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BEAM SPLITTER: AUDREY CHEN / HENRIK MUNKEBY NØRSTEBØ
MOPCUT: LUKAS KOENIG / AUDREY CHEN / JULIEN DESPREZ
HISS & VISCERA: AUDREY CHEN / RICHARD SCOTT
AFTERBURNER: AUDREY CHEN / DORON SADJA
VOICE/PROCESS: AUDREY CHEN / HUGO ESQUINCA
(amplified voice and analog electronics with and without cello)
(voices)
With primary focus on the interplay between the uttered sounds of the mouth and vocal chords, Minton and Chen plumb the depths of their most inherent and bodily instruments. Their improvisations are fearless, fragile, hungry, passionate, riotous, ululating and animalistic, yet are also in all respects, human. They express, pronounce and intensely articulate (in their fashion) the many nuanced shades of their individual and collaborative conditions.
".......For those two voices interpenetrate to produce a more complex song. It’s a single voice branching out. Here, what the voice produces is actually what singing has not explored, what has been left behind as something impure or non-complying. Something similar can be brightly heard in Scelsi’s vocal pieces. There is also a similarity with the complex vocal works (the logatomes) Léo Kupper extensively produced in the mid-‘60s.
At times, the music seems to lead us to a meaning that is deeper than the textual level. Or is it the depth of another possible song? That’s when the music takes us to areas that seem closer to the sacred, left untouched by mediation, even slightly incomprehensible, though mostly ambivalent and reality-piercing.
Both voices in interaction, perpetually urging the other on, producing more than their simple addition, producing a third voice – like a semi-autonomous organism – very difficult to explain how – why – as if what had been mostly deeply burrowed was surfacing. An UR-song, like Schwitters’ UR-sonate. Something basal – though from an uncharted base. Music that should be listened to before one even perceives the slightest melody. An infra-song that encompasses everything including the comical, the grotesque, the exacerbation of a mood, and the extreme pain that obscurely lives inside all of us. Everything comes up effortlessly....." ---- Guy -Marc Hinant (Subrosa Editions)
Chen and Minton have been performing as a duo for more than a decade with concerts/tours in Europe, the US, China, Argentina and Brazil. Their duo album, By the Stream, was released by SUBROSA in 2013.
https://www.subrosa.net/en/catalogue/soundworks/phil-minton--audrey-chen.html
http://www.popmatters.com/review/171884-phil-minton-audrey-chen-by-the-stream/
(voice, electronics, trombone)
... as with many seemingly incongruous pairings, what defines the subtle union of this duo are the deeper synergies that are simmering beneath the surface.
BEAM SPLITTER are: Henrik Munkeby Nørstebø (NO) and Audrey Chen (US). Using the trombone and voice, they maneuver a balance between fragility, intimacy, the ecstatic and measured control. They share a common sense of pulse and an inherent understanding of the way they each aurally manage and let go of every consecutive moment. The lungs release through to mouths to bell, back and forth like a tactile breathing exchange.
Since beginning their collaboration in 2015, Nørstebø and Chen have been extensively touring the globe, in Europe, New Zealand, Argentina, Brazil, and the USA. They have taken part in larger commissioned works at the Teatro Colon, Buenos Aires and largely conceptualized a theatrical adaptation of MEDEA in front of the Olympic Stadium in Kiev, Ukraine (for butoh dancers and musicians) produced by the Ukho Agency. They have shared their collaborative projects with artists such as Phil Minton, Bob Ostertag, Michael Vorfeld, Thomas Rohrer, Valentin Tszin, Flavia Ghisalberti and Leonel Kaplan. Beam Splitter will release their debut album in 2017.
"Beam Splitter is highly improvised, extremely crafted and held in an iron will for experimentation."
- Jean Louis Fernandez, La Nacion, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2016.
(voice, digital process)
VOICE / PROCESS simultaneously explores the dynamics between a sonorous body, the processing interaction of a system that responds directly to the particularities of its spectra and the relation these two have with a defined space. In this sense, human- machine relations enter into a mediation through a double articulation. This double articulation emerges from the inherent temporalities of vocality and the processual speeds of computational devices which carry within them the capacity to extend the intervening at the same time as they react to the spatial characteristics of a defined architecture.
(drums, electronics, voice, guitar)
With Lukas König on synthesizers and drums, Julien Desprez on electric guitar and vocalist Audrey Chen. Three artists have joined forces to create songs beyond language and gravity at the interface of sound architecture and performance-ritual. Minimal and maximal improvisation, noise and electronics overlayed by Audrey Chen´s ecstatic vocals.
