send + receive October 20: Lucy Liyou, Yes, Sydo, Medical Museum

Los Angeles-based composer Lucy Liyou synthesizes field recordings, text-to-speech readings, poetry, and elements from Korean folk opera into sonic narratives that explore the implications of Orientalism and Westernization. Combining disparate sonic elements into critically cohesive pieces, the musical world of Lucy Liyou alternates between beautiful serenity and unsettling entropy. Arresting ballads and contemporary classical pieces fragment into decaying shards, voices get warped beyond recognition, and shimmering light makes way for bit-crushed noise. Her latest record, Dog Dreams (개꿈), is a rumination on the double-sidedness of trauma and love, on how one does not undercut the other, but rather how both are interlocked in an affective dialectic. Liyou’s work has earned acclaim from Pitchfork, The Guardian, Bandcamp Daily, The Quietus, Them, Tone Glow, Wire Magazine, Mixmag Asia, The FADER, and NPR Music, among others, and received notable airplay on NTS Radio, KEXP, NPR, and Sonos Radio’s Radio Hour with Thom Yorke. Liyou has shared the stage with artists like L’Rain, claire rousay, Salamanda, Drew McDowall (Coil), Theodore Cale Shafer, HTRK, Liz Harris (Grouper) and performed on stages such as Cafe OTO, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, and Rewire Festival.

At the end, / another /battle, /another /battle, /another /
battle. /There is no /aftermath,/ no after/math, no af/termath. Only /
more, more, more. /

Yes, Sydo explores how poetry and sound can meld into an alternative form using Homer’s epic Odyssey as its anchor. Yes, Sydo looks to reframe the oldest Western epic, challenge its legacy and ultimately target the pain of navigating today’s tragedies and ideologies. Yes, Sydo stems from over six years of sustaining a relationship through tragedy and comedy; mutual and different expressions of grief and pain. Yes, Sydo investigates the dialectical dilemma of giving and receiving odynia, or pain. Yes, Sydo asks how pain can serve other purposes. How and what may pain, receiving and delivering, communicate when mobilised in a radically different system? Yes, Sydo prods the paradox of current times, questioning how such an aftermath can exist when the unremitting characteristics of global capitalism rage on to the tune of business as usual.

Do / not let the /olive branch fall /
from his hand. /It’s not com/plicated, /complica/ted, compli/cated. /

Medical Museum is a new project created by long-term collaborators, Hang Linton and Laura Lulika, both based in Leeds, UK. Hang is a self-taught artist, musician and music producer whose work is a rejection of clean aesthetics. Hang will release their debut solo album later this year. Lulika is a multidisciplinary unprofessional artist, parent and Arts Accessibility Consultant. Medical Museum combines the artists' passions for storytelling in its many forms, through words, sounds, videogames and objects. Their musical influences span genres from Dungeon Synth, Jungle and Doom Metal to more ambient and spiritual sound experiences.

With interpretation by Deaf performer Gaitrie Persaud, this video performance is curated by AO Roberts in conjunction with the release of Plants Properties Equipment. Plants Properties Equipment is a compilation LP with tracks by Chisato Minamimura (UK), Molly Joyce (USA), Johanna Hedva (GER), Andy Slater (USA), VOR (CAD), and Medical Museum (UK). Released as a soundtrack to Field Hospital, a video game developed by Seance Collective and AO Roberts, the album features Deaf and Disabled artists whose sonic works invoke crip pleasure, kink, illegibility, and noise.

Presented with the West End Cultural Centre.

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