16–17 November 2024
Evicshen is the nom de guerre of sound artist, experimental music performer, and inventor Victoria Shen (she/her). Based in San Francisco, Shen's sound practice is concerned with the spatiality/physicality of sound and its relationship to the human body. Her music features analog modular synthesizers, vinyl/resin records, and self-built electronics. Shen's music eschews conventions in harmony and rhythm in favor of extreme textures and gestural tones.
Shen is notably the inventor of Needle Nails, acrylic nails with embedded turntable needles allowing her to play up to 5 tracks of a record at once. Shen's DIY approach extends beyond just instruments but also music releases. Her debut LP, Hair Birth, features copper album art that transforms the cover into a loudspeaker through which the record can be played. Recently, Shen has started releasing hand-made resin records embedded with found materials, each piece functions not only as playable music media but as unique art objects.
Will Guthrie is an Australian drummer / percussionist living in France. He plays solo using different combinations of drums, percussion, amplification and electronics, and leads the contemporary hybrid percussion / gamelan group ENSEMBLE NIST-NAH. His music has been released on labels such as Black Truffle, Editions Mego, Erstwhile, Clean Feed, Gaffer Records, Hasana Editions, 23five, iDEAL and his own label Antboy Music.
Regular collaborators past and present include Oren Ambarchi, Container, Sarah Hennies, Mark Fell, Roscoe Mitchell, Ahmed Ag Kaedy, James Rushford, Ghassen Chiba, Jean-Luc Guionnet, Erell Latimier, Chulki Hong, Mark Simmonds, Jérôme Noetinger, Keith Rowe, Ava Mendoza, the film maker Hangjun Lee and choreographer/dancer Mette Ingvartsen.
Performing solo with only his guitar and effects pedals as instruments themselves, his performance is a true performance that engages all the senses. The body is at the heart of his practice, and one theme still fuels his work today: what to do with bodies and their generated movements through music?
Originally conceived as a recorded sound piece, ‘Agora’ was created during the November 2020 confinement.
‘Agora’ is also a piece for electronics, impedance games, electric guitar and podoryhtmy, created during the autumn 2020 confinement and presented during the Italian Festival Cataclisma.
If Agora refers to the meeting place of the city, of the town, where the people come together, Agora also means “now” in Portuguese. Agora is twofold and plays from several points of view. A soft, explosive and joyful trance brings together podorythmics, high voltage electricity, guitar and body until their rupture and reconciliation. With playfulness and frenzy, a multiple world is negotiated through your listening.
‘Agora’ plunges us into the jungle of impedance. A jungle where the air is dry and moist and where the trees, a little too bright green, burn from within. Crackling under our steps, the road reveals a few shadows in the middle of the mud, dancing in a tap dance. The blackout is our vehicle, the electric tension our fuel.
