Gray Sound: Maria Chávez

This Gray Sound performance was live-streamed on November 10, 2020.

Maria Chávez
Hyper Memory Installation #13, Nature Walk w/ Folkways records
2020

This new performance work continues Maria's creative field recording installation series "Hyper Memory Installations" (HMI), referring to her unique composing and performing practice of sonically placing multiple tiers of audio that contain field recordings or documentation of a specific time. The act of layering "audio snapshots" of time, multiple times, creates a conceptually jam-packed day, hence the use of the word "hyper".

This latest HMI incorporates vinyl records of field recordings consisting of sounds in natural settings during various seasons and times of day, derived from the Folkways Records catalog and other documentation-based labels. HMI #13 will combine four record players that all have the world's first Rake Double Needle. Invented by Randal Sandan Jr., each model has two needles on one shell with each needle reading a different part of a record at the same time. Incorporating eight needles into a four-turntable set enhances the density, physically creating a new memory of the world's various natural habitats.

For a glimpse of Maria's recent work, view her October 2020 performance at Experimental Sound Studio here:   / 773879628  

Born in Lima, Peru, and based in NYC, Maria Chávez is best known as an abstract turntablist, sound artist, and DJ. Coincidence, chance & failures are themes that unite her book objects, sound sculptures, installations & other works with her improvised solo turntable performance practice. Her latest album, “Maria Chavez PLAYS Stefan Goldmann’s Ghost Hemiola” was nominated for a Preis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik in 2020. http://www.mariachavez.org/

Currently, Maria is on the cover of the textbook on the History of Experimental & Electronic music by Routledge Publishing, is a David Tudor and Robert Rauschenberg Arts Fellow and a Research Fellow for Goldsmith's Sound Practice Research Department (2015-17). Her large scale sound & multi-media installations along with other works have been shown at the Getty Museum, the JUDD Foundation, Documenta 14 in Kassel, Germany, and HeK (Haus der elektronischen Künste Basel) amongst many other institutions around the world. She is currently an artist in residence with EMPAC (The Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center) until 2022 and is on a medical sabbatical due to receiving brain surgery in Feb. 2019. She will return to performing for the public in 2022-23. She appreciates everyone's patience and compassion during this difficult time.

About Gray Sound:
Envisioned as an ongoing performance and discussion series, Gray Sound represents a chance for artists and the broader community to tease the boundaries of sound—when it moves from voice to music, from a recognizable tune to noise.

https://graycenter.uchicago.edu/progr...

This year, in the midst of the ever-present global pandemic, we as a people are looking at the hard truths of who we are as a public. Themes of identity, place, ownership, environment, noi(z)e and care run rampant in the news, blogs, and creative work that has surfaced since March 2020. For the 2020-21 season of Gray Sound, Seth Parker Woods has curated a cohort of artists whose creative practices explore multiple convergences of the aforementioned ideas, and whose latest output, either in text/sound formatted interviews or new performative work, is presented to our global audience for reflection and alignment. We look forward to sharing these events with you from our homes to yours.