Miya Masaoka and Ben Vida

Join us at e-flux on Thursday, October 19 at 7pm for a live music performance by Miya Masaoka and Ben Vida. The artists performed together in 2013 as part of an ensemble at Roulette Intermedium, and the show was recorded and later released on Innova Records. The album, titled Triangle of Resistance, was composed by Masaoka and combines a fragmented modernity with particular approaches to temporality, gesture, and noise, and draws from the experience of the Japanese American camps. Ten years later, Masaoka and Vida come together again at e-flux for an intimate improvised session reflecting on their previous collaboration and the time that has passed. The duo will be improvising on koto, electronics, trumpet, and voice. The performance will be followed by a Q&A with the artists, moderated by Martha Joseph. 

Miya Masaoka is a composer, sound artist, and musician with works that include pieces for orchestra, acoustic phenomena, video, electronics, and installation. Her work explores the  natural world, bodily perception of vibration, movement, and time while foregrounding complex timbre relationships alongside performance, social, and historical references. Whether recording inside physical objects, plants or the human body, or within architecturally resonant spaces or outdoor resonant canyons, Masaoka creates incongruencies that feed the paradox of the contemporary condition. As an improviser, Masaoka has performed and recorded with artists such as Pauline Oliveros, Cecil Taylor, Pharoah Sanders, Henry Brandt, Christian Wolfe, Anthony Braxton, Andrew Cyrille,  Reggie Workman, Zeena Parkins, and Myra Melford. Her teachers include Alvin Curran, David Tudor, Maryanne Amacher, and Togi Suenobu.

Her works have been presented at the Venice Biennale, MoMA PS1, Kunstmuseum Bonn, the Park Avenue Armory, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts amond other places. Masaoka has received the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Award, The Rome Prize, the Fulbright, the Alpert Award, the Doris Duke Award, and the Studio Artist Residency at Park Avenue Armory.

Ben Vida is an artist currently based in NYC. In the mid-1990s he moved to Chicago and got involved with the city’s multifaceted experimental music scene, co-founding the minimalist quartet Town & Country and releasing solo records under the moniker Bird Show. After about a decade in Chicago, he relocated to Brooklyn and shifted his focus to electronics and systems based compositions which utilized psycho-acoustics, aural phenomena, and advanced synthesis techniques. He also began showing his works for video, text, and sound installation in galleries and arts institutions. Since 2015 he has been composing pieces that combine his interest in experimental writing with his love of singing with people. Besides his solo work he has developed duo projects with Marina Rosenfeld, Lucio Capece, and Lea Bertucci.

Vida’s work has been supported by the NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship, Aaron Copland Fund for Music, the Alice M. Ditson Fund, and many more. He has released his music with Shelter Press, Kranky, PAN, iDEAL, and 901Editions among others. His work has been featured in Artforum, The Quietus, Modern Painters, The Paris Review, The New York Times, Art Review, The Wire, The Creators Project, and WIRED magazine among others. Vida has presented work at the Guggenheim, Museum Of Contemporary Art Chicago, Performa Biennial, EMPAC, Berghain, Unsound Festival, and many more.

Martha Joseph is a curator and writer specializing in contemporary art, sound, and performance. At the Museum of Modern Art, she is part of the curatorial team for The Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Studio, MoMA’s space for live and time-based art. There, she has organized exhibitions, commissions, and performances, including Projects: Dineo Seshee Bopape, Yve Laris Cohen: Studio/Theater; Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme: May Amnesia Never Kiss Us On the Mouth; Guadalupe Maravilla: Luz y fuerza; and David Tudor and Composers Inside Electronics Inc.: Rainforest V (variation 1). With Ana Janevski and Thomas (T.) Jean Lax, she co-organized Judson Dance Theater: The Work Is Never Done in 2018. Martha’s writing has appeared in publications by the Whitney Museum of American Art and MoMA, as well as in Flash Art and Frieze magazine. Before joining MoMA she worked at The Whitney and The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA).

e-flux Music is curated by Sanna Almajedi.

For more information, please contact program [​at​] e-flux.com.

Accessibility            
–Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue. 
–For elevator access, please RSVP to program@e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator which leads into the e-flux office space. Entrance to the elevator is nearest to 180 Classon Ave (a garage door). We have a ramp for the steps within the space.         
–e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the event space and this bathroom.