Shan Lyu
Sound Artist · Composer · Performer
"Listening as a form of auditory alchemy, dissolving the boundary between material vibration and psychological perception."
Shan Lyu is a London-based Chinese sound artist, performer and composer. She holds a Master in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London. Her practice spans live performance, composition, sound sculpture, field recording and installation. It centres on listening as a form of auditory alchemy, dissolving boundaries between material vibration and psychological perception to create contemplative, multi-sensory listening environments.
Her compositional process draws on field recording, acoustic instruments, digital signals and inaudible frequencies. It is informed by research into alchemical thinking, Jungian analytical psychology and Daoist inner alchemy. Recent works explore hidden networks of information transmission and concealed memory, using electromagnetic signals, VLF frequencies and field recordings to reveal the invisible systems that sustain human movement.
She has exhibited and performed internationally across London, Shanghai, Beijing, New York and Europe, with presentations at Vortex Jazz Club, Radiophrenia, EXPERIMANCE festival, Ealing Blues Festival and Peckham Levels. Her writing has appeared in Limit Experience (New York) and Indelible, published by the London Arts-Based Research Centre. She is also an active workshop facilitator and public arts educator, and currently works at the University of the Arts London.
Photo: Keyan Wang
Highlights
Phantomnesis selected artist, Cambiata Arts; featured in the compilation Phantomnesis: Sites, Streets & Sacred Spaces
The Sound That Constitute, Surround and Surpass Us broadcast in the Radiophrenia 2026 programme, Glasgow
Un-proofed, an interactive performance, presented at the Eavesdropping Festival, Vortex Jazz Club, London (2026)
Nest Sound Walk at the EXPERIMANCE festival 2026, Saarbrücken, Germany
Call to Prayers from the Sea published with Cities and Memory (2025)
Dense Horizon Architecture, released 3 July 2026 with Mike Zellers
Live broadcast on Noise Radio, Netherlands (2025)
Writing published in Limit Experience and Indelible
Master in Fine Art, University of the Arts London
Selected works
Dense Horizon Architecture (2026) — collaboration with Mike Zellers. Released on Bandcamp on 3 July 2026.
Margrate Street Hermit (2026) — field-recording composition. Based on a recording of monks chanting in a Buddhist temple in central London, it reflects on the tension between inner contemplation and the surrounding urban world, making audible sonic spaces that often go unnoticed. Presented at EXPERIMANCE 2026.
The Sound That Constitute, Surround and Surpass Us (2025) — composition from listening materials of movement and transportation. The sources are a self-built antenna that collects signals from VLF radio stations in the UK, public transport, and submarine sound. Released in January 2025 and broadcast on Radiophrenia in 2026.
Un-proofed (2025) — interactive music performance. An effort to uncover the concealed signals and vast spatial perceptions in our surroundings through listening. The set-up uses six electromagnetic microphones, a self-made instrument inspired by the monochord and the Vietnamese dan bau, and an acoustic guitar. Audiences enter a listening room mapped with the microphones and use their own devices to create the ambient basis of the performance. A studio remaster was released in September 2025.
Call to Prayers from the Sea (2025) — composition for the Cities and Memory Autumn Project 2025. Released in November 2025.
Selected presentations
Eavesdropping Festival — Vortex Jazz Club, London (2026)
EXPERIMANCE festival, Nest Sound Walk — Saarbrücken, Germany (2026)
Radiophrenia 2026 programme — radio broadcast, Glasgow (2026)
Live broadcast — Noise Radio, Netherlands (2025)
Things Left Unsaid — Frevd Bar & Gallery, London (2025)
Live music performance — Peckham Levels, London (2025)
Performance — Wimbledon College of Arts, London (2025)
Group exhibitions — Shanghai, Beijing, London
Recordings
Dense Horizon Architecture, with Mike Zellers (3 July 2026)
Call to Prayers from the Sea, for Cities and Memory (November 2025)
Un-proofed, single track, studio remaster (September 2025)
The Sound That Constitute, Surround and Surpass Us (January 2025)
Prayers from the Sea
Phantomnesis selected work
"Istanbul's call to prayer, faint across the street and the water, becomes music born from the place and departing from it."
Shan Lyu is one of the composers selected for Phantomnesis, an international call from Cambiata Arts for contemporary music, experimental composition and heