The Unsounders: Closing Performance

Thessia Machado, the artist behind The Arts Club’s current exhibition, is also an accomplished improviser and instrument-builder. With her practice as an inspiration, Merche Blasco, Viola Yip, Pedro Lopes, Jenna Lyle, and Machado perform solo and group sets rooted in the idea of sound with no hierarchy.

Viola Yip, a native of Hong Kong, is a Brooklyn-based composer and performer who tries to find the boundaries and push the boundaries in her imaginary sound world. As a composer, her compositions are not limited to acoustic music, electronic music, graphic scores, and structured improvisation. Recent works appeared in ArtX at Bowling Green State University, Women Composers Festival of Hartford, Ravinia Festival, Fresh Inc Festival, soundSCAPE Festival, TEDXSMU, University of Florida, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, NASA saxophone conference, ThingNY spam v3.0 concert, Quiet City concert, Vox Novus Concert, Musicarama 2012 (Hong Kong), and PAUSA Art House in Buffalo. As a new music advocate, she also performs contemporary works regularly as a pianist and an improviser. Her recent interest falls on using human natural voice as an instrument and explore its expressivity and musicality.

Merche Blasco is an interdisciplinary artist and composer based in New York. Her work involves designing and building imprecise technological assemblages that catalyze new listening modes and embodied forms of live composition in electroacoustic sounds. Through these devices, Blasco attempts to establish a more horizontal relationship with audio technologies, distancing herself from parameters of precision, power, and control. She instead explores collaborative spaces where these instruments render audible unheard energetic forces, and offer a composition methodology in which her body and the live exploration of alternative materials are central elements. She has presented her performances and installations at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Sonar Festival in Barcelona, La Biennale di Venezia, NIME conferences, Tsonami International Sound Art Festival in Chile, The High Line in New York, SONIC Festival, Mapping Festival (Geneva), Queens Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Santiago de Chile, among others. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Wire magazine

Pedro Lopes is a turntablist, computer scientist, and hardware t(h)inker. He play turntables like they are full-fledged instruments, which means they can be bowed, percussed, scratched, subversed, and hacked. He make my own needles and records using circuit-bending and acrylic cutting and engages in collaboration with visual artists, performers, and improvisors. Lopes has played in venues such as Transmediale, Serralves Foundation, Casa da Música, OutFest, Rescaldo, Metasonic, and Future Places, and collaborated with many artists: Carlos Zíngaro, André Gonçalves, Gabriel Ferrandini, Pedro Sousa, Miguel Sá, Hernâni Faustino, Rodrigo Pinheiro, Per Gärdin, Carlos Santos, and Manuela São Simão, and in ensembles conducted by William Winnant (Zorn’s Cobra), Reinhold Friedl, and Ernesto Rodrigues.

Thessia Machado lives and works in New York City. Machado’s installations and video pieces have been exhibited in New York, London, Philadelphia, Paris, Amsterdam, Dublin, Berlin, and Athens. She has been awarded residencies at Homesession, Barcelona; the NARS Foundation, NY; I-Park; MacDowell Colony; Yaddo; the Atlantic Center for the Arts; the Irish Museum of Modern Art; and the Vermont Studios Center. She is a recipient of fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, The Experimental Television Center, The Bronx Museum, and the American Academy in Berlin. In 2017, she was a recipient of an Artists Grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.