MSHR, The Tenses, Special Collections, Joe Potts

**UPEND** presents an evening featuring **MSHR** and **The Tenses**, two creative partnerships entwined in the story of Portland, Oregon’s fecund underground. ~ MSHR touch down in L.A. with the latest iteration of a live sound-sculpture cycle, performing on a menagerie of fantastical instruments of their own creation that can emit (and respond to) light, audio signal, and data. Through custom circuitry and software the duo coax a wild electronic stew of chirp, click, pulse, zap, and pow, enveloping the audience in an intermedia drama. MSHR is a collective comprised of Brenna Murphy and Birch Cooper. THE TENSES – the smoked-out duo of Ju Suk Reet Meate & Oblivia – again descend from the Pacific Northwest to offer us a slice of sublime subterranean Americana. Eerie mindscapes made spontaneously from crackles of found sound enmeshed with surf guitar and horn play, or whatever suits the day. The pair are, of course, key figures of SMEGMA, the Los Angeles Free Music Society-affiliated collective of avant agitators since all the way back. And sonic action from around the way as Sam Rowell drops a new live rendition of her SPECIAL COLLECTIONS radio project, an interrogation of anomalous audio phenomena from across the electromagnetic spectrum, the built environment, and the natural world. Plus a special solo set from the dean of the scene, JOE POTTS. With a full-on, turn-everything-on aesthetic and an array of chopped electronics, he opens the show sculpting with saturation, charting threshold topographies that approach totality.