Impossible Music Performance + Opening Reception

Join us for the opening of Impossible Music, a survey of the sonic vanguard, with a performance of Aki Onda’s installation Spirits Known and Unknown, followed by a public reception and community-wide celebration. 

Organized by curator Candice Hopkins and composer, performer, and installation artist Raven Chacon, Impossible Music brings together sculptures, sounds, scores, video, and live performances to explore the radical, interdisciplinary potential of conceptual and experimental music. From the banned to the bombastic, the exhibition highlights the work of visionary artists who pushed music forward, defying norms and piloting new forms of expression. Featured artists include Terry Adkins, Black Quantum Futurism, Nikita Gale, Sarah Hennies, Tom Johnson, Christine Sun Kim, Conlon Nancarrow, Aki Onda, and C. Spencer Yeh. 

 Performance: Spirits Known and Unknown (2023) 

(6pm; Duration: 45min) 

Performers: Che Chen and Zach Rowden 

 Aki Onda’s Spirits Known and Unknown is an installation and performance featuring found brass bells that pulls on the myriad association of bells throughout the globe as symbols of spirituality, peace, and even in some cases, war. To mark the opening of Impossible Music, Onda developed a score for invited Che Chen and Zach Rowden to perform the bells as a means to ruptures the confines the structures of clock time.  

Onda relays: “Playing bells can be eerie at times. I get the sensation that ringing them connects me to their former owners who may have rung them. The actions recall lost sounds and sense histories that would otherwise be erased. It’s like collaborating with forces such as spirits and ancestors which transcends the sense of time and space….” 

Aki Onda is an artist, composer, and curator currently based in Mito, Japan, after living in New York for two decades. Onda works are often catalyzed by and structured around memories—personal, collective, historical—such as his widely-known project, Cassette Memories (2004–ongoing), drawn from three decades of field recordings. Crossing genres, Onda has been active internationally in art, film, music and performance. 

Zach Rowden is a musician based in Connecticut. His work is focused in the areas of drone, repetitive structures and noise. Collaborators and projects include - Tongue Depressor (with Henry Birdsey), Hyperion Ensemble under the direction of Iancu Dumitrescu, Red Yellow Blue Green Black (with Austin Larkin), Windscour (with Joe Moffett), Leila Bordreuil, Aki Onda, Arien Wilkerson, and Paul Flaherty.

Che Chen is an improviser, composer, bandleader, multi-instrumentalist and concert organizer based in Queens, NY. An energetic presence in New York City’s experimental underground since the early 2000s, he has tread an idiosyncratic path from noise duo True Primes to playing in groups led by drone minimalists and Japanese outsider artists, to studying guitar in Mauritania and improvising with veterans from NYC’s storied free jazz community. In 2012, he and “plywood crate” player Rick Brown founded 75 Dollar Bill, a group with flexible personnel whose hybrid music synthesizes modal traditions from the non-Western world, Sun Ra’s space chords and the minimalist and No Wave histories of their hometown.

Image: Aki Onda “Spirits Known and Unknown” featuring Eyvind Kang, 2023. Courtesy of Human Resources Los Angeles.