The Aural Kitchen
The Aural Kitchen:
An Amplified Cooking Performance + Field Recording of the Kitchen
Four-course meal | Sonic Environment | Menu-score
Sunday, November 15th
Limited Seating | Kindly RSVP
The Aural Kitchen is an amplified cooking performance by artist and 3307 W Washington Blvd director Amanda Martin Katz that takes an ingredient list as the compositional basis of a live field recording. At once performance, meal, and document, this iteration of the project consists of a seated four-course dinner, a sonic environment, and a video projection of Katz’s menu-score. The project was workshopped with sound artist and engineer Jorge Martin, and features a twelve-channel audio mix utilizing contact microphones, condensers, and a lavalier wedged inside the head of a stethoscope that Katz made to capture her heartbeat. Together, the microphones amplify the minute sounds produced by each kitchen tool as the dinner guests are asked to negotiate their attention between listening, reading, and socializing. While the audio tracks are being recorded unanimously as a document (the “field recording”), Martin crafts what is audible during the performance (the “composition”) by adjusting the volume outputs in response to Katz’s movements in the kitchen. The projected text of the menu-score scrolls throughout the evening. This four-paragraph essay connects Katz’s longterm cooking practice with a sudden loss of appetite, as she considers the relationship between utility and grief—particularly how labor, loneliness, and love resound through the activity (or, non-activity) of the kitchen.
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This first performance functioned akin to the practice of theater workshopping, as the work is, in part, formed and informed by its relating of host and guest.
The Aural Kitchen I | Food Menu
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Tomatoes sliced with minced shallots, sea salt, white pepper, cumin, coriander, black Urfa chili, lemongrass vinaigrette, Meyer lemon olive oil
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Sweet potatoes roasted with oranges, cumin, coriander
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Chicken thighs baked with zucchini and shallot in a black tea rub, served with naval orange juice, Meyer lemon olive oil, chopped parsley
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Assorted cupcakes | Sprinkles bakery
Amanda Martin Katz is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and facilitator based in Los Angeles. She works both independently and collaboratively to produce social, spatial, and performative embodiments of texts, as well as objects, text-objects, video installations, performances, and dialogic facilitations. For the past ten years, she has been designing and operating conceptual residency projects that explore collaborative inquiry and embodied research methodologies (in Katz’s Deli, since 2012, and BOOKSHELVES, since 2016). Recent exhibitions and published or performed works include “The Somatic Library,” Sluice, London (2020), Publishing Against the Grain, Pitzer College Art Galleries, Claremont, CA (2019), “Non-Disclosure Agreement for Artist-Artist Sexual Relationships,” Foundations Magazine (2017) and Non-Disclosure Agreement: Contract Performance at New Women Space, Brooklyn (2018). She received a BA from Colgate University and a MFA from Otis College of Art and Design.
SOUND ENGINEERING
Jorge Martin is a human genetics and orthopaedic surgery researcher at UCLA by day, who transforms at night into a well-respected sound artist. Though classically trained on piano and clarinet, he is more often heard constructing intricate music by processing the output from his modular analog synthesizer panels through a myriad of effect pedals and feedback. He was one half of the acclaimed duo, Spastic Colon (Downey, CA), and one fifth of the band, Sleestak (Los Angeles). Currently, he is a member of the Southern California Soundscape Ensemble, a collaborative involved in making and playing back field recordings. His frequent collaborations include live performances with Anna Homler, Gregory Lenczycki, Reneé Petropolous, and Joe Potts. His work with Spastic Colon was released recently by Troniks Records, with original album art by John Wiese.
photos and video by Ian Byers-Gamber