Seven Cups Echo is a participatory installation and performance by Emma Palm, Marc Merza, and Julian Stein that explores sound in the context of an intimate tea ceremony. Through the ritual, process, and movements of a tea tasting, the artists will manipulate and alter the soundscape. Participants are invited to drink tea, in which their involvement contributes to the co-creation of an evolving sound environment, scored by the very act of what it takes to make and drink a cup of tea.
 

Emma Palm is a Los Angeles based, Taiwanese-American musician and visual artist. She creates soundscapes that often collage synths, vocals, guqin and field recordings that reflect on the intersection of environment and memory.

Marc Merza is a Filipino-American artist and musician based in Los Angeles, California. He often composes on guitar, clarinet and Kulintang (a Filipino gong set) to speak to others, but the use of tape loops, field recordings and electronic equipment are not foreign in Marc’s music.

Julian Stein is a media artist based in Los Angeles, CA. He creates performances and installations that reimagine aspects of daily life, seeking shared qualities between the natural and built world.

Memory Leaks Onto The Rug mixes murky tape sounds, ambient, noisy, slow, & plunderphonic loops. Initially crafted during long, hazy, unhealthy sessions hunched over tape machines during a five year stint of deep escapism related to self denial of gender identity; now made with a personal, therapeutic intent.

Memory Leaks Onto The Rug remains one of the most enigmatic figures in contemporary experimental music. The Santa Cruz, California-based sound collagist has issued a plethora of lo-fi and murky recordings via tapes, CD-Rs, and digital files over the past decade, all the while maintaining complete anonymity and cultivating an overwhelmingly unique aesthetic. Her sound is often ambient and droney, with elements of noise and instrumental hip hop thrown in for good measure. Memory Leaks' debut cassette for Primordial Void, Form, “was made using cassettes, microcassettes, tape dictation machines, effect pedals, and pause button tape manipulation,” according to the artist.

Everly Brothers and jazz samples transform into hypnotic broken transmission loops, landing somewhere between the haunting vaporwave of Infinity Frequencies and the laidback piano melodies of Tomcat. “Computer was only used to extract sections into tracks (with very minor volume adjustments), basically each track is exactly what is on tape,” Memory Leaks explains.