emptyset is the collaborative duo of James Ginzburg (also performing at the festival this year alongside Osmium) and Paul Purgas. Purgas is a London-based artist and musician working with sound, performance and installation, who is known for his immersive soundscapes that blend traditional instruments with electronic manipulation and modular synthesis. Ginzburg is an artist and musician who is the founder of labels Subtext and Tectonic – the latter of which was integral in the early foundations of British dubstep. As emptyset, the two assemble as noise bringers and harsh experimenters to gift grizzly bass and industrialized technophonics to unsuspecting audiences. A cacophonous and foreboding feeling of scale accompanies emptyset’s music: expanding and contracting this sense of space is what emptyset do, leading the listener through their soundworlds like sherpas in a fallow, jagged land. The momentary respites the music offers – like in the pulsating synthesis of album Blossoms (2019), or with the gaps between burnished bass drums in the riotous Ash (2023) – feels like surfacing for air from some unfathomable dark depths. And yet, each time it summons you back, you gladly want to plunge in.