Issue 15 February 2019
Issue 12 May 2018
Issue 10 November 2017
Issue 7 February 2017
Issue 5 August 2016
Issue 4 May 2016
Issue 3 February 2016
Issue 2 November 2015
Issue 1 August 2015
7811 Gallery
Anat Ebgi (Wilshire)
Arcana Books
Artbook @ Hauser & Wirth
as-is.la
Babst Gallery
Baert Gallery
Bel Ami
Billis Williams Gallery
Canary Test
Central Server Works Press
Charlie James Gallery
Château Shatto
Cirrus Gallery
Clay ca
Commonwealth & Council
Craft Contemporary
D2 Art (Westwood)
David Kordansky Gallery
David Zwirner
Diane Rosenstein
dublab
Ebony Repertory Theatre at The Nate Holden Performing Arts Center
Fernberger
FOYER-LA
Francis Gallery
François Ghebaly
Gana Art Los Angeles
Giovanni's Room
Hannah Hoffman Gallery
Harkawik
Harper's Gallery
Heavy Manners Library
Helen J Gallery
Human Resources
ICA LA
JOAN
Jurassic Magic Mid-City
Jurassic Magic MacArthur Park
Karma
l.a.Eyeworks
LACA
Lisson Gallery
Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery
Louis Stern Fine Arts
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles
M+B
MAK Center for Art and Architecture
Make Room
Matter Studio Gallery
Megan Mulrooney
Michael Werner Gallery
MOCA Grand Avenue
Monte Vista Projects
Morán Morán
Moskowitz Bayse
Murmurs
Nazarian / Curcio
Night Gallery
NOON Projects
O-Town House
OCHI
Official Welcome
One Trick Pony
Pace
Paradise Framing
Perrotin Los Angeles
Patricia Sweetow Gallery
Rajiv Menon Contemporary
REDCAT (Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater)
Regen Projects
Reparations Club
Roberts Projects
Royale Projects
Sea View
Sebastian Gladstone
Smart Objects
SOLDES
SPRÜTH MAGERS
Steve Turner
St. Elmo Village
The Box
The Fulcrum
The Hole
The Journal Gallery
The Landing
The Poetic Research Bureau
The Wende Museum
Thinkspace Projects
Tierra del Sol Gallery
Tiger Strikes Astroid
Timothy Hawkinson Gallery
Track 16
Tyler Park Presents
USC Fisher Museum of Art
Village Well Books & Coffee
Webber
Wönzimer
Ysasi Gallery
Gattopardo
GGLA
John Doe Gallery
Junior High
la BEAST gallery
Marta
Nicodim Gallery
North Loop West
OXY ARTS
Parrasch Heijnen Gallery
Philip Martin Gallery
Rusha & Co.
South Gate Museum and Art Gallery
Staklena Kuća
The Armory Center for the Arts
The Pit Los Angeles
Umico Printing and Framing
Vielmetter Los Angeles
Vincent Price Art Museum
Wilding Cran Gallery
D2 Art (Inglewood)
Experimentally Structured Museum of Art
Long Beach City College
The Den
Torrance Art Museum
Bortolami Gallery (New York, NY)
Bread & Salt (San Diego, CA)
Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art (Buffalo, NY)
Chess Club (Portland, OR)
DOCUMENT (Chicago, IL)
Et al. (San Francisco, CA)
Fresno City College (Fresno, CA)
High Desert Test Sites
ICA San Diego
Left Field (Los Osos, CA)
Level of Service Not Required (La Jolla, CA)
Los Angeles Valley College (Valley Glen, CA)
OCHI (Ketchum, ID)
Baltimore Museum of Art (Baltimore, MD)
Bard College, CCS Library (Annandale-on-Hudson, NY)
Charlotte Street Foundation (Kansas City, MO)
Cranbrook Academy of Art (Bloomfield Hills, MI)
Getty Research Institute (Los Angeles, CA)
Los Angeles Contemporary Archive (Los Angeles, CA)
Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles, CA)
Maryland Institute College of Art (Baltimore, MD)
Midway Contemporary Art (Minneapolis, MN)
Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles, CA)
Pepperdine University (Malibu, CA)
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (San Francisco, CA)
School of the Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago, IL)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, NY)
University of California Irvine, Langston IMCA (Irvine, CA)
University of Minnesota Duluth, Tweed Museum of Art (Deluth, MN)
University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, PA)
University of Washington (Seattle, WA)
Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, MN)
Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY)
Yale University Library (New Haven, CT)
Our advertising program is essential to the ecology of our publication. Ad fees go directly to paying writers, which we do according to W.A.G.E. standards.
