MV Carbon

Friday, March 13th, at 8pm, ISSUE presents a two-part evening featuring interdisciplinary artists MV Carbon (2010 AIR) and Keke Hunt (2023 AIR). 

Across many years of work with ISSUE, MV Carbon has developed a practice around sculptural objects that function as musical instruments, amplifying the ritual, rhythm and momentum embedded in music. Most recently in 2019, Carbon honored Suzanne Fiol, the late founder of ISSUE in Suzanne Fiol: Ten Years Alive, in a performance during the exhibition of Fiol’s mixed-media artwork curated in collaboration with her daughter, Sarah Fiol. This March, Carbon taps into the mystery of the human mechanism, exploring themes of interchangeability, transmission, and the transmogrification of mind and matter using her "Psychophonic Instruments". Drawing on the Greek roots psyke (soul) and phone (sound), psychophony describes a listening experience that folds spatial imprints into external vibration. Using vintage telephone receivers, electric cello, hand-built instruments, gongs, and evolving synth textures, Carbon creates systems that invite listeners into a dynamic dialogue between space, mind, and matter.

MV Carbon is an artist exploring the transformative relationship between sound, space, and place. Her practice investigates how sound and technology can be used to reveal hidden information, influence sensory perception, and generate new aesthetic relationships to space and time. Speculative sound synthesis shapes her process and musical output. Decay and repetition expose the underlying architecture of sound, where the present melds with the future and resonance emerges. Carbon uses voice, electric cello, gongs, vintage microphones, and magnetic tape to reveal and shape the immediate environment. She treats space as an active, responsive organism, emphasizing interaction and emergence. Handmade circuits and sculptural objects are melded with voice and synthesizers, allowing unexpected musical logics to form through sonic saturation. Analog techniques are combined with oscillating strings, fusing sonic space onto live compositions. Carbon has solo and collaborative music released on record labels including Kill Rock Stars-5RC, Atavistic Records, Discombobulate, Ecstatic Peace, Chaikin Records, Hanson, Load Records, No Fun Productions, Various Artists, and Veglia.