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Recombinant Media Labs and Gray Area present
The Turntable Trio

Pioneers of New Turntablism, Maria Chávez, Evicshen (aka Victoria Shen) and Mariam Rezaei come together in this historical, head-scrambling, boundary-shattering trio.

Maria Chávez + Victoria Shen + Mariam Rezaei
aka The Turntable Trio

with Las Sucias

Saturday, April 5, 2025

Doors: 8PM

All Ages

Standing performance

View our FAQ page for more info, or contact us at [email protected] with any accommodation requests.

About The Turntable Trio

Pioneers of New Turntablism, Maria Chávez, Evicshen (aka Victoria Shen) and Mariam Rezaei come together in this historical, head-scrambling, boundary-shattering trio. The group weave together elements of musique concrète, free improvisation, noise, techno and hip-hop with instrument building and modification. Each artist has a wildly different approach to turntablism. Techniques deployed to create their dizzying sets include scratching, beat-juggling, sampling and looping, while the technologies include double-needle-head shells and acrylic needle nails. The trio’s compositional aesthetics combine sound sculpture, maximalism/minimalism and sonic destruction. Together, they show that New Turntablism is beyond technique, genre or compositional theory; it’s about the unknown. This important project represents the first time three female turntablists of colour have come together in this way.

About the Artists

Maria Chávez

Maria Chávez, born in Lima, Peru and based in NYC, is best known as an abstract turntablist, sound artist and DJ. Coincidence, chance and failures are themes that unite her work across mediums, including improvised performance, sound and marble sculpture, visual art, book objects and an extensive history with multi-channel installation. Her approach is rooted in Deep Listening, a form of embodied listening developed by her late mentor Pauline Oliveros. Maria’s practice is profoundly expansive, responsive and curious. Her work has been featured and supported by a myriad of institutions over the past decades including Rewire Festival, Counterflows Festival, Donau Festival, MoMA PS1, The Getty, The Wire Magazine (Cover, April 2023), DOCUMENTA 14, the JUDD Foundation, Cambridge University Press and many, many more. Chavez’s 2012 book, Of Technique: Chance Procedures on Turntable has garnered a reputation as both an academic resource on turntablism and a foundational text for a new generation of turntablists.

Evicshen

Evicshen is the nom de guerre of San Francisco-based sound artist, experimental music performer, and inventor Victoria Shen (she/her). Shen's sound practice is concerned with the materiality/physicality of sound and its relationship to the human body. Her music features analogue modular synthesizers, vinyl/resin records, and self-built electronics. Shen's music eschews conventions in harmony and rhythm in favour of extreme textures and gestural tones. Notable for her Needle Nails, Shen uses modified acrylic fingernails with embedded turntable needles, allowing her to play up to five grooves of a record at once. Her DIY approach extends to hand-made resin records embedded with found materials. Each piece functions not only as playable music media but a unique art object.

Mariam Rezaei

Mariam Rezaei is a multi-award winning composer, turntablist and performer. She previously led experimental arts project TOPH, TUSK FRINGE , and TUSK NORTH, and in November2022, she received the Paul Hamlyn Foundation #AwardsForArtists, in recognition of her contribution to music composition. Her music has recently been described as ‘genuinely ground-breaking’ (London Jazz News 2022) and ‘high-velocity sonic surrealism’ (4* TheGuardian 2022). Recent releaseBOWN(Heat Crimes) charted no.6 inThe Wire and no10 inThe Quietus’ best albums of 2023 and was The Quietus Album of the week. Boomkat described it as ‘harnessing extreme technical prowess—phenomenal stuff’.

Las Sucias

Las Sucias is the Avant-Tropical Noise duo formed by Danishta Rivero and Alexandra Buschman-Román. Through ritualistic and improvisatory manifestations involving electronics and bruja voices, they look to their Venezuelan and Puerto Rican roots, and the diaspora's cultural expression, steeped in Afro-Caribbean and mestiza consciousnesses.

Partners

Recombinant Media Labs

The Recombinant Media Labs organization was founded to research the qualities and artistic potential of Spatial Cinema. It does so by means of Experiential Engineering; exploring processes that propagate the aesthetic and technological boundaries of panoramic AV exhibition. RML acts as producer and presenter of hybrid artworks and performance archiving based on spatial media synthesis; intermodal works using image, light, sound and other disseminated media in three-dimensional space. The CineChamber is RML's curated, nomadic platform under the artistic trajectory of founder & Director Naut Humon plus a superhuman crew.

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