The Precision of Discipline
Melissa Achten, Jeonghyeon Joo, Eli Klausner, Ethan Marks, Miller Wrenn
September 19, 2o24 8pm
The Precision of Discipline is an evening of improvised sound exploring the simultaneity of the aimer and the aim, the interaction between gesture and result. Over a series of sets, precise actions are repeated with slight variation, morphing into entropy, disorder, until ultimately - understanding.
"'I'm afraid I don’t understand anything more at all,' I answered, ‘even the simplest things have got in a muddle. Is it “I” who draws the bow, or is it the bow that draws me into the state of highest tension? Do “I” hit the goal, or does the goal hit me? Is “it” spiritual when seen by the eyes of the body, and corporeal when seen by the eyes of the spirit - or both or neither? Bow, arrow, goal, and ego, all melt into one another, so that I can no longer separate them. And even the need to separate has gone. For as soon as I take the bow and shoot, everything becomes so clear and straightforward and so ridiculously simple…”
“Now at last, “ the Master broke in, “the bowstring has cut right through you.”-Eugen Herrigel, “Zen and the Art of Archery”
With Melissa Achten, Jeonghyeon Joo, Eli Klausner, Ethan Marks, and Miller Wrenn
TICKETS
General Admission: $18
Students, Members, Seniors, Artists: $15
Seating is limited. Ticket reservations are recommended.
About the Artists:
Jeonghyeon Joo is a haegeum performer and composer based in Los Angeles and Seoul. Her practice includes performance, composition, improvisation, artistic research, collaboration, writing, and teaching. She explores the physical, social, cultural, and political relationship between performer and instrument, frequently collaborating with filmmakers, dancers, composers, and performance artists. Her original performance projects have been supported and presented by the Arts Council Korea and the Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture and have received the Presidential Award of Korea. Joo holds a Doctor of Musical Arts from the California Institute of the Arts and is currently an Assistant Professor at School of Performing Arts in the Seoul Institute of the Arts in South Korea and a Program Director at CultureHub.
Ethan Marks is an experimental trumpet player and producer whose work deals with the collision between body and instrument. His music is usually improvised, sometimes silly, and has involved feedback, video, noise, household objects, power tools, and plundered recordings. Two self-released albums, dune and bloom, are about smells and biomes. He directs a DIY noise series, Sounds Poetic, in downtown Los Angeles, and co-directs High Desert Soundings, in Wonder Valley, outside of Joshua Tree.
Melissa Achten is a Los Angeles based harpist focused on immersive musical ritual through experimentation and improvisation. Her performances directly engage with the listener, blurring the relationship between bodies, instruments, and sound to destabilize and thereby reveal hidden meaning. Within carefully conjured atmospheres, she explores the nuances of surrealism, fantasy, mythology, and the occult and what these say about human experience. In her hands, the harp is untangled from convention and remade as a divining tool for channeling work that is diaristic, intimate, and cathartic.
Drawn to interdisciplinary form, Melissa frequently collaborates with performers, composers, and other artists to realize their work and her own. She is a founding member of the absurdist performance ensemble Playstructure Dreamcast and the other half of experimental harp & cello duo RÁN and harp & piano duo Deathflavorkiss. Melissa is also the co-founder and Executive Director of Oracle Egg, an artist-run incubator for experimental music and performance in downtown Los Angeles which she runs with her partner Eli Klausner. As a soloist and ensemble member, she has performed and premiered work in New York, Germany, and Denmark. Melissa is an alumna of McGill University in Montréal, QC (MMus) and Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, WA (BMus).
Miller Wrenn is a Los Angeles-based bassist and composer-improviser. He works primarily in the fields of new, creative, and improvised music and has been fortunate to do so with artists such as Vinny Golia, Eyvind Kang, Hildur Guðnadóttir, Stephanie Richards, Dan Rosenboom, Alex Cline, and the Santa Monica Symphony.
Tapetail is Automata’s new experimental sound series, launched in October 2022.
Tapetail presents live events and sound installations featuring the work of experimental sound artists.
We are currently looking to present shows and installations that deal with "liveness" where something about the experience is best presented live, whether through improvisation, special acoustic treatment or audience experience. There’s been a lot of great art happening in the virtual and digital world so now we’re turning our focus back towards bringing people together for sound experiences that are best experienced in a live setting.
Automata’s Tapetail series
is curated by Cassia Streb.
If you are interested in proposing work for the Tapetail series,
please fill out this short query form.