40:00, solo performance, LACMA, October 1, 2024
What is the sound of a memory on loop? What is its shape? Texture? What story is left?
Daydream Building is a solo sound performance that explores architecture and ambiences of diasporic memory in real time. I take apart the sonic and relational elements of memories that surround a place, foregrounding an immigrant sense of split time/space. Over the course of this 40-minute durational performance, I build a site-specific assemblage of memory as an ambient song that is composed in action, as a live confrontation with the vivaciousness and messiness of memory in the process of it becoming re-spatialized.
In early 2024, I was invited by LACMA to present a program related to sound and architecture. This invitation came through while I was in Taiwan working on my experimental audio memoir Departures / Arrivals.
In Taiwan, I spent most days finding places where I set up my recording gear and exercise my body’s somatics to activate memory. These activation practices took place on sites such as stairwells in the apartment building I grew up in, chanting and staring into a mirror while inside of a reverberent bathroom, humming and sweeping inside of a living room with terrazzo floor, sitting on a springy wood floor stage with a children’s choir during a rehearsal in an auditorium at the elementary school that I went to. I also brought my family into the project to participate in unscripted conversations as a way to collate our feelings to what’s no longer there.
Daydream Building was composed and performed in loving memory of my grandparents who I grew up with. I practiced humming like my grandmother using the timbres of what I still hear as her voice. I transmitted the immersive quieting soundscape that I remember as my grandfather’s radio.
For the LACMA performance, I wanted to make tape loops in real time in order to reveal the labor of memory work. I brought ten or so shoebox cassette recorders to the museum gallery. Using cassette recorders, I made quick recordings of my humming, sweeping, and playing with rice cookers and kitchen utensils. Each recording formed a short 4 to 30-second tape loop, depending on the length of each gesture.
To transform the gallery space, I worked to create an evolving architecture of memory, building one layer in a corner at a time, in a roving performance over the course of forty minutes. As soon as I made a recording, I walked around the gallery to identify a place to position the cassette player based on the acoustics of the space. Following my movement, audience members watched this rapid temporary installation as it was being built. Some people opted to counter-follow the roving performance and wandered around the existing artwork Band (2006) by Richard Serra. Audience members experienced an evolving soundscape that was unique to their position, with shifting acoustics and varying degrees of proximity to the objects and people in the gallery.
In addition, an assemblage of radios scattered throughout the gallery contributed to a live FM broadcast of a rain recording. I intended for the radio signal to be intermittently interrupted by the rotating bodies in the room. Some members of the audience also enjoyed private moments of the broadcast through a handheld radio.
“Someone says it sounds like Taiwan. Yes, I think it does, even though I haven’t been to Taiwan in a decade. But it sounds like what I imagine Taiwan sounds like in a nice dream, or in heaven.” – Pete Hsu, author
An excerpt of this 40-minute performance recording was broadcast on the Berlin-based Refugee Worldwide radio as a part of the HOMING exhibition on November 11, 2024, curated by Arjuna Neuman for the Archive of Belonging.
Official program description:
Artist, musician, and ethnomusicologist Umi Hsu will bridge their current exploration of architectural acoustics with the exhibition ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN, creating a live assemblage of tape loops and everyday objects. Inspired by their soon-to-be-released experimental audio memoir, Hsu’s performance offers a fresh perspective on memory, space, and the exhibition.
This performance is presented by LACMA / Los Angeles County Museum of Art and is a part of a project commissioned by 聽說 Ting Shuo Hear Say with funding support from National Culture and Arts Foundation in Taiwan.
Composition, performance, and recording by Umi Hsu
Produced by Nateene Diu
Performance audio recording by Jacob Alden Sargent
Photos by Monica Orozco
Video by Jenny San Angel, Don Everhart, Kevin Hsu, Sonia Hsu, Lydia Otero, Nicole Rademacher, and Grace Umali
Video edited by Umi Hsu
Live sound by LACMA AV
Special thanks to Gu Grocery, Sonia Hsu, Emily and Vladimir Lu, Linda Wei, Ashle Fauvre, and Nathan Lam Vuong.
More:
Departures / Arrivals project website (English)
Departures / Arrivals project website (Mandarin Chinese)
Artist Interview on Departures / Arrivals
Radio broadcast on Refugee Worldwide
Departures / Arrivals on Bandcamp