Sunday 2nd February 2020 Karen Yu and William Kuo performed at Twenty Alpha for 02022020.space in Hong Kong. Blair Reeve of Hong Kong's press : release zine wrote

"I’ve just seen the phrase “zone programme” on the 02022020 Facebook page. It refers to a different performance I think but its semantics and long O sounds suggest a confined and guided set of parameters which seems applicable to the performance tonight: Sunday Feb 2, 2020, with its palindromic date. There was a programmatic quality to the early proceedings with syndromic repetition of tone phrases and white noise that simulated a hearing test procedural. This tweaked itself (autonomously) into patterns and vocal phrases that occasionally got meta with repetition, such as “The ear is your organ of hearing.” We were exhorted to listen by an oscillating choir of pitch-shifted voices bouncing around the room from speaker to speaker. You couldn’t then not be swallowed into the sound (or the story perhaps; as I learned later there was narrative intent, though on this occasion I wasn’t in the mind for narrative). Instead I zoned in on the texture of the tones. I thought that that was the directive actually – close listening, flow with it, go on a journey into the textural detail of the noise, which sounded like a balm with a roughcast of friction. I balanced and swayed in this definitive middle ground between Kuo’s smooth synthphonic oscillations and Yu clunking and grinding an imprecise and unmusical resonance. One could read her contribution as antidotal to the rhythm and order of Kuo, her ‘music’ played as a disruptive intrusion of 'humanity' into the digital machinery - usually metal on metal, or beads, a drum skin, some I don’t know, who knows, some lids or something, a couple of heavier things, and other stuff I’ve forgotten, but simple and technical at the same time, where the physical elements seemed rudimentary and the musicianship a willing regression into child play, but the intuition, the listening, the responding and creating within these fields were intricate, interwoven, delicate things that demanded focus from the two performers. I see that call and response as intentional, and yet other intentions, such as the performer’s narrative, are cast into the drama of sound where an object’s tones could be voices communicating and if you bothered to listen to their story you might learn a thing or two. I myself prefer these experiences in ipsa hora where my response is purely visceral, a gut punch that catalyses some creative pulse of my own.

"There was a control element, a darker side to the noise which treated us as test subjects in an experiment. I fought it off at first, pushed it off and remembered to listen to it from a critical perspective and not play up to a paranoid fantasy about artists treating our brains as psychic canvases. But fighting it off didn’t work once I’d located the pleasure principle inherent in a dystopian narrative. That is, to ride it, always go with the flow, merge into the sound, let it grip you. This requires great feats of mental relaxation, but the more you can ‘sleep’ in a wakeful posture, the more you take in from the aural plain. This is how I enjoy blues lyrics. You have to listen obliquely – listen while doing something else, so long as it doesn’t involve language, and while focusing in that non-linguistic field the lyrics will come through loud and clear. In this case, the “something else” for me was a spurt of poetry writing on my phone. At some point early on, I asked myself, “Why is it that we study maths?” Like, what mode or branch of thinking decided that games with numbers should be a major area of learning? That manipulating numbers and creating and solving puzzles ought to be a category of thinking that occupies a significant proportion of our educational lives? It is but one form of logic. Language and sound are less quantifiable, like catching an asteroid in a blanket of cloud. When the world is too malleable and polysemous instead of exact and answerable then life is equally out of balance. Music is the cloud blanket, maths is the asteroid belt, they pass on through, and in passing they bear a resemblance.

"On quite an opposite spectrum, Nick heard in the surge and push of the music something primal and sexual, a sensual tantalising of attraction dynamics. I'm sure it was there, but I'd need to rewatch the performance which I think is available as the whole thing was broadcast live as part of 02022020 day."