An inventor of forms and worlds based in San Francisco, Victoria Chen tcp Evicshen has revealed her tireless work in a way that is as transparent as it is fearless, leaving clues and hints about her continuous reinvention processes. Curiously, and promoting a totalizing vision for her art, these processes – technical, material, conceptual – are inseparable from it, promoting an intimate relationship between the physical-auditory space and the body. A quibble that has eroded much sound art and performance, but which here reveals an almost tactile physicality. Expressive and very real. And it is precisely in the interstices between sound art, music and performance that this (also) instrument builder positions herself with remarkable vision, creating the necessary bridges that unify all of this. One and the same thing and something else at the same time.
The electronic instruments she has invented or reimagined, which include DIY modular synthesizers, the amplification of various objects or the homemade creation of vinyl records from resin, which are then manipulated using their “needle nails” – allowing them to play up to five sections of the same record simultaneously – are the source of a music that is raw in its approach but with a full sense of detail and dynamics, escaping the bro-centrism of harsh bovine noise and the sterile hoax of the most hi-tech digital noise, even if the intensity of the volume, noise and physical positioning is as confrontational as it is difficult to imagine. BS
