Merge Lane

<p>MERGE LANE<br /> $3.33 / Celia Hollander</p> <p>Last week, within 5 days, I took a car to a bus to an airplane to an airplane to a car to my feet to a car to a bus to a subway to my feet to a subway to a train to a shuttle van to my feet to a shuttle van to a train to a subway to my feet to a subway to a train to an airplane to a bus to a car to my bed. Collecting myself horizontally, I realized that my insides had been whisked into a pureé from all of the movement.</p> <p>The word “smog” is a blend of the words “smoke” and “fog.”</p> <p>I am playing a show in a large, reverberant white space. I am scheduled to play second out of four acts. The opening band is a psychedelic metal band and they are so loud that when they finish their set their music continues to echo through the space. They stay onstage, sustaining their sonic trace while I start to set up. I don’t know them and feel too shy to ask them to leave, and so they continue to play, lightly, in the background while I begin to play. I am very surprised and pleased to hear that their background music is actually very thoughtful and creates the perfect foundation for my set. Although I don’t know any of the other performers I understand that after my set I am meant to stay onstage and continue to play as the next act comes on, sustaining my own piece while working with the previous act to create a supportive sonic palette for the next. By the last performer, we are four groups on stage, layering our sounds so lightly that we merge into a single sonic entity in the reverberant airs.</p> <p>This is an image of a bunch of open tabs after doing a google image search, all at once.</p> <p>“Hypnosis is less of an act of magic that performs miracles, but a methodic collaboration between two or more people, a shared mutual practice.”<br /> (Marcos Lutyens, 100 Days: Memoirs of a Hypnotist)</p> <p>“Merge Lane” is an electroacoustic piece featuring Celia Hollander and Alex Tyson improvising on a grand piano submerged into the depths of a public indoor pool.</p> <p>——</p> <p>Celia Hollander is a Los Angeles based artist working primarily in audio recordings, scores, sound installations and text. Using the moniker $3.33, her work critically engages ways that music and sound based art can be understood as a type of architectural design that questions cultural infrastructures, cultivates social connection and enables awareness of a continuously changing present. Most recently, she performed a live score for the theater performance “The Bumps,” a play exploring pregnancy, at the Skirball Cultural Center (LA) using a watermelon as an electronic musical instrument. She hosts radio shows on Dublab and KCHUNG FM.</p>