Heat Waves brings together musicians of different contexts and practices to bring sonic experiences into our summer public programming. Heat Waves is an occasion to gather, listen, move, or simply spend a longer (and acoustic) time in our space.
On August 13 from 6 to 8pm, experimental musicians Lucy Liyou (Philadelphia) and Theodore Cale Schafer (NYC) share the stage. Although their works diverge greatly in style, both interrogate what happens when traditional instrumentation becomes data, engaging in play between synthesized and raw, and between presence and absence.
Entry is free, and we welcome all ages and music preferences. Prior registration is recommended but not required.
Philadelphia-based artist Lucy Liyou synthesizes field recordings, text-to-speech readings, poetry, and elements from Korean folk opera into sonic narratives that explore the implications of Orientalism and Westernization. Though their music reflects the work of genres such as post-industrial and musique-concrète, Lucy Liyou is greatly influenced by audiobooks as well as music from the Impressionist period and Neoclassical period. Lucy Liyou’s debut project, A Hope I Had, was a sonic examination of hereditary depression in Asian families, which caught the attention of South London based artist Klein. Liyou followed up the release with their debut full-length, Welfare (released in March 2020 through Klein’s label ijn inc), an ambitious analysis of the colonialist concept of self-care. Less than a year later Lucy Liyou released the acclaimed follow-up, Practice, which drew deeply on aesthetic touchstones from Liyou’s Korean heritage to examine how families explicitly and implicitly pass on coping mechanisms – or lack thereof – for grief and loss passed through generations. Liyou has since shared a steady output of works, including for N. and how to ask for help and, most recently, a collaboration with guitarist YSKA titled A Need / A Want, released via Notice Recordings. Liyou’s work has earned acclaim from Pitchfork, Bandcamp Daily, The Quietus, them., Tone Glow, Wire Magazine, NPR Music among others, and received notable airplay on NTS Radio, KEXP, NPR, and Sonos Radio’s Radio Hour with Thom Yorke. Lucy Liyou’s first two full-length albums Welfare / Practice were reissued on vinyl for the first time in May 2022 via American Dreams Records.
Photo Bianca Chun.
Theodore Cale Schafer is a musician. After a long history of producing cassettes on various labels and self-releasing audio files, Schafer has most recently released works including Patience (Students of Decay) and It’s Not a Skill, It’s a Curse (Longform Editions). Schafer’s music often confronts the tropes of ambient, drone, and field recording music to arrive at his own style of concrete music—fusing elements of autobiography, an open ambivalence to instrumentation, and self-reflexive composition structures. Informed by his work as an audio engineer, his work combines digitally sourced audio and manipulated self-recordings to create its own unique fidelity—equally informed by Playstation OSTs, modern classical composition, confessional narrative, and spoken word. Recently, he has collaborated with Natalia Panzer, Angelo Harmsworth, and Claire Rousay, participated in the Neo-Pastiche: Changes in American Music festival at the Black Mountain College Museum, and curated the Casualism mix series with Retreat Radio in Malmö, Sweden.
