Beyond Music #7: Evicshen / Lee Patterson & Pak Yan Lau / Aernoudt Jacobs / De Mond & Vanhoof

Beyond Music is STUK's sound performance laboratory. Expect a ‘ear-blowing’ parcours along four short interventions at the intersection of sound, vision, spatiality and the body.

Belgian sound artist Aernoudt Jacobs investigates our perception of sound. In STUK, he builds an object with rotating speakers that spin so fast that we can no longer perceive the individual tones separately.

Up next is San Francisco-based artist Evicshen, who will prove why she is one of the most exciting voices in noise music. She makes her way through the audience with self-made instruments or everyday objects such as a hair comb or a bull whip. Loud but fantastic live!

After the break, two STUK residents present new work: British sound artist Lee Patterson and Belgian musician Pak Yan Lau will perform with a bunch of electronic and acoustic instruments, combined with field recordings.

Finally, sinister duo De Mond (Stijn Wybouw & Arno De Bock) and sound and media artist Floris Vanhoof join forces for an audiovisual show with two manipulated strobes. Their album will be released in April by the Futura Resistenza label.

• Aernoudt Jacobs — Akoetrope
(artist-in-residence)

Akoetrope is both an intuitive and heuristic device for understanding the persistence of sound cognition. The device is freely inspired from the Phénakisticope/Zoetrope devices that were invented around 1833 that use the phenomenon of iconic memory or persistence of vision to create a moving image. In the auditory domain we can find a relative similar phenomenon called echoic memory. Both phenomena rely on short term sensory memory information that lingers on the threshold between perceiving and remembering.

When comparing the visual with the auditory phenomenon, the persistence of an image is at 1/5 th of a second (5 images per second) and the persistence of a sound is at 1/20 th of a second (20 oscillations per second or 20Hz). The cognition in the auditory domain is complex, it evolves and shifts through very distinctive perceptual thresholds along the frequency bandwidth, and equally, the processing of sounds takes place in very different parts of the brain. 20 Hz (or 20 oscillations per second) is a threshold that differentiates rhythm from tones. Until that threshold rhythms and beats are still perceived as non-continuous. Until this threshold sound patterns are perceived as periodic rhythms and processed in the left hemisphere of the brain. At rates above 20 Hz individual beats and impulses can’t be segregated. They are too fast to be differentiated and will blend into a continuous tone. Another notable fact is that from this point sounds are processed in the right hemisphere of the brain. At 40Hz, pitch differences will emerge in our perception, and at this point pitch and melodies will appear. Between 40Hz and 80Hz we can clearly detect pitch intervals and recognize relations between chords and melodies.

Concept: Aernoudt Jacobs
Production: r25b4
Software : Isjtar, Patrick Delges - Centre Henri Pousseur
Technical and mechanical realisation: Jeroen Vandesande
Felt: Studio Ester Goris
Special thanks to: STUK

• Evicshen

Victoria Shen is an experimental music performer and sound artist from San Francisco. Though analog synthesizers are the backbone of Shen’s music, while performing live, she plays self-made electronics, invented instruments, and even acoustic objects like a bull whip. Shen is a markedly mobile performer that muddles the boundaries between performer and audience, stage and floor. Her sets tend to be site-specific, in direct response to the physical and acoustic qualities of the space in which she performs. Her live show vacillates between moments of restraint and swells of frenetic and confrontational movement. A tightrope walk between control and chance, the whiff of danger is never far during Shen’s performances. Her sound is dynamic with a sensitivity to texture and structure throughout.

• Lee Patterson & Pak Yan Lau
(artist-in-residence)

Last May 2023, Pak Yan Lau and Lee Patterson met and played for the first time together in Manchester.This meeting brought out similar interest of listening and sound treatments, but different approaches to execution and projection. Pak Yan felt a direct kinship to the way Lee was processing his ‘invisible’ sounds, sounds that are not always hearable with the naked ear, like the chemical reaction of chalk in water or the footsteps of an ant, but enveloping the space in a non invasive way. Pak Yan was very eager to invite Lee over and to explore the different sound categories together. This residency is aiming to meet and record in a sound space and trace common and uncommon grounds.

• De Mond & Vanhoof
(artist-in-residence)

De Mond is the brainchild of Stijn Wybouw and Arno De Bock, two musicians from Brussels. Together, they craft an electrifying blend of mucky vocalizations, tape loops, hypnotic synth

sounds and deep drum beats. Their first EP Glow will be released by the label Futura Resistenza in April 2024. They work together with sound and media artist Floris Vanhoof, who joins the live-sets as a third member by making live collages with two manipulated, turning stroboscopes.