Pacific City Sound Visions: Sea Urchin

Thursday, April 5th, ISSUE is pleased to present the debut NYC showcase of Pacific City Sound Visions, an experimental label helmed by Spencer Clark, well known for his work with seminal noise duo The Skaters (with James Ferraro), and his alternative aliases Tarzana, Fourth World Magazine, and Monopoly Child Star Searchers. The evening features debut American performances from Francesco Cavaliere and Leila Hassan, as well as new work from Lieven Martens Moana and Clark’s own Typhonian Highlife project.

Sea Urchin, Egyptian-Austrian artist Leila Hassan’s collaborative project with Francesco Cavaliere, also performs in their American debut. Exploring a unique blend of poetry and dub music, their practice modulates sine waves, tapes, and electroacoustic devices while turning fluorescent minerals, mirrors, and materials into ever-changing projections. The duo began in 2011 with the creation of “dragon water music cassettes,” a series of tapes that detail musical relations with objects, writings and textiles. In 2016, KRAAK records released their debut full length album Yaqaza, arabic for “daydream.” Taking on the frame of a magical-realist narrative, the album’s ten songs are dedicated to specific topics, territories and characters: Sicilian salt miners and their muscle mirror glasses, Bolaji Badejo (the first “Alien” actor from 1979), and Cheba Nouria (known as “the Queen of Raï music”) -- an unknown Algerian pop star who recorded some of the most beautiful maghreb disco songs of the 1980’s.

Francesco Cavaliere (b. 1980 Piombino, Italy) is known for the sensitivity with which he combines sounds, materials and space, showing a highly particular taste for the most diverse forms of exoticism. His works are capable of enlivening his listeners’ inner states in an imaginative journey populated by ephemeral presences, phenomena generated by glass, minerals and voices recorded using analogue and digital technologies. First introduced to the world through the tape "Neverending Somersault,” Francesco Cavaliere is also author and interpreter of the "Gancio Cielo" audio stories, released as a full length LP on the label Hundebiss (IT) in 2016, as well as a second volume in the same year.

Leila Hassan is a Berlin-based, Egyptian-born visual artist and distinctive speaking voice. She talks mainly through her textiles, light sculpture, and ceramics works and gives voice and life to radio plays, poetry, and interpretation of other worlds. She is founder of the music & art project Sea Urchin with Francesco Cavaliere.