Fri 22 - The Black Box

The New York-based musician and producer Nicky Mao uses a combination of hardware, synths, and modular to create a visceral meditation on rhythm, noise, and melody. A specialist in manipulating macabre disorientations into enchanting new shapes, her music exposes the unsettling and sublime. With multiple acclaimed albums to her name – including three on DAIS Records, the most recent being 2021’s Silvercoat the throng, and one joint EP with frequent collaborator Drew McDowall (Coil) – the enthusiastic press rightly points to her strength as an artist, alchemizing disruption and decomposition into regenerative interior worlds.

For this year’s Intonal, Mao presents a new piece inspired partly by the words of the late Bernard Stiegler: “The age of disruption is the epoch of the absence of epoch.” As Mao explains, “Current technical systems are preventing our expression of will and what we are left with is a fragmentary sense of existence. The incomprehensibility of our times, faltering mutualities, diminishing worlds, a lack of growth in transgenerational experience – all lead to an unbearable psychic weight and an inability to conceive of new forms of life together.” An extension of Silvercoat the throng, which was composed during lockdown in 2020, the artist felt the need to resist the urge to fill the space, instead observing deeply how absence gives dimension and form to our lives. With that work and now the performance, she asks: “If light does not break, if shadows are not cast, how are we to process and then disseminate all that we have experienced? And in these current modes of existence, will we experience an epoch together ever again?” Preceding his death in 2020, Stiegler himself said of our current isolation, “It [the pandemic] should be an opportunity to revalue the silence, the rhythms that we give ourselves…”