SOUND TYPE Concert: Che Chen

Join us for a live concert on Friday April 26 at 8PM with Che Chen, New York-based composer and guitarist/multi-instrumentalist.
Chen's solo improvisations are attempts to commune with spaces and presences in real time, with sound, as it is embodied in the internal, environmental and social, as the basic material. Musicality, noise, states of attention, identity and other spectrums are cross-catalyzed and collaged together in the process. Asian Arts Initiative is pleased to present Chen’s tactful auditory space that invites audiences to an awareness of the dissonance and harmony in the environments within and around us.

Che Chen is an improviser, composer, bandleader, multi-instrumentalist and concert organizer based in Queens, NY. An energetic presence in New York City’s experimental underground since the early 2000s, he has tread an idiosyncratic path from noise duo True Primes to playing in groups led by drone minimalists and Japanese outsider artists, to studying guitar in Mauritania and improvising with veterans from NYC’s storied free jazz community. Organizing concerts has always been a parallel activity, stemming from a firm belief that music is social and must take place in community. In 2012, he and “plywood crate” player Rick Brown founded 75 Dollar Bill, a group with flexible personnel whose hybrid music synthesizes modal traditions from the non-Western world, Sun Ra’s space chords and the minimalist and No Wave histories of their hometown. Chen’s solo performances explore improvisation as an extension of listening, setting the spontaneous, melodic invention of his guitar playing within electronic drones, noise and an immersive sense of space that invokes the meditative, psychedelic and the sounds of everyday life.