Quist has been operating under the Embryoroom name since the mid-1990s, originating from Brooklyn and assembling one of the more singular bodies of work in experimental electronic music and film over the intervening three decades. His CV reads like a dispatch from the outer edges of avant-garde culture: a filmed close-performance document of Pan Sonic released as Kuvaputki in 2008; feature-length audiovisual essays on pandemic-era America including Ravaged by the Sun (American Cannibalism); exhibitions at MoMA PS1, Kunsthalle Wien, and the Milan Film Festival. He is, in other words, not a touring artist in any conventional sense. Which makes the fact that he found himself chaperoneing ABDUCTOR (a new 12-track album structured in four movements and accompanied by an album-length film) across four Australian venues in February 2026 all the more remarkable.
The logistics were handled by Stock Grazing, an independent label out of Canberra’s underground scene founded by Isaac Bryson and Rory Bolger. Their operation is small but clearly serious: each release treated as an extended artefact rather than a product drop, each tour considered in terms of environment and atmosphere as much as geography. Their stewardship of this particular run including Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne, and a final open-air Canberra date the following day was exemplary. They found the right rooms. They sourced professional sound equipment. And overall, ran a very tight ship fuelled by a grassroots DIY ethic.
Altar itself is worth noting. The venue, tucked beside the Queen Victoria Market, was hosting one of its final events with four more shows remaining after this one before it shutters. There is something fitting about Embryoroom performing in a space on borrowed time. The room had been dressed up with care: no amount of professional rigging could fully mask the underlying grime, but nobody in attendance seemed to want it masked. The space felt earned.
DJing between sets was Emelyne, credited with installation was Luxeflorart, and opening the night was Knotting. However, opening my evening was Abby Sundhorn. I arrived mid-crowd-build to see a singular, white-clothed figure sending sustained tones into the room via a double bass while dissolving particle animations shifted across the back wall. It was ritualistic and hypnotic, the drone mutating slowly, plucked percussive attacks occasionally puncturing the texture before Björk-adjacent vocals took the lead: wails that were somehow both raw and controlled, feminine and strange. The set expanded as the room filled, the sound growing independent and sparse, wafting through the venue as though testing whether anyone would flinch through the ebbs and flows from loud and ethereal to soft and sparse. Nobody did.
TORIMIMASATAKA from Osaka, Japan followed with something considerably more confrontational. Chest parallel to his table, physically inhabiting the equipment, he worked through ominous scratchy electronics, piercing frequencies and crackling echoes that drew from noise and sound art traditions. The accompanying visuals ran deep reds and jagged, lightning-bolt graphic forms. When the strobes kicked in alongside the crackling bursts, it was like standing inside the eye of an electrical fire: destructive, overlapping, genuinely unsettling.
By the time Embryoroom began, the room had recalibrated its threshold for what it was prepared to absorb. The contrast was immediate and deliberate. Where TORIMIMASATAKA had offered chaos, Quist offered rhythm: heavy, charged electronic thuds arriving with the regularity of a slow mechanical heartbeat. After two sets built largely around texture and unpredictability, the introduction of percussive pulse felt almost like relief, though it was relief that kept threatening to collapse into something more sinister.
ABDUCTOR had been performed in Sydney and Canberra in the days prior, and I’d heard that the Melbourne iteration had been restructured, with abrupt transitions between movements. In practice, even for those forewarned, the cuts were barely disorienting, less abrupt than reconfigured, the sequencing serving the visual logic of the piece rather than any musical through-line. A clapping guiro-like sound dominated one extended passage, hypnotic and almost tribal, while a deliberately embedded void-green cross pulsed at the centre of the projection, one of many throughout ABDUCTOR that Quist has described as containing hidden references and dedications.
The visuals deserve their own accounting. Quist’s film background is long and specific including early documentary work on the heroin epidemic and needle exchange programmes in Illinois; Kuvaputki; years of audiovisual performance, and it shows in the sophistication with which image and sound are made to do the same work simultaneously rather than merely accompanying one another. Bright, uncanny cyborg figures materialised through the visual static. Centipedes. Swirling voids that seemed to pull the lighter sonic passages into themselves. And running through it all, an ominous corridor sequence: an endlessly receding hallway, pursuit music hovering somewhere between ambient and thriller soundtrack, the unseen abductor closing in. The music moved with the narrative weight of a film, from the unease of the stalk to the crushing heaviness of the capture, the set was dense with dread.
Occasional glimpses of techno broke the surface: a snatch of four-to-the-floor propulsion before being swallowed back into the texture. Quist is clearly fluent in club idiom but has little interest in its conventions. ABDUCTOR is cinematic techno in the most literal sense, creating music that thinks in scenes and acts rather than in drops and builds, operating according to dramatic logic rather than dance-floor submission. Sat in an underground room immersed in swirling visuals and thumping electronics, it was hard to imagine another format that would do it full justice.
ABDUCTOR is a project that demands to be experienced rather than streamed, and Quist’s carefully curated Melbourne performance made the case without feeling like it was arguing for itself. The work simply arrived, did what it needed to do, and effectively made that case through a sustained artistic vision of experimental music and visuals.
Credit is due, finally and without qualification, to the organisers for making it happen. For Stock Grazing, getting a Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist of Quist’s acumen to commit to four Australian dates and then producing each one with this level of rigour is not a small thing. And for Altar, their next venue, whatever form it takes, is worth watching.
Keep up-to-date with Embryoroom on Instagram and embryoroom.com.
Follow Stock Grazing for upcoming events and releases.
Altar for venue news.