We are currently printing runs of 6,000 every three months. Our publication is distributed locally through galleries and art related businesses, providing a direct outlet to reaching a specific demographic with art related interests and concerns.
To advertise or for more information on rates, deadlines, and production specifications, please contact us at ads@contemporaryartreview.la
-
AA LA
- Ace Hotel
- Alter Space
- Angels Gate Cultural Center
- AWHRHWAR
- BBQ LA
- Ben Sanders
- Big Pictures
- Blum & Poe
- Bullseye Projects
- Bridge Projects
- Central Park
- Chimento Contemporary
- Cranbrook Academy of Art
- Dalton Warehouse
- DXIX
- Elevator Mondays
- Five Car Garage
- Frieze
- Frieze Art Fair
- Garden
- Gas
- Graphite Journal
- Hammer Museum
- Hauser & Wirth
- Hesse Press
- Hunter Shaw Fine Art
- Ibid
- ICA LA
- in lieu
- John Pots
- Karma International
- Kayne Griffin Corcoran
- Klowden Mann
- LA Louver
- LA Valley College
-
Left Field
- Lowell Ryan Projects
- LSH CoLAB
- Luis De Jesus
- Material Art Fair
- Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
- NADA NY
- Night Gallery
- Odd Ark LA
- Ochi Projects
- Oof Books
- NowShop
- Noysky
- Parker Gallery
- Parrasch Heijnen
- Paris LA
- Photo L.A.
- Pomona College Museum of Art
- Praz-Delavallade
- Roberts Projects
- Shulamit Nazarian
- Sprüth Magers
- Syracuse University Art Department
- Telluride Gallery
- The BOX
- The Broad
- The Getty
- The Landing
- The Lodge
- The Pit
- The Underground Museum
- Ulises
- Untitled Art Fair
- Walters & Skyler LLP
- Wilding Cran Gallery
- YBCA
- Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
- X-Tra
Sonic Overlook: Archiving SASSAS and L.A.’s Experimental Music Scene
August 25, 2026
Text by Reuben Merringer
Take a walk at night. Walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears.
—Pauline Oliveros, Sonic Meditations (1974)
Between Crenshaw and Culver City stands the Baldwin Hills Scenic Overlook (BHSO), a mound of trails and wildlife with a history rooted in both the natural and built landscape. First used by the Tongva people as a panoramic lookout, the park eventually became swallowed by oil fields before it was ultimately converted into a landscaped California State Park through restorative practices.
In 2017, this park served as the venue for a concert by Japanese sound art pioneer Akio Suzuki, his first performance in Los Angeles. Suzuki initially garnered attention in 1963 with a performance that involved throwing, in his words, “all sorts of junk” against a set of staircases at Nagoya Station, after which he was escorted away by the station’s public safety staff.1 For the BHSO performance, he was joined by the younger Japanese visual artist, composer, and curator Aki Onda. The age difference lent a passing-the-torch dynamic to the night, as the two explored four separate locations on the Overlook through sound and listening, an intimate and rapt audience surrounding them at every stop. They created sound through interactions between banal objects like scrap metal, smashed soda cans, Suzuki’s “ANALAPOS”—an invented instrument of metal cylinders connected by a steel coil—and the built terrain.2
The concert can be viewed in its entirety on the archived website of SASSAS, the sibilant acronym for the Society for the Activation of Social Spaces through Art and Sound, a music and sound art nonprofit that ran experimental concert programming in L.A. for nearly 20 years, between roughly 1999 and 2019. Concerts were free to the public when possible (which was most of the time), operating on the condition that participating artists were always compensated and concerts were documented.
