Evicshen
with guests, TBA
Victoria Shen is a sound artist, experimental music performer, and instrument-maker based
in San Francisco. Shen’s sound practice is concerned with the spatiality/physicality of sound and its
relationship to the human body. Her music features analog modular synthesizers, vinyl/resin
records, and self-built electronics. Eschewing conventions in harmony and rhythm in favor of
extreme textures and gestural tones, Shen uses what she calls “chaotic sound” to oppose
signal and information, eluding traditionally embedded meaning.
Her personal identity; her body; is the space her work utilizes to restructure sonic meaning. In
her live performances, she proposes an exploration between meaning and non-meaning
through the physical activation of noise tropes. Her probing into these melodic voids
interrogate the ways we perceive value within aural experiences. The appendage-like
instruments and objects she makes, exemplify Shen’s ability to embody through sound her
interest in the tension created by opposition: control and chaos, the unique and the mass
produced, the practical and the absurd.
