Pieter PASD
420 West Avenue 33, Unit #10
Los Angeles, CA 90031
VOLUME is pleased to bring together four transcontinental artists for a special evening of sound and film.
Hailing from Montreal, Sarah Davachi returns to Los Angeles after several new releases in 2016, including the acclaimed Vergers. NYC-based artist Byron Westbrook, currently an Artist-in-Residence with ISSUE Project Room, will perform in LA for the first time since touring his 2015 release on Root Strata. After her debut release on Dragon’s Eye Recordings and a residency at Land And Sea (Oakland), Geneva Skeen will present new work. Paul Clipson, whose most recent work was created for Grouper’s late-2016 EP Paradise Valley, will accompany all three musicians with different films.
About the Artists
Paul Clipson is a San Francisco-based filmmaker who often collaborates with sound artists and musicians on films, live performances, and installations. His Super 8 and 16mm films aim to bring to light visual preoccupations that reveal themselves while working in a stream of consciousness manner, combining densely layered, in-camera edited studies of figurative and abstract environments, in a process that encourages unplanned-for results, responding to and conversing with the temporal qualities of musical composition and live performance. His work has screened around the world in festivals and at sound and film events such as the International Film Festival Rotterdam, The New York Film Festival, and the Cinémathèque Française.
Sarah Davachi is a pianist and electroacoustic composer based between Vancouver and Montréal, Canada. Her compositional projects are primarily concerned with employing extended durations, psychoacoustic manipulations, and simple harmonic structures so as to emphasize variations in overtone complexity and natural phasing patterns. She holds a master’s degree in electronic music from Mills College in Oakland, California, and since 2007 has worked as a researcher for the National Music Centre in Calgary. Recent live appearances include Lampo (Chicago, 2017), Moogfest (Durham, 2016), Suoni Per Il Popolo (Montréal, 2016), No Response (Cincinnati, 2016), the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival (2014), MUTEK (Montréal, 2016), Sound of Stockholm (2014), Debacle (Seattle, 2015), and send+receive (Winnipeg, 2014). Her music has been published by Important Records, Students of Decay, JAZ Records, Constellation Tatsu, and Full Spectrum.
Geneva Skeen is an interdisciplinary artist working in Los Angeles. Influenced heavily by écriture féminine, alchemical metaphors, and a mix of musical traditions ranging from holy mysticism to industrial, Skeen composes primarily with field recordings, digital presets, and mixed voice and instrumentation. Her current work is focused on the contrast between facing the finite resources of the physical landscape and its infinite digital representations. Her solo and collaborative works have been performed or presented at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, on the rooftop of The Standard Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, and on the façade of the Armory building in Long Beach, California, amongst others. She recently released her debut on Dragon’s Eye Recordings (Dark Speech) and will produce new projects for Land And Sea editions and Crystalline Morphologies in 2017. She is a member of VOLUME, a curatorial collective focused on sound-based practices.
Byron Westbrook is an artist and musician based in Brooklyn, NY. He has been performing and showing experimental sound work internationally since 2008. His work focuses on creating immersive psychological spaces using sound, lighting and video to interact with architecture and landscape. He holds an MFA from Bard College, where he studied with Marina Rosenfeld, Marcus Schmickler and David Behrman. Following two releases under the moniker Corridors, his debut LP under his given name (Precipice on Root Strata) was named #4 Best Experimental Album of 2015 by Pitchfork Magazine. His work has been presented at ICA London, Cafe OTO (London), Fridman Gallery, Abrons Arts Center, Pioneer Works, Experimental Intermedia Foundation (NY), Human Resources (Los Angeles), Disjecta (Portland, OR), Instants Chavires Art Space (Paris), O’ (Milan), Fylkingen (Stockholm), the LAB (San Francisco), among many others. He has been in residence at Civitella Ranieri Foundation, Clocktower Gallery, Diapason Gallery, EMS Stockholm. He is currently Artist in Residence with ISSUE Project Room in Brooklyn and is Visiting Faculty in the Fine Arts Department at Pratt Institute.
Featured still from a film by Paul Clipson.