It would be hard to grasp the nature of the intimate Suzuki concert were it not for the SASSAS archive, which now exists both as a public-facing website (sassas.org) and a collection of ephemera, artworks, and documentary media housed at the Getty Research Institute. For many performance-based practices, such documentation can be scant and of disparate quality. Sound is a transitory medium, and the ad hoc conditions in which such performances tend to take place make it extraordinarily difficult to trace a singular, coherent lineage of L.A.’s sonic history.
Some of the difficulty lies in the very spirit of West Coast experimentation, which resists reduction to a single lineage or narrative and is consequently difficult to document. Archives like SASSAS become increasingly valuable as L.A. continues to shift; neighborhoods flip, old haunts are razed and polished over. Having volunteered for SASSAS as my first post-grad school gig, and eventually working on the SASSAS archives in its sundown years—during which the organization faced pandemic-era budget challenges—I have since referenced them repeatedly for all sorts of reasons, often to simply remember the name of a certain park or shop that once served as a performance venue.
Phil Teele, Bruce Fowler, Mapping sound.: Chung King Corpse (performance view) (2009). Image courtesy of the artists and SASSAS. Photo: Wild Don Lewis.
Founded in 1999 by post-conceptual artist Cindy Bernard and operating until 2019, SASSAS programmed concerts and workshops featuring artists, musicians, and their work. Artists such as James Tenney, Mike Kelley, Tetuzi Akiyama, Pauline Oliveros, Glenn Branca, Roscoe Mitchell, and Kelan Philip Cohran produced concerts that ranged from sublimely harmonious musicality to Cage-ian emptiness. Though each concert was distinct, they all seemed to contain a spirit of kinship and chance, imbuing SASSAS programming with a mercurial quality that appealed to tricksters, dreamers, and sensualists.
In an exhibition text for SASSAS’s 2019 anniversary installation 20 HRS / 20 YRS, writer and curator Michael Ned Holte summed up SASSAS’s “remarkable run”: how it emerged from “the intersection of a small, but high-minded art world and a similarly narrow community devoted to experimental music and sound, often a tightly overlapping Venn diagram of interest.”3 Perusing the archived website and its hundreds of participating interdisciplinary artists, one sees countless visual methods threaded together with an interest in how two invisible quantities—space and the vibrations filling it—can inflect subjective experience.
⁂
Experimental composer and sound artist Alvin Lucier, who was heavily influenced by John Cage, argued for the value of listening over simply “making sounds happen.”4 Along with fellow composer and performer Pauline Oliveros, Lucier began making site-specific sound work on a visit to San Diego in the late 1960s. Chambers (1968) involved players “sounding” seashells in a La Jolla canyon, using sound to “describe the outdoor space”5 by revealing what happens when sonic substances of various textures and viscosities are dumped into it. Throughout the piece, performers move sound through the environment, allowing architecture and portable containers to diffuse, filter, and reshape the audio as their paths cross. Oliveros likewise went on to explore sound through alternative modes of listening, drawn to collective experience, writing “Sonic Meditations” intended for groups. Teaching at Mills College in Oakland and the University of California, San Diego, Oliveros’s influence on West Coast experimentalism is unassailable, and unsurprisingly, Oliveros and other pioneers appear in many forms across the SASSAS archives. For instance, in the 2001 performance Oliveros gave at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, she instructed viewers to “listen for the subtle rhythms of the body” before playing meditative disjunctive sounds on an accordion. “You’re helping me to create this piece by the way you listen,” she explained.6
SASSAS began with the simple intent to bring visual artists and musicians together in unlikely collaborations in non-hierarchical spaces, often using an “exquisite corpse” format that blended multiple solo performances with overlapping duets, as musicians rotated in and out of the designated staging area. During the six-hour concert Welcome Inn Time Machine (2012), multiple motel rooms in Eagle Rock’s mid-century Welcome Inn were transformed to ad-hoc “micro-concerts” that could be experienced in sequence and simultaneously.7 Visitors were invited to wear “pyramid headphones” by the Los Angeles Free Music Society in one room, while Anita Pace performed Merce Cunningham-inspired dance experiments in two other rooms and the adjacent stairwell.
