M.A. Harms, Matt LeVeque
Friday, September 22 2023 at 8pm
i am no longer afraid to run is a multimedia performance piece that explores aspects of time, gender, and relationality. The work is highly interpersonal and asks the question of how its two main subjects, two non-binary percussionists, have adopted contrasting perspectives and aesthetic strategies in relation to the history of engendered violence inherent in their instrument. The piece features video, stream-of-consciousness poetry, and both live and pre-recorded percussion sounds.
Through the synthesis of these materials, the piece presents two possible answers to the problem of percussion’s history, one that is minimalist, austere, and small, and another which is maximalist, messy, and large. Just as queer people throughout generations have found ways to coexist without changing one another, so too do these methods of coping with gendered expectations. It asks how our relationships to ourselves change over time, and to what extent those relationships are healthy and generative.
Friday, September 22, 2023, 8pm
$15 Students, members, seniors, underemployed
$18 General Admission
Seating is extremely limited, advance reservations strongly encouraged
About the Artists:
M A Harms is a Los Angeles-based composer, performer, and instrument builder who explores the intersections between grief, gender, and sex through a combination of text and sound. Their practice centers performance art and interdisciplinarity, imagining and creating sound using sculptural installations, found objects, electronics, mannequins, and placing equal significance on the visual experience of their work. M navigates literal stories and personal life events via sound practice, obscuring them to the point that they begin to bridge the gap between individual and “universal” experiences.
Matt LeVeque (b.1996) is a percussionist, composer, and improviser based in Los Angeles. An active performer of both composed and improvised music, Matt has performed at New Music on the Point, the Percussive Arts Society International Convention, BENXT Festival, Yarn/Wire Institute, Darmstädter Ferienkurse, and others. As part of a continued effort to develop new works with young composers and artists, they maintain ongoing collaborations with Jeonghyeon Joo, Jack Herscowitz, Kevin Good, M A Harms, and Daniel Newman-Lessler (as part of the piano/percussion duo ++). As a composer and researcher, Matt explores through his work aspects of relationality, intimacy, smallness, and duration in pursuit of a politics of queer utopianism.
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.