Qiujiang Levi Lu (卢秋江): 沿光苍穹 / The Ever-Reaching, Luminescent Horizon

Friday, November 21st at 8pm, ISSUE Project Room presents the culminating commission of 2025 Artist-In-Residence Qiujiang Levi Lu. Joined by Scott Congyu Li, Warp Duo performs The Ever-Reaching, Luminescent Horizon at The Mark O'Donnell Theater at the Entertainment Community Fund Arts Center in Downtown Brooklyn. Lu’s residency is supported by Harvestworks’ Technology Immersion Program (TIP) and is part of an ongoing program collaboration between two organizations that are committed to supporting the creation and presentation of experimental performance practices while sharing resources.

沿光苍穹 / The Ever-Reaching, Luminescent Horizon is the latest augmented operatic work by Warp Duo (Qiujiang Levi Lu & Scott Congyu Li), which brings together violin, voice, prepared guitar, and live electronics in a symphonic ritual of grief, love, and resistance. Armed with augmented instruments—joystick-modified systems, feedback-driven brass instruments, synthesizers, amplified violin, voice, and wine glass; even the performers’ own amplified bodies—the duo navigates a throughline of light, slipping between searing distortion and fragile lullabies. Rooted in the duo’s shared reality as queer Chinese Americans, their performance unfolds as catharsis, blending beat-based electronic music, noise, folk, classical, and performance art in a spiritual voyage that extends beyond the stage. Improvisations mix with dense compositions, blurring violence and a fierce tenderness. With a musical language at once intimate and monumental, the duo honors loss, celebrates resilience, and imagines new, liberatory futures for humanity beyond the horizon.

Qiujiang Levi Lu (卢秋江) is a NYC-based performance artist, experimental musician, composer, and educator. Their work transforms the body into a sonic object through interactions with movements and audio technology, exploring identity, sound, and space. Lu designs customized feedback systems with cyborg-like body augmentations inspired by Objectophilia/animism. These include special microphones, speakers placed within bodily orifices, and an augmented amplified laptop. Their resulting performances consist of choreographed, ritualistic improvisations building upon ancient Chinese drumming traditions to manifest body dysmorphia, sexuality, spirituality, and mortality. As the second-prize winner of the International Electronic Music Competition 2023, their works have been featured internationally, including MATA Festival, High Zero Festival, The Poetry Project, E-Flux, IRCAM Forum, and Center for Performance Research. Lu has also been an artist-in-residence at ISSUE Project Room, Harvestworks TIP, Reforesters Laboratory, and Elektronmusikstudion Stockholm. Lu is currently a lecturer in the Department of Music at the University of Pennsylvania.

Scott Congyu Li (李淙禹) is a NYC-based classically trained violinist, composer, performer, improviser, filmmaker, recording engineer, and sound artist blending the Romantic chamber music tradition with emotive experimental electronic music. Li’s performances and compositions fuse modular synthesis, live processing, fixed media, film, photography, dance, and prose with elements of classical chamber music to “create a simultaneous understanding of The Beautiful and The Sublime, while exhibiting unparalleled emotional induction.” (The Crossfader, 2019) Li is an explorer of haunting and ethereal sounds of wildly different styles, and a collaborator of a diverse group of musicians, filmmakers, visual artists, writers, and dancers. Collaborations have included premieres of large-scale, multi-movement works at New World Symphony’s BLUE Project series in 2022, The University of Michigan’s Dance Department alongside Vim Vigor Dance, as well as with the Pathos Percussion Trio. Li has performed at numerous established venues across the country, including the New World Symphony Center in Miami, REDCAT, the DiMenna Center, the Jazz Gallery in NYC, Rhizome DC, and Ottobar.

Warp Duo is the duo project of Qiujiang Levi Lu and Scott Congyu Li, utilizing violin, voice, guitar, and live electronics to achieve profound emotional catharsis. Wails, visceral violin screeches, and digital distortion weave their way into ethereal, reverberant soundscapes and melancholy melodies inspired by Chinese folk lullabies. The juxtaposition of orally composed songs with free improvisations tells an aural story of love, grief, fragility, intimacy, and strength. The duo explores their shared queer Chinese experience through a familial bond that ultimately transcends music and cherishes, above all, human connection.