This is a running theme throughout the SASSAS archive: Performers and musicians were placed on the same level as the audience, resulting in highly intimate but wholly unpredictable encounters with sound. A 1998 concert at Angels Gate Cultural Center (a solo event organized by Bernard before she formalized SASSAS the following year) involved the creation of musical trios on the fly: Names were pulled randomly from a hat, and the musicians and artists then improvised in front of the audience. One placed artist Frances Stark on electric guitar alongside artists Joe Potts and Gabie Strong. These early concerts were aggressively interdisciplinary experiments in chaos and alchemy, artists often bridging generations.
Vetza, Kira Vollman, sound. at the Baldwin Hills Scenic Overlook: 20th Anniversary Corpse (2019). Image courtesy of the artists and SASSAS. Photo: Wild Don Lewis.
Akio Suzuki, sound. at the Baldwin Hills Scenic Overlook: Akio Suzuki and Aki Onda (2017). Image courtesy of the artists and SASSAS. Photo: Wild Don Lewis.
Pauline Oliveros, sound. at the Schindler House: Pauline Oliveros and Philip Gelb (performance view) (2001). Image courtesy of the artist and SASSAS. Photo: Sam Durant.
Solid Eye (Rick Potts, Steve Gregoropoulos, Joseph Hammer), sound. at the Schindler House: Solid Eye and Extended Organ (performance view) (2000). Image courtesy of the artists and SASSAS. Photo: Cindy Bernard.
The spirit of the West Coast experimentalism that emerged in the 1960s and ’70s typified SASSAS’s increasingly ambitious concert formats and workshops. This was evidenced by SASSAS collaborators like Oliveros or composer James Tenney, who influenced younger generations with shared philosophies on microtonal music and deep listening. Its spirit was informed by earlier projects; anti-professional, anti-commercial agents of chaos like the aforementioned LAFMS, a loose collective of “non-musicians” founded in the early 1970s by brothers Joe and Rick Potts as well as Tom Recchion, Fredrik Nilsen, and many others.
LAFMS has spawned many iterative offshoots over the past 50 years. Many performers and projects, like experimental drone collective Extended Organ, which included artists Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley, performed at SASSAS concerts in the early 2000s. Joe Potts served on the SASSAS board early in its formation and hosted a monthly SASSAS workshop, “soundShoppe,” at the Center for the Arts, Eagle Rock, where anyone could come and make noise with literally anything for a few hours. These sessions often transitioned almost imperceptibly from silence to mad-scientist-levels of cacophonous feedback as audio signal chains ran amok. This de-professionalized chaos, central to LAFMS programming, distinguishes it from 1960s and ’70s East Coast conceptualism, which is often (perhaps inaccurately) perceived as more buttoned-up and clinical due to its focus on language and systems.
Critic Thomas Crow has argued that California art of this time developed as a heterogeneous alternative to New York’s critical orthodoxy.8 New York critics such as Lucy Lippard defined East Coast conceptualism through the dematerialization of the object,9 and Rosalind Krauss frequently interpreted the city’s artistic production through questions of signification, representation, and systems of meaning.10 In California, by contrast, artists from Robert Irwin and James Turrell to James Tenney and Pauline Oliveros often treated perception, atmosphere, and embodied listening as artistic material itself. Though it seems like Light and Space would have little in common with LAFMS’s amplifiers and noisemakers pounding and screaming at full volume, the preeminence of place and perception is the same.
But to boil it down to an East Coast/West Coast binary would ignore the dialogue taking place across countercultural circles at the time.
One could easily draw a line between the antics of LAFMS and the No Wave or Fluxus scenes that emerged in NYC in the 1960s–’70s. Similarly, LAFMS was thrilled to take the piss out of the uptight perception of experimental music, embracing dissonance, formlessness, and a DIY anti-establishment ethos. The inherent desire of these artists to deconstruct or subvert seemingly traditional features of sound and music reveals a willingness to push beyond our notion of what music can be, thereby opening ever more corridors of creative production.
