and a series of coding sequences in their brains.
This is laptop lightning, a demonstration of an algorave, the hot international trend that uses algorithms to create pulsating dance music.
Leading the performance is Kerem Ergener, a Ph.D. candidate in experimental music and digital media at LSU. An electronic composer from Turkey, Ergener toured last summer performing his piece “In Praise of Shadows,” including a first-time appearance in South Korea.
“Louisiana is a melting pot of cultures and influences, and electronic music is, too.”
[Kerem Ergener]
“For me, it’s never about pitch, but instead the timbre and the texture of the sound,” he says. “I love figuring out how different rhythmic elements can fit together.”
The 31-year-old began playing piano at age 3 and drums soon after. While studying mechatronics engineering and music production at Istanbul’s Bahçeşehir University, Ergener launched his own record label in his mid-20s and began experimenting with compositions.
Since arriving at LSU, he has joined the Laptop Orchestra of Louisiana, while continuing to push the boundaries of his sonic creations.
“I’m inspired by design very much, whether that’s fashion or furniture—I collect midcentury furniture—or architecture, which I love experiencing in New Orleans,” he says. “Louisiana is a melting pot of cultures and influences, and electronic music is, too.”
As part of earning his Ph.D., Ergener is working on a minor in architecture, focusing on building an innovative speaker system to enable everyone within a 75-foot span to hear the same exact sound, no matter where they are standing within the space. Anyone who has been to a loud concert at a bar can identify with moving around to find where the band sounds best.
“With this, there will be no bad spots and sweet spots while hearing the performance,” Ergener says. “It’ll all be a ‘sweet field.’ And I wouldn’t be able to develop this at any other university, really. It’s very ambitious.”
This article was originally published in the January 2025 issue of 225 Magazine.
