Paracusia is a multi-movement collaboration for saxophone(s) and live electronics created by Camila Agosto and Justin Massey. The performer represents a character that is trapped within a reverberation room. Over the course of the movements, the performer navigates the audience through their experience as they slowly lose their ability to interact with their outside world. Each movement represents a different step along their journey, exposing the unique sonic landscape of the different instruments within the saxophone family and their connection with the integrated electronics.

Paracusia I begins after the character has been inside the room for a brief period of time. They will begin to hear voices (imitating the action of the performer) swarming around them, building into a climatic moment of tension which seems to dissipate briefly Ito the start of the second movement.

Paracusia I was premiered by Justin Massey at West Virginia University (April 14, 2018)

Paracusia II, tethers begins immediately after the first movement. The character continues to hear violent echos that imitate their actions, emerging from all around them. Throughout this movement the character begins to struggle more intensely against the multitude of voices spiraling around them, as the tethers connecting them to reality begin to snap.

Paracusia II, tethers was premiered by Justin Massey at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity (June 21, 2018).

Avid collaborators Camila Agosto and Justin Massey share an obsession for the creation of art through partnership. With an incessant interest in extended instrumental techniques, obscure, and unexplored sounds, Camila and Justin research and scrutinize different timbral and textural elements in an exploration of the sonic potentialities of acoustic instruments. 

The partnership of Paracusia was formed through the concepts of memory and perception that have become an integral link and inspiration source for Agosto’s recent projects. From an early age, she has seen how mental illness, PTSD, trauma, and dementia has affected family members and friends closest to her, and those experiences have inspired her growing interest in exploring the ways in which we, as humans, process and form memories, recall past events and traumas, and the ways in which music and the arts, from a visual and auditory level, are linked to the memory process. 

Paracusia is a long term project that relies on the unique expertise offered by both Massey and Agosto. Justin Massey is a Canadian saxophonist who is obsessed with the instrument's unparalleled potential to create visceral and emotional music. Through experimentation and performance with electronics, Massey has composed, performed, and created electronic music that pushes the saxophone’s boundaries and crosses the lines of traditional music genres. 

Together, Camila Agosto and Justin Massey’s collaboration is to create  interdisciplinary and decidedly intimate art through the combination of live saxophone performance, electronic manipulation, and deliberate staging that envelops and invites an audience to share a deeply emotional and visceral artistic experience through a concert setting.