Parallel 05: Erin Gee with musica intima

Tickets

Cost: $21.18
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For this fifth edition of Vancouver New Music’s PARALLELS series, Montreal-based artist and composer Erin Gee partners with vocal ensemble musica intima, pianist Andrea Wong, and other local artists to present Affect Flow.

Artist chat starts at 7:15pm.

Please arrive at least 15 minutes before the performance to be checked in on time. The performance starts at 8pm sharp; latecomers will be seated between pieces.

Affect Flow is a concert of work by Gee that features hypnotic gestures, live biosensor feedback, imaginative script writing, choral performance by musica intima, and original electroacoustic music. Through her work in music and new media art, Gee probes interior experience as an automatic, unconscious, and sensual material, likening the vibrations of vocal chords to the channeling of electricity across her electronic biofeedback systems, or the feeling of an emotion spreading across the room.

Gee has been exploring the way that emotion manifests in the body and can be “read” by emotional data systems for a decade, translating sympathetic emotional reactions in real time to sonic textures that evolve through analysis of BPM, blood flow, skin conductivity, and gentle shifts in respiration. Through this work, Gee combines her idiosyncratic performance style with technologies commonly used in lie-detection tests as a means of structuring sensually layered electroacoustic music. Through these unlikely combinations of technology, hypnotic suggestion, and emotion, Gee makes palpable the ways that emotional space is shared, experienced, and unconsciously processed through music.

In Song of Seven (2016), members of the choir musica intima lay bare their emotional memories of childhood through seven solo vignettes, within which the affective reactions of the choir are woven into the work through Gee’s BioSynth devices.

Gee’s newest work is influenced by the cool, algorithmic intimacy of Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) videos, within which she melds whispers, taps, and various sonic and visual “triggers” into electronic music. Through works such as We as Waves (2021), Gee provokes intimacy in gentle, pleasurable, and sometimes psychologically dark and humorous ways.
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