Chinabot Vinyl, CD & Tape 3 Items

Tafaa - Random activity of the work of art, escalates an extension of accepted (unproductive) concepts of art, nature and society' is a sound editing project led by Chloé Delarue, a visual artist based in Geneva (ch) in collaboration with Adeena Mey, a curator, art critic, managing editor of the magazine Afterall (Central St Martins, London, UK) and researcher/teacher at Ecal (Lausanne, ch).

Together, they gathered sound artists Jaeho Hwang, Lafidki of the Chinabot label and the performer-composer Seth Ayyaz in a desire to bring together horizons of thoughts with a singular tonality in resonance with the Tafaa* cycle. The release is a continuation of the deployment of Chloé Delarue's solo show - Tafaa - THE Century OF THE Snitch, which took place at the Villa du Parc - Contemporary art center in Annemasse (fr).

The four compositions resulting from this meeting are materialized in a hybrid compilation. Each of the tracks, affected by the aesthetic spectrum of Tafaa - THE Century OF THE Snitch, results from unique paths that each sound artist builds in their own works. This compilation released in the exhibition space and in its vinyl form, was infused under this particular atmosphere with the aura of sodium, as an echo of the previous opus Tafaa - Acid Rave. The title evokes territories in wasteland and multitude of theaters of an urbanity that has become tropical for one night.

For Chloé Delarue, the environment produced under Tafaa - THE Century OF THE Snitch and its aesthetic feeling is linked with the dissemination of these four tracks. As she says, it becomes “like the deep trance of a noise invisible to oneself but that we perceive thanks to the questioning of its own imperception, the work no longer looks at itself, it injects itself.”

Moult and Dystopia by Jaeho Hwang, Pandæmonium Cctv by Lafidki in collaboration with Ayankoko and Pisitakun (from Chinabot) and Apophenic studies | stochastic iqaat by Seth Ayyaz thus bring out, through their sound characteristics, a powerful emotional expanse driven by their glimpse of the conceptual reconfigurations of a world increasingly accessible through its ersatz.

The vinyl title Tafaa - Random Activity (...) is borrowed from Gustav Metzger taken from an extract from his Manifesto On random activity in material / transforming works of art in July 30, 1964.

Chloé Delarue constitutes what she calls environments under the influence of the Tafaa perception system, an acronym for Toward A Fully Automated Appearance. Tafaa is a conceptual organ that she builds as a cognitive outgrowth allowing her access to the reasoning that feeds her work. It is under this name, indexed by a number or a subtitle, that each occurrence of her work has been presented since 2015. Thus, she probes the ambiguous relations that our society maintains with its multitudes of transfigurations, real or simulated, at the time of permanent interconnections and raises questions relating to changes in perceptions and cognitive transformations of our beings under the visible and invisible authority of cosmotechnics.

Lafidki is the moniker of London-based artist Saphy Vong. Since 2008 he's been working on experimental electronic music that is deeply informed by his origins of being born to Cambodian parents in a Thai refugee camp. Vong has previously released an EP with Orange Milk Records and operates his own label, Chinabot, which is currently getting ready to take off and will focus on showcasing artists from all across Asia.

DaBa is the new album from the Taiwanese, Berlin-based audio-visual artist Sabiwa. It explores the space between dreams and virtual reality, created both for use and consumption of the user.

As with our relationship to technology and fantasy, the album veers between seduction and repulsion. The intimate There is Nothing Real recalls the wondrous, textural sonic worlds of Bjork and the warm, muted tones of 90s trip-hop.

But the whispered, dream-like lyrics and samples from the natural world contrast with jabbering, scrambled, processed vocal loops as the album progresses, before the record contorts and dissolves into uncanny videogame glitches, reaching a grinding industrial crescendo during Enigma reminding horror movies soundtracks.

Patching together different dimensions and sonic spaces, DaBa creates a virtual landscape floating between primordial evocations, prayers and hyper-processed concrete sounds, dissolving with the rhythmic clicks and gasps of the album’s title track. “DaBa is the blurred moment when I wake up from a dream,” says Sabiwa, “And I don’t understand if it is me or not.”