Ash Fure Receives Creative Capital Award for Ambitious New Sound Artwork

For the past decade, Associate Professor of Music Ash Fure has leapt out of the world of contemporary music to pioneer a new genre of sonic art that is closely embedded in architectural spaces. 

The recipient of numerous prestigious awards and a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Music, Fure creates multisensory worlds that blur the boundaries between aural, visual, and physical art. In January, Fure received her latest major accolade, a 2025 Creative Capital Award in support of her forthcoming boundary-pushing encounter with sound, ANIMAL [the underground].

The Creative Capital awards catalyze projects across the arts that propose radical new ideas and groundbreaking approaches. Fure was one of 55 artists selected for the award from a pool of nearly 6,000 applications from across the country. Project proposals were evaluated through a rigorous external review process that included 120 industry leaders, cultural producers, and artists. 

"The award is especially meaningful to me because of the intensive selection process, and because it has a lot of cross-disciplinary legibility," Fure says. "My work is quite interstitial; I'm trying to pry open this space for an encounter with sound that is architectural in scale and migratory for the audience. In some ways, this expansive, full-bodied work is too loud for traditional art venues, and too spatial for traditional music venues."

Award recipients are provided with up to $50,000 in unrestricted project funding, plus access to professional development services and community-building opportunities. Established in 1999 after the U.S. Congress pressured the National Endowment for the Arts to end the majority of its grants for individual artists, the Creative Capital Foundation helps artists dream past disciplinary boundaries and realize work held back by the limits of institutions.

"Ash Fure's extraordinary sonic worlds define a new art form while activating our senses in new and exciting ways," says Samuel Levey, associate dean for the arts and humanities. "I can think of no artist more deserving of this prestigious award that invests in pathbreaking new work."

Activating our 'animal capacity to sense'

The Creative Capital Award will support the latest incarnation in a series of works called ANIMAL. The projects share sonic content and a body-forward listening ethic, but range in scale from solo performance (ANIMAL [for body and sound]) to hybrid installation/performance (ANIMAL [the listening gym]) to full-scale site-specific sonic takeover of an entire architecture (ANIMAL [the underground]).

ANIMAL [the listening gym] debuted at Yale's Schwarzmann Center in October 2023. Both an interactive sound installation and a site for live performance, listeners were invited to "work out" on a series of custom full-bodied sonic machines that functioned like a circuit workout for the senses. Fure says it was beautiful to see people of all ages, both musicians and non-musicians, find their way through the sensory architecture and "through a quite intense sonic experience, but one that had this visceral intimacy to it."

She recalls how her 9-year-old nephew lay on an inner tube with a subwoofer inside of it. "When it finally quieted, he turned to his dad (my brother), and said, 'This is my favorite place on Earth.' Wow, that broke my heart."

New Haven public school students who took part in the experience shared similar reactions with Fure, including those who identified themselves as neurodivergent. "It's not a place with a lot of fixed rules and sitting still, and there's an invitation to investigation that we found really spoke to people," she says.  

This June, ANIMAL [the underground] will take over an 18,000 square-foot concrete basement with a massive empty pool at The Macarthur in Los Angeles. Produced by The Industry (where Fure served as co-artistic director from 2021 to 2024), this site-specific sonic artwork functions like an underground listening gym, "a site of collective sound-fueled focus that is body-amped and adrenaline tuned."

"It's this huge labyrinthian expanse, and there's a massive rig of speakers and subwoofers activating the entire architecture," Fure says. "And then inside of this underworld of sound, there is a rig of custom full-bodied listening gym machines that I developed with [architect] Xavi Aguirre."

The gym machines "invite you as the listener to engage with sound in a really full-bodied and tactile way," Fure continues. "And they're spread throughout the space, like a circuit workout or a CrossFit gym. It's a really sensory-intensive experience that operates outside language or narrative and is a kind of social experiment in embodied listening and collective focus."

Fure is composing the audio score with the 24-channel system that was recently installed in The Warehouse, Dartmouth's new lab for sonic art at 4 Currier Place. "This is a very rare resource, and I couldn't have more gratitude for it," she says. "It's so fortuitous that we were able to finish The Warehouse in time to incubate this project there."

Fure recently performed ANIMAL [body and sound] at the CTM Festival in Berlin—whose club culture she considers formative to her evolution as an artist. 

"The queer nightlife scene in Berlin really shaped and changed my understanding of how sound could be a collective experience and the possibilities of the social body outside of the more normative, rigid structures around sound that I was raised in and had always tried to push against in the noisy edges of classical music," she says. 

Fure says that ANIMAL emerged from her experiences in Berlin, which include debuting another site-specific production, HIVE RISE, at the city's iconic techno club Berghain in 2020.  

"My experience in Berlin and club culture there really refueled and stretched my imagination," she says. "It was amazing to bring ANIMAL back to that city and offer it to my very close community of friends and the dance community there, people who really understand the dance floor it comes out of."