Victoria Shen (Live at Big Ears Festival)

Victoria Shen (also known by her performance alias Evicshen) is a San Francisco–based sound artist, experimental music performer, and instrument-maker whose work blends tactile audioworks with visceral live performance. Her practice engages deeply with the physicality and spatiality of sound, often through custom-built electronics, analog modular synthesizers, and hybrid sculpture-instruments.

Shen is perhaps best known for pioneering “Needle Nails”—acrylic fingernails fitted with embedded turntable styluses enabling her to play multiple record grooves simultaneously. She’s also created a copper-speaker album sleeve for her debut LP Hair Birth, and hand-poured resin records with embedded found objects.

Rooted in improvisation, her live sets are described as spirited, confrontational, and intensely physical, incorporating elements like whips, saw blades, and combs to shape visceral resonance with her audience.

In this episode, here how songs by Faye Wong, Jimi Hendrix, and Lightning Bolt were formative for her.

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