trios in residence
Experimental improvised music is a social practice. Above adherence to any demarcated set of aesthetic principles, what is valuable is openness and trust. To listen first, and find a way forward together, meeting your contemporary at the threshold of your experience and theirs.
For two weeks, the music room becomes a studio and a living room for 10 artists from Taiwan’s diverse experimental sound scenes. They will each spend three days on site, building temporary sonic worlds with each other and breaking them back down. The Music Room will function as a testing ground: a space for attempts and failures, for embracing the mess of collective discovery and establishing understanding through action.
Artists on Site each day
Feb. 21st.: Immanuel Dannenbring + 동이 dongyi + Yoshi Yung-Chih Hsueh
Feb. 22nd: 동이 dongyi + Yoshi Yung-Chih Hsueh + Tseng Po-Hao
Feb. 23rd: Yoshi Yung-Chih Hsueh + Tseng Po-Hao + He Chen-En
Feb. 24th: Tseng Po-Hao + He Chen-En + Lin Tzu-Ning
Feb. 25th: He Chen-En + 동이 dongyi + Daniel Ditlevson
Feb. 27th: Lin Tzu-Ning + Daniel Ditlevson + Cia Him-Ian Li
Feb. 28th: Daniel Ditlevson + Cia Him-Ian Li + Liu Chun-Liang
Feb. 29th: Cia Him-Ian Li + Liu Chun-Liang + Iris Chun-Tzu Chang
Mar. 1st: Liu Chun-Liang + Iris Chun-Tzu Chang + Immanuel Dannenbring
Mar. 2nd: Iris Chun-Tzu Chang + Immanuel Dannenbring + Lin Tzu-Ning
All day: Visitors are welcome to enter the music room at any time, 3 artists will be on site each day.
Daily Open Sessions (~30 minutes)
11:00 conversation with the residents, hosted by Alice Hui-Sheng Chang
16:00 improvisation recording with live audience, hosted by Nigel Brown
About The Artists
He Chen En
He Chen En uses feedback, amplified objects, tape loops and field recordings from everyday as materials and conceptual drives for sound improvisation in performance and projects. He tries to expand the border of physical consciousness and focuses on the direct sensations of sound. He also focuses on the connections of time and space, and sensations of body memories in his performance and projects.
He performed as part of Cochlea-gigs no. 54, 56, 57, and Necromantia Dispersus in Kaohsiung Literary Museum, Ting Shuo Has Performance Twenty-Six, and sound installation as part of Dalinpu residency, in 2020; “Animal Experimentation” in Kaohsiung Literary Museum in 2021; Mille Sonos and Anamorphosis & Anatexis at Clab Taipei, and sound design for Ephemeral Radical by Jia-Che Chang as part of Taiwan Art Biennial in 2022; solo exhibition “Fix Surroundings” in Mr.maestro hair salon in Taipei, and published site-specific field recording album “Peak” in 2023.
Liu Chun-liang
Liu Chun-liang is a sound artist, director, and performing/ce artist based in Kaohsiung. Trained in politics and sociology, she creates meditational, perceptional, and participatory experiences that unsettle public spaces. Recent works include Sixty-Second ‘I Love You’ (2022) and The Sum of all these Love (2022) in Jinwanwan, a shopping mall located in the Little Philippines in Taipei. In, Sixty-Second ‘I Love You’, She invites random Filipino passersby to stare into each other’s eyes for sixty seconds. In The Sum of all these Love, she created an impromptu parade in Jinwanwan. Recent theatre work Fermenting: Listen (2020) takes the audience exploring the connections between the process of fermentation and the issue of life and death. She launched her second album I Thought it was Colourful, but They Said it was BLACK in 2022, first album Friction in 2016. She is a member of the duo group Moe Chee (“tacit understanding” in Chinese) with Australian experimental musician Clinton Green. Recently she also started painting and dance/movement video creation.
Iris Chun-Tzu Chang
Iris Chun-Tzu Chang is an artist and researcher currently based in Taiwan. Like sound as clay, Iris crafts her work through drawing, poetry, installation, field recording and improvised performance. Exploring embodied perception at the thresholds between the tangible / intangible, audible / inaudible, conscious / subconscious, her research focuses on the themes of sonic memory, imaginary sound, interspecies listening, and synesthetic experiences. In her art practices she seeks to grasp the fragility of sonic memory as a self-therapeutic process through which tension and identity is formed, deformed and reformed.
Her works have been exhibited and performed at home and abroad, including Hundred Years Gallery (UK), IKLECTIK (UK), NTMoFA (TW), Weiwuying (TW), TMoFA (TW), Tokyo Designers’ Week (JP) and Israeli Center for Digital Art (IL). In 2020, her work ‘moon tide lullaby: fragility of sonic memory’ won the First Prize in Nanying Awards (new media category), which is included in Tainan City Government’s art collection. In 2023, her work 'Listen Like A Stone' was nominated for the Best Imagined Sound in Sound of the Year Awards 2022. Iris initiates a long-term research project ‘What is it like to be_?’ exploring interspecies listening and imaginary sound. She has facilitated deep listening / sonic drawing workshops and lectures since 2021.
