SOUND TYPE Seminar: Che Chen & Geeta Dayal

Musician Che Chen, who grew up in a family of Taiwanese immigrants, and Geeta Dayal, arts critic and journalist of South Asian descent, will tease out the concepts of appropriation, sonic colonization, anthropological fetishization, erasure of origins, and the act of creating independent music communities. Laying out a variety of examples, from Western avant-garde composers or the Beatles appropriating motifs from Asian music, to Black hip hop artists lifting off samples and celebrating Kung Fu, appropriation is discussed as both a colonial approach as well as a cross-pollination of ideas and transfer of power. Considering ethnographic recordings, the erasure of local context, and the lack of understanding the meaning of specific songs and those who produced it, are interrogated against the phenomena of fetishization.

Join us as the two discuss each other's work in the context of the SOUND TYPE festival: uplifting new, experimental, courageous music from the Asian diaspora and beyond!

Geeta Dayal is a noted arts critic and journalist specializing in the history of experimental music. She has contributed to many major publications, including The New York Times, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, Wired, Slate, The Boston Globe, Frieze, Film Comment, Sight & Sound, The Wire, 4Columns, and NPR. She is the author of the book Another Green World (Bloomsbury, 2009.) A new book, a collection of her writings on music over the past two decades, will be published next year. She is based in Los Angeles.

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. Organizing concerts has always been a parallel activity, stemming from a firm belief that music is social and must take place in 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. Chen’s solo performances explore improvisation as an extension of listening, setting the spontaneous, melodic invention of his guitar playing within electronic drones, noise and an immersive sense of space that invokes the meditative, psychedelic and the sounds of everyday life.