CAROLYN CHEN + IAN POWER
if I could say a few words
November 22, 2025, 7:30pm
TICKETS
Members,Students, Seniors, Underemployed: $15
General Admission: $18
Automata's TAPETAIL experimental sound series presents compositions and performances by Ian Power and Carolyn Chen. Their text-based pieces will accompany Sarah Roberts’ installation of lithography-illustrated children' s books. Google Translation artifacts, telepathic crossfading into unison, and compound word illumination of acoustics as Sesame Street’s two-headed monster meets ‘I am sitting in a room.’ Audience participation possible.
Prior to the performance, there will be an opening for Sara Roberts’ Automata Windows Project
About the Artists:
Carolyn Chen has made music for supermarket, demolition district, and the dark. Her work reconfigures the everyday through sound, text, light, and movement. Her listening interests have been informed by studying early music, taichi, aikido, and the guqin, the Chinese zither traditionally played for private meditation in nature. In 2015, after moving to L.A., she joined The Reader’s Chorus, led by Sarah Roberts and Jordan Biren. Current projects include an underwater listening project for Dog Star Orchestra, and a collaboration with poet Divya Victor for AMOC.
Ian Power is a composer and performer in Los Angeles and Baltimore. Power’s music is insistent, suspenseful, warm, and performer-driven, and has been performed by ensembles and soloists in the US, UK, Germany, Denmark, Israel, Japan, and New Zealand. He has been commissioned by Wet Ink, Heather Roche, Mariel Roberts, and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, among others. His piece BYE BYE LOVE was premiered by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra in Glasgow, and in 2025 his collaborative work It Allowed Them To Produce A Single Sound was made into a film by Music for Your Inbox in Los Angeles.
Tapetail is Automata’s new experimental sound series, launched in October 2022.
Tapetail presents live events and sound installations featuring the work of experimental sound artists.
We are currently looking to present shows and installations that deal with "liveness" where something about the experience is best presented live, whether through improvisation, special acoustic treatment or audience experience. There’s been a lot of great art happening in the virtual and digital world so now we’re turning our focus back towards bringing people together for sound experiences that are best experienced in a live setting.
Automata’s Tapetail series
is curated by Cassia Streb.
If you are interested in proposing work for the Tapetail series,
please fill out this short query form.