Daniel Ditlevson
Daniel Ditlevson is an American sound artist that is currently based in Taipei, Taiwan. He creates sound collages utilizing tape loops and manipulations of field recordings, audio feedback, found objects, and various electroacoustic sounds for his performances, recordings, compositions, and sound installations. It is through these sonic montages, his sound art serves as a conduit of communication of emotions and experiences—an unspoken and abstracted communion of a created sonic environment with the listener. His aim is to study the chaotic nature of information, experience, and disconnection in a connected world. It is through his physical manipulation of an imprinted memory of a particular instant in time that he rediscovers, reinterprets, and reinvents that specific aural moment into a new soundscape.
Immanuel Dannenbring
Immanuel Dannenbring is a composer and sound artist based in Taiwan. Aesthetically he is interested in seeking a means to strike a balance or to obscure the boundaries between both academic and popular music worlds and demonstrates this through performance, composition, sound design and curation. As a performing artist he primarily works with the sampling of found sounds, field recordings and percussion in rehearsed and improvised settings under the pseudonym MOXINA. In recent years he has started working in close collaboration with many video and new media artists.
As a sound artist he was awarded a Lilburn Trust Composition Award for his 7.1 Channel electroacoustic composition “Distant”. In 2021, he undertook a residency at the Taipei Digital Arts Center in collaboration with Mothra Productions. The following year, he was selected as an artist in residence for the New Zealand Pyramid Club & Thomas King Observatory Creative Sound Residency.
Tseng Po Hao
Born in Gangshan Kaoshiung and growing up in Tainan, Tseng Po Hao started studying Chinese classical music from his elementary years. In high school he became intrigued in western rock music and began to play in rock bands. This was followed by formal training in Taiwanese folk songs singing and traditional string instrument yueqin. Po Hao has a degree in Material Arts and Design from TNNUA, and a Master degree from Graduate Institute of Trans-disciplinary Arts from TNUA. Currently he continues to study traditional Nanguan music, self-made instruments and performs in diverse ways with Taiwanese and international theatre makers and musicians. He had performed or collaborated with Against Again Troupe, Chino Shuichi, Kazuhisa Uchihashi, Hiromichi Sakamoto, Voutchkova, Thiek&Fagaschinski, and more. He won the Taishin Arts Award Annual Award in 2019 with the work “Clear White Song” with Against Again Troupe, where he was the actor and sound designer. His personal projects often connect to Taiwan history. Recently, he focuses on technical narrative and recognising and solving the coexisting dynamic relationships. He is also actively involved in broad culture works such as preparing solo music works and other theatre productions.
동이 dongyi
Wood-bass and electric-bass improvisor dongyi walked the path of Koreans modernization from Jeju island to Osaka-Tokyo, Shanghai-Nanjing, and Taiwan, creating new forms of Dang-ak, Aa-ak, and Samhan-ak. East Asian ancient music was thrown into an alchemical furnace, waiting to be stirred, fusing unique acidic folk songs.
Cia Him-Ian Li
Sound, transmedia artist and an educator who is interested in flux energy under visual surface. She takes "sound" as sensory awareness and agency in her creation, to explore the reflecting relations and forces between environment, memory (history) and life. As is her regular approach, in addition to sound, she juxtaposes on-site installation, performance and painting to represent time veins and dimensions, that overlapping dynamic relation between humans and environments. From the perspective of microcosmic, she attempt to deconstruct and to reveal the connections and out of connect in different scales of consciousness. Her artworks have been presented in Taiwan, the United States, South Korea, Germany and China through different residency projects and exhibitions. She is also the founder of Incorrect Lab, currently lives and works in Tainan, Taiwan.
Lin Tzu-Ning
With theater as the main focus,interested in cross-border and experimental performances. In 2019, started exploring experimental music performances in the form of human voice. Vocal training is mainly developed through teacher Wang Hsueh-Mei "improvisational tune". In 2017, started to learn Nanguan from teacher Hsu Chih-Cheng. Now focus on the relationship between voice and body, and what between sound and becoming language, about raw sensuality, symbolism, logical thinking. Ensemble improvisation focuses on communication and connection with other people’s sound. Together with Huang Ching-Yi and Hung Tzu-Ni formed a cross-disciplinary performance group "San-Sei" to perform theatre and experimental sound performances.
Yoshi Yung-Chih Hsueh
Yoshi Yung-Chih Hsueh is a core member of UniProduction and sound art group Semicircular. Obsessed with sounds, Hsueh is enamored of the making of different sound. She is an expert in experimenting percussion and sounds and identifying the common language between artists of different fields in the process. Her recent works include The Rest directed by Chen Ping-jung, Still Life and Soundscapes by Re:Play (sound installation), Coast Guess sound installation exhibition, Rip Current (experimental music album) and 2019 TIFA Katena by Architects of Air.
Sound Worlds Rotation
Based in Tainan, Taiwan and run by Alice Hui-Sheng Chang and Nigel Brown, Ting Shuo Hear Say facilitates participation and encounters with contemporary listening and sound practices. Sound Worlds Rotation was conceived in two phases: “trios in residence” and “trios in residue.” Ting Shuo has invited ten artists to be in the Music Room, each for a three-day residency. Each day, three artists are present, with one joining and one leaving the group. The artists bring their sound practices and work in an improvisational manner to discover new possibilities in collaboration with their trio partners. Following the residencies, recordings, documentation, and other artifacts and traces will be left behind in the Music Room as “residue.” The residue of these interactions will be archived and presented in various forms within the space.