Nguyễn + Transitory / Afterburner at KM28 / Saturday, 06.04.2019

NGUYỄN+TRANSITORY is the duo of Nguyễn Baly and Tara Transitory. Their work crosses disciplines of sound, performance, and installation. Together, the two attempt to approach sound, synthesis, noise, rhythm, and performance from a postcolonial lens. Their practice also involves efforts to empirically learn more about various Southeast Asian + diaspora queer existences and histories. Currently, they are in the process of developing the immersive site-specific installation sound performance, Bird Bird, Touch Touch, Sing Sing, initially developed at HAU Berlin. Nguyễn Baly is a non-binary, Vietnamese-German diasporic sound and performance artist based in Berlin. In their work, Baly deals with postcolonial discourses, intersectional feminism as well as issues related to the Vietnamese diasporic community. Tara Transitory aka One Man Nation, makes work which some consider art, some consider music and some consider trash. Clearly, it never quite fits into neatly demarcated categories. She is trans, nomadic, and an explorer at the intersections of gender, noise, and ritual through sound, performance, and collective trance.

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AFTERBURNER is the collaborative project of vocalist Audrey Chen and electronic artist Doron Sadja, both American artists based in Berlin. Unique in a crowded field of voice and electronics duos, the pair weaves together Chen’s extreme idiosyncratic vocal growls and chirps with Sadja’s dense synthetic atmospheres and immersive smoke and light show into a singular monolithic landscape. Doron Sadja is an American artist, composer, and curator whose work explores modes of perception and the experience of sound, light, and space. Often using multichannel or motorized speaker systems and high intensity fog and light, Sadja crafts immersive performance and installation works that are both playful and transportive. Sadja has published music on 12k and Shinkoyo records and has performed/exhibited at PS1 MoMa, Miami MOCA, D’amelio Terras Gallery, STEIM, Norberg Festival, Cleveland Museum of Art, and Issue Project Room amongst others. “Audrey Chen has created an uncompromising and idiosyncratic music, tightly disciplined yet acoustically wild and heavy with implication. Her ultra-verbal vocalising, often reminiscent of the visceral and emotionally charged sound poetry of François Dufréne or Henri Chopin, exposes physiological aspects of utterance that are concealed within standardised articulation and day to day speech. Fleshy, breath-driven and flecked with spittle, Chen’s voice emanates not just from her mouth but from an ensemble of upper body surfaces, channels, passages, and cavities.” – Julien Cowley THE WIRE