An account of Victoria Shen at Asian Arts Initiative, 3/23/24

Consciousness is the interplay between signal and noise. Noise is the void; signal is what the brain receives, dissects, and animates. Noise artists bisect the two not to create a binary but to establish a spectrum. A noise performance, then, is something like a transfiguration of the body, the blood, and the sound into the omniscient spirit.

Of course, noise as a genre is beholden to historical benchmarks and tropes like any other. To some (like myself), “noise” might connote a tasteful set inside of a bookstore or church where someone stands blankly behind an array of machines. This is where dreaded gearheads collide with the antisocial, where the you may find yourself in the basement of a noise set and ask when am I going to give up this scene bullshit and follow professional basketball signal breaks through and you decide tinnitus isn’t worth the devotion.

It’s reductive, but perhaps the most effective noise sets are akin to performance art: the boundary between audience and performer blurs, trying to figure out where one movement ends and another begins is futile, submission is the only logical response, and that surrender (or not) is uniquely your own. Is your appreciation of Victoria Shen (who performs as Evicshen) enhanced if she decides to pick you to crack the whip in front of or can you love it afar, earplugs in, while the room quakes like a tarmac?

To Shen, any surface capable of supporting electrical current is a canvas for sound: a hair brush, fingernails, white flags blowing in the wind, (eventually) her own skin. The world becomes a lot different perceived this way: which of the things I possess or witness are capable of projection? What does my outfit sound like? How loud are my thoughts? Shen, in lecture, stated the first thing she considers is the performance space–recon to how she wants to fill up the room, but also as a gauge to how physical she can be. The nomadic ability of the noise artist is their most intriguing tangible. Noise (as music, as art) juggles between filling up a room with music and more and also sometimes making your own room.

A cohort in seeming puzzlement tells me after Evicshen’s performance they witnessed headbobs. When Shen breaks down the sound (literally, as she tosses gear across the performance space) how does your body react? It’s confining to suggest the body can only move to a 4/4 rhythm (everything’s so democratic etc), but what stirred me about Shen’s performance was her persistent ability to dodge your educated guesses. When you locked into an aspect of her performance, she switched it up. She tilts the table of her gear to the brink, then denies the culmination of destroying it cathartically like Pete Townshend. She’s moving through the heart of the crowd, then suddenly she was right next to me, way off to the side of centerstage, hanging a light on a support beam in the darkness. Her performance had now armed itself with another component.

I’ve seen Spiritualized unleash a wall of sound and feedback so vigorous it cracked glass in a concert hall. B L A C K I E at his most confrontational codes as a masculine force but his lyrics are not nihilistic and he will sometimes antagonize white people in the audience to establish his status as the center of performance, not a leader of violence. Shen’s noise is even more pointed, because she bucks not only gendered and racial expectations but genre ones, which may sound obvious but also we know often subverting the thing starts with who’s doing it. The sound, so consuming it’s impossible to witness without earplugs that do not hamper the thrill and viscera in any way, and the vision of her traversing the black box, resists tropes of “performer” and accepted modes of performing such as leading a mosh pit or fourth-walling the crowd (even as she plows through politely seated patrons). It’s a denial of the absolution offered by shoegaze and the catharsis of free jazz. To suggest the power and vigor of her performance is rendered only by a cliché like, “I’m speechless,” seems to imply there’s no path to interpretation, which implies there’s no brain behind the action, which is untrue. It is a radical mix of technological bravura and a dismantling of commonly accepted western values in music.

The noise-as-bondage foreplay and iconography of needles attached to acrylic nails scratching vinyl as a mutli-faceted interpretation of whatever dusty ideas still surround a word like turntablism are the food wrapped around Shen’s medicine, a shock doctrine for the constitution of expectations. How Shen transforms the room versus how long the body absorbs her art indicates a place where words and actions fail. The surrender is the thing Shen is chasing, a point where she and the audience stop being impressed and start searching for synonyms for transcendence.

Photos by Daniela Galindo.

What I’m reading: Cyberfeminism Index
Listening to: Unrecognisable
Watching: Enough Said