Axine M: Control Scheme

Friday, December 6th at 8pm, ISSUE Project Room and The Emily Harvey Foundation present 2024 Artist-In-Residence Axine M’s culminating commission, Control Scheme, songs and improvisations for computer-extended fretless guitar and voice. The event will take place at The Emily Harvey Foundation’s limited-capacity space in SoHo, Manhattan, and recognizes a longtime collaboration between two like-minded organizations that are committed to supporting the work of underrepresented artists while sharing resources.

Her year-long residency has explored the user experience and the effects of capitalism on our identities and relationships. Experimenting with pieces from her repertoire that feature alternative methods of control, the artist writes: “An interface is a set of affordances. When designed for a specific use case, the offerings of an environment may be hacked, expanded, or ignored. Well-designed tools are easy to use and difficult to master.”

Notes from Axine M on Control Scheme:

Phenomenological mapping strategies: hypothetical limb, emotional projection

Psycho-spatial offerings; potentialities of exertion 

Creating a vacuum to fill with one’s own agency

Mutating and interpolating the scope of activity

Being a conjectural architect, keeping in mind that space filled over time shapes changes in the user anatomy

Take, establish, demand, hoard, relinquish, surrender

Axine M is the moniker of Maxine de las Pozas, a music artist residing in Brooklyn, NY. The Ancient Greek Axenos, or "inhospitable place," is a name for the Black Sea before nautical technology was advanced enough to safely traverse the water. Axine M is a vessel for musical inquiries and creative impulses across multiple genres and sentiments, carving out a space for itself against the grain of the dystopian imaginary. A recent self-released tape, USUSUSESESERERER (pronounced "user"), is a songwriterly exploration of interpersonal relationships under late-capitalism. Axine has published tapes with Summer Isle and Embalming Lately, a label she co-founded. As a DJ, Axine has mixed for c-, BIZAARBAZAAR, DUST, Hong Kong Community Radio, and The Lot Radio, among others. Maxine holds a master's degree in Music Technology from NYU Steinhardt, where she focused on the design of novel music controllers for live performance. Versions of her thesis were published in the proceedings of New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME 2020) and International Computer Music Conference (ICMC 2021). Maxine is a collective member and sound engineer for Chaos Computer. She works as an Audiovisual Technician.