The Silent Light has spent a decade doing something that sounds like a stunt and plays like something else entirely: scoring classic silent films with live black metal and doom metal. On Saturday, September 5, the duo closes out EMPAC’s TOPOS 2026 festival in Troy with a 70-minute live score for Teinosuke Kinugasa’s 1926 A Page of Madness, a film so willfully strange that EMPAC describes the pairing as creating “parallel dissonance” where “subjective and objective realities begin to unravel.”
About the Show
Founded in 2015 by composer and film director Michael Formanski, The Silent Light (Formanski on guitar and electronics, Matt Hardy on drums) has built a catalog of live film scores around Metropolis, Faust, Nosferatu, and Joan of Arc, touring from Pennsylvania to California along the way. Drawing on black metal, doom metal, and dark ambient, with influences including The Body, Sunn O))), and Emperor, the ensemble doesn’t treat film scoring as accompaniment. EMPAC frames this performance as “a destabilizing and distinctly contemporary psychological force,” designed to push against the film rather than underline it.
A Page of Madness is already demanding material. Kinugasa’s 1926 film tells an unsettling story of a family undone by violence and mental illness through superimpositions, distorted perspectives, and dreamlike sequences. Surviving prints lack intertitles entirely, which means the visuals carry everything. Time Out described Kinugasa’s technique as deploying “a battery of expressionist distortions” to pull viewers into unstable viewpoints. The Silent Light answers that with sustained sonic intensity. The result, per EMPAC, is a meditation on madness, memory, and perception.
The 70-minute performance closes out TOPOS 2026, a four-day festival curated by Amadeus Julian Regucera that also brought Vijay Iyer and Wadada Leo Smith, Miho Hatori, and others to EMPAC earlier in the week.
Venue & Logistics
EMPAC, the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center on RPI’s campus in Troy, is one of the Capital Region‘s most technically capable performance spaces, purpose-built for immersive and experimental work. The pre-performance reception opens at 5 p.m. in Evelyn’s café on-site. Plan to arrive early; the café gives the evening a proper preamble before the lights drop at 7 p.m.
Tickets
Single tickets are $20. A festival pass covering all nine TOPOS 2026 events is $50; if you can make it out for the full weekend, it’s worth considering. The RPI student rate is also $20. Buy tickets