⁂
It is said that James Joyce boasted that the Dublin of 1904 (specifically June 16, the date on which his iconic book was set) could be reconstructed from the pages of Ulysses. The SASSAS archives function much in the same way: a multi-layered cultural artifact rife with the poetic and factual, creating a sort of four-dimensional map spotted with glowing sites of activity. Though SASSAS earned a dedicated audience over the years, the legacy of Cindy Bernard’s massive project would be at risk of disappearance were it not for its archival efforts. Concerts with historic sonic luminaries may only draw an audience of a couple dozen, but the audience of an archive is potentially endless. For Bernard, this aspect of the organization carries far greater impact; as the city disappears and rearranges itself through various internal and external pressures like rising rents and industry precarity, SASSAS offers a window into views of L.A. that are disappearing, if they haven’t already.
Like Joyce, SASSAS saw urban life as thrumming, ceaseless, and simultaneous, something to be elevated and loved. SASSAS’s 10-year anniversary concert, Mapping sound. (2009), took place in 8 separate locations, including the defunct Eighth Veil project space and the old Amoeba Music on Sunset Boulevard. The organization’s final concert, the five-and-a-half-hour 20th Anniversary Corpse at Baldwin Hills Scenic Overlook, was a massive exercise in simultaneity, sound, and relationalism. More than 25 artists played in five locations around the park, concurrent concerts all held within earshot of each other, all free to the public. No center, no hierarchy. A simple diagrammatic musical score, written by Bernard herself. For five hours, sonic idiosyncrasy spilled down onto the L.A. basin.
In the attempt to map a definitive lineage of L.A. sonic history, instead one finds routes and imbricated strata, interacting and networked like our freeways: in constant motion, evolution, and adaptation. The SASSAS archive embodies a different way of listening and interacting with sound and space that invites visitors to consider the city as it is today. What spaces have yet to be activated, and how might that be done while those spaces are still around?
Many of the venues noted in the archives, like Sacred Grounds and most recently The Box, which hosted the SASSAS-produced 2017 premiere of James Tenney’s Changes,11 have shuttered and disappeared. However, newer spaces like non-profit Canary Test embrace sound as both physical and communal, and longer-running spaces like Coaxial, Human Resources, Automata, and others continue to program events that foster community and inclusion, celebrating performance practices while challenging norms. As with every domain, the future is tenuous, but it will undoubtedly be mapped in some sonic form. And what form that sound will take will unerringly depend on the shape and qualities of the space itself and everything and everyone in it, adapting alongside our changing city. Sound, after all, is a vibration that requires another medium to carry it.
- Akio Suzuki, interview by Aki Onda, translated by Aiko Masubuchi, “Akio Suzuki with Aki Onda,” ISSUE Project Room, September 2012, https://issueprojectroom.org/news/akio-suzuki-aki-onda. ↵
- “sound. at the Baldwin Hills Scenic Overlook: Akio Suzuki and Aki Onda,” SASSAS, October 22, 2017, https://sassas.org/event/akio-suzuki-and-aki-onda/. ↵
- Michael Ned Holte, 20 HRS / 20 YRS exhibition text, MAK Center for Art and Architecture (The Schindler House), West Hollywood, 2019. ↵
- Alvin Lucier, “Careful Listening Is More Important than Making Sounds Happen: The Propagation of Sound in Space,” in Reflections: Interviews, Scores, Writings 1965–1994 (Cologne: Edition MusikTexte, 1995), 430–38. ↵
- Elie Siegmeister, Alvin Lucier, and Mindy Lee, “Three Points of View,” The Musical Quarterly 65, no. 2 (April 1979): 288, https://rohandrape.net/ut/rttcc-text/Siegmeister1979a.pdf. ↵
- “Pauline Oliveros and Philip Gelb,” SASSAS, July 28, 2001, https://sassas.org/event/pauline-oliveros-and-philip-gelb/. ↵
- “Welcome Inn Time Machine,” SASSAS, January 29, 2012, https://sassas.org/program/welcome-inn-time-machine/. ↵
- Thomas Crow, The Artist in the Counterculture: Bruce Conner to Mike Kelley and Other Tales from the Edge (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021). ↵
- Lucy R. Lippard and John Chandler, “The Dematerialization of Art,” Art International 12, no.2 (February 1968): 31–36. ↵
- Rosalind E. Krauss, “Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America,” October 3 (Spring 1977): 68–81. ↵
- “sound. at The Box: James Tenney’s Changes,” SASSAS, 2017, https://sassas.org/event/james-tenneys-changes/. ↵
About the author
Read More