(voice, live electronics)
All new file exchange mind-melter from 2nd generation Chinese/Taiwanese-American musician Audrey Chen & British electroacoustic artist Kaffe Matthews:
"Breathing air as dark swallows was made during the three month COVID-19 lockdown period in Berlin 2020. Kaffe and I decided to embark on a music exchange after participating in a chain recording project isolated.connected initiated by Sabine Vogel. The first track of this album is the result of that, our first sonic meeting, inspired by prior recordings by Sabine and Michael Thieke. We then decided to continue the process by taking it in turns to send each other improvised solos to which the other would respond, producing four highly tactile and intimate breathing movements. Kaffe plays digital oscillators through a glu-box, whilst processing through resampling and granulation. Spatialization is via the pink ball Java interface and Touch OSC. I use my voice." - Audrey Chen
https://thesampler.org/news-opinion/takuroku-breathing-air-as-dark-swallows/
https://www.kaffematthews.net/
(voice, modular synthesizers)
“Hiss and Viscera” is Sound Anatomy’s fourth album release and presents a striking debut recording from two highly distinctive voices in the richly varied Berlin improvising scene. On the face of it the human voice and analogue synthesizer may appear to have little in common but Audrey Chen and Richard Scott share an intuitive, corporeal and dynamic sound world out of which an intense and sustained musical conversation develops. Phrases and interjections bounce and ricochet between Chen’s vivid lexicon of glottal pops, rasps and expulsions and Scott’s exhaustive catalogue of electronic clangs, plosives and propulsions. The resultant musical conversation may not always seem entirely human in origin, conjuring sonic images of stories, languages and environments populated by many unearthly creatures, real or imagined.
(voice, electronics, light)
Berlin based AFTERBURNER is a collaborative project of vocalist Audrey Chen and electronic artist Doron Sadja. Unique in a crowded field of voice and electronics duos, the pair weaves together Chen’s idiosyncratic vocal growls and chirps with Sadja’s dense synthetic atmospheres into a singular monolithic texture. Intimate, dark, chaotic and ritualistic, AFTERBURNER have created a fascinating vision of romantic noise music that is all their own.
(voice, cello, modular synthesizers)
Their work crosses the disciplines of experimental music and performance. Audrey Chen has created an uncompromising and idiosyncratic music, tightly disciplined yet acoustically wild and heavy with implication. Her ultra-verbal vocalising, exposes physiological aspects of utterance that are concealed within standardised articulation and day to day speech. Nguyễn Baly encompasses experimental music and performance from an urgent postcolonial perspective exploring themes related to gender, ethnicity and the diasporic condition in her practice. Tara Transitory has relentlessly sought the interstices as an artist whose practice amalgamates sound, performance, video and installation. For years, she looked into the effects of sound on our sensitivities, the state of trance and the collective experience, traditional rituals in Southeast Asia, the effects of matriarchal, postcolonial and ancestral histories on a contemporary artistic practice.
Performance
March 10, 2012
The Watermill Center
39 Watermill Towd Road
Water Mill, New York
In 2009, the Métamatic Research Initiative decided to host an open call for entries, in its quest to promote artistic research to the legacy of the artist Jean Tinguely. The result was an overwhelming response of 297 valid entries of which an internationally renowned jury selected eight artists. Berlin based Artist John Bock was amongst the eight selected artists with his proposal for a concert for voice, cello, land machine and objects, which he further developed during the course of 2011.
Jury report by Roland Wetzel, director of the Museum Tinguely, Basel: ‘John Bocks proposal addresses central issues of Tinguelys métamatics. It opens up a complex scenario through the setting of machine and man interaction with weird mechanisms of transmission to produce a surreal scenario of pathetic and intimate gestures in the “concert” he intends to produce. Sculptural power, multiple kinetical issues, references to art history (as for example an intimate theatre of “la mariée mise a nue…”) and acoustical paraphrases will result in a showdown of exuberant beauty and disturbia (we hope…). The strength of Bocks approach to Méta-Matic lies as well in its literal understanding and in its creative, perpetual and spectacular transformation.’
Cast
Cellist: Audrey Chen
Dancer: Colin Stilwell
Foley Artist: Leslie Bloome
About John Bock
John Bock’s work has been included in several collections such as MoMA, New York, MoCA, Los Angeles, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, TATE, London and Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt. Recent solo presentations include exhibitions at Kunstpalais Erlangen, Germany; Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin, Germany (both 2011); Centro de Arte Contempraneo de Malaga, Malaga, Spain, and Barbican Art Gallery, London, UK (both 2010). Recent group shows include Surreal versus Surrealism in Contemporary Art, Institut Valencia d’Art Modern Valencia, Spain (2011); The Art Magazine Becomes Art, Louise Bain Foundation, London (2011); 6th Curitiba Biennale, Curitiba, Brazil (2011); Berlin 2000-2011: Playing Among the Ruins, Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan (2011); Colección Art Foundation Mallorca 2011, CCA Andratx, Spain (2011); Adaption: Between Species, The Power Plant, Toronto, Canada (2010); 17th Biennale of Sydney – The Beauty and the Distance, Sydney, Australia (2010).
