AUDREY CHEN

UNTRAINING THE EAR: LISTENING SESSION N°2 WITH  Audrey Chen 08.12.2017 19:00 Untraining the Ear: Listening Session N°2 presents Audrey Chen who works with aural and oral perceptions of time and living process, which in her performances, become a narrative and nonlinear storytelling. Her collection of sound materials (as filtered through the voice and cello) form a language which is freely used to express an abstract collage of her experience, memory, history, perspective, thoughts and emotions. The material is taken experientially and through feeling and listening, even subconscious hearing, which becomes stored as an accumulated “mass” of muscle memory, knowledge and personal biography. With the Listening Sessions, SAVVY Contemporary, Deutschlandfunk Kultur and CTM Festival suggest an alternative way to listen to music and sound. In order to contextualise how we listen to the world today we also need to replay the past of abounding sonic references. We (the audience, the performers, the space, the radio, the moderators and the technicians) will rhetorically navigate through archives of maverick composers in the attempt to reindex their contributions, to create other possible genealogies and narratives. By involving sound practitioners coming from diverse genres to perform, and scholars to discuss works of the composers, we listen back to the influence and ingeniosity of musicians and sound artists who defy the linearity of 20th century avant-garde music history. We would like to shed light on and unbox works of pioneers such as Halim El-Dabh, Eliane Radigue, Jose Maceda to mention a few. We will also commission new works to echo and reflect (with a contemporary take) rare archival body of works that have been marginalised by history of avant-garde music and sound art. Supported by Musicboard Berlin

live concert video from the Festival Ecuatoriano de Música Contemporánea, Quito, Ecuador September 16, 2018