Voidwave is pleased to present the work of Saun Santipreecha, an interdisciplinary artist and composer based in Los Angeles. This show includes a conversation between Saun and Kim Zumpfe while walking in the mountains above Altadena, recording ourselves treading through the brush and pine needles of the Angeles National Forest a couple weeks before the devastating fires. This moment of walking through this delicate ecosystem in an area that still stands, a recording that registers time of this simple act of walking, felt incredibly potent as Saun and Kim worked to create the sound design for the episode together, interweaving sounds of walking and Saun’s work into a tapestry that wove back into our conversation, excavation of history, and this current historical moment in the local area. While the conversation feels like it touches logically upon subjects of forms and processes of sound’s relationship to image, body, language, landscape and architecture, it also transcends into more intangible aspects of sound, including its amorphous relationship to embodiment, politics, and the realities and vacancies in perceptions of our own histories that live in the spheres of the sonic. 

About Saun, from Saun:

My work primarily lives in interstices and intersections, in trace embodiments of the visual and aural, of the tangible and intangible, of image, language and sound, always ever-moving, ever in flux, grounded in the position of questioning, or rather the questioning of position—embodying a larger concept which I call relational modularity—weaving a web from various disciplines and inquiries, working with and through material in order to sculpt, form and embody gestures of thought. The work, in other words, is formed from traces and is in itself a trace, questioning the relation of tangible and intangible bodies, frames and systems, the body as frame, bodies as systems, systems themselves as organized body, a societal frame—a never-ending cybernetic loop: the act of breaking myth itself forms its own myth.

 Each piece aims to hold multiple perspectives, stratum of ideas, and material memories that opens up a space within which each spect-actor (to reference Claire Bishop’s use of Augusto Boal’s term) can find themselves in dialogue—through the act of translation as excavation. In what state of concretization then can we call a work complete as opposed to in process? And most importantly, how can a work be triangulated such that a spectator is brought into the fold themselves, excavating the work, the spectacle before them, the spectacle within which—accepting and acknowledging our innate need to find and impose meaning—we create and inhabit our own symbols, myths and illusions. Yet despite it all, the aim is always to ‘heighten the illusion to the point of transparency’ (Adorno on Alban Berg).

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Voidwave is a web of experimental voices, sounds, and interviews with a focus on work by femme, gender non-conforming, and queer folx. Embedded in these sound practices are rebelliousness and longing, hunger for new subversive futures, irreverence, determined perseverance, political potency, uncompromising processes, and includes a celebration of lineages that spans across time and the globe. Voidwave is a 2-hour radio show that features work from artists who use experimental sound and music, performance, field recording, spoken word, sound art, sound poetics, and other disobedient audio speculations – adventures into sound and conversations with the people who made them.

Voidwave is a collaboration by multidisciplinary artists Melissa Vogley Woods in Ohio, Liz Roberts in Berkeley, and Kim Zumpfe and Katya Urban in Los Angeles, with occasional guest collaborators and hosts. Voidwave was formed by Melissa, Liz, and Gina Osterloh.