Empty Gods: GRACE

Grace (2025) by Empty Gods is a collaboration between artist-musicians Sean Lowry and Damien Melchiori in the form of a visceral sonic experience situated at the threshold between contemporary art and experimental music. Refusing to be contained within either ontology, Grace unfolds across twin manifestations: a studio album distributed via major streaming platforms and an immersive installation performed in near-total darkness. Each form interrogates the conditions of sonic reception, from the private and portable rituals of recorded listening to the collective, embodied intensity of durational sound installation. Working through extremes of brutality and subtlety, Grace is an exploration of sound as both medium and event—an affective architecture in which the body becomes a resonant chamber. Eschewing narrative, lyric, and conventional musical structure, it amplifies texture, density, and duration to evoke a state of devotional stasis and emotional saturation. By oscillating between artworld and music world attention economies, Grace tests the limits of interpretation, embodiment, and attention, proposing that sound itself can act as a site of grace—a threshold condition where thought gives way to sensation and experience becomes its own meaning.<p></p>