Saturday, January 22, 2022 7pm doors / 7:30pm show Tickets $10 (discounted or free for members) Get Tickets Now Masks, proof of vaccine & booster shot (or negative COVID-19 tests taken within 48 hrs) required for entry. Feeling sick? The performance will be broadcast live to thelab.org.
What is the sound of the space where something was supposed to be, but isn't? What music comes from the burden of doing life, out of the din of fatigue? How to sing when you're too tired? Hedva's new work is a composition built with sustained (rather than looped) guitar, in a drone that drags and pulls and continues. The scale of time is unceasing rather than renewed, haunted rather than cyclical. The lyrics quote Clarice Lispector, and the voice is pushed into the muscles of the throat until it breaks. Rather than a concert of songs, the new work is a ritual to bring communal exhaustion and rage into corporal space. This is Hedva's first live performance since January 2020.
Johanna Hedva is a Korean American writer, artist, musician, and astrologer, who was raised in Los Angeles by a family of witches, and now lives in LA and Berlin. Hedva’s practice cooks magic, necromancy, and divination together with mystical states of fury and ecstasy. They make mystical doom; hag blues; intimate metal. They are devoted to doom as a liberatory condition, deviant forms of knowledge, and the ways in which a voice can unmake the world. Their approach to sound is informed by Korean shamanist ritual and the Korean tradition of P’ansori singing (which demands rehearsal next to waterfalls, in order to ravage the vocal cords), Keiji Haino, Sainkho Namtchylak, Diamanda Galás, and Jeff Buckley, among others. Hedva’s work, no matter the genre, is different kinds of writing, whether it’s words on a page, screaming in a room, or dragging a hand through water. Their latest album, Black Moon Lilith in Pisces in the 4th House, was released on crystalline morphologies and Sming Sming on January 1, 2021. Hedva is also the author of two books, the novel On Hell (2018) and a collection of poems, performances, and essays, Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain (2020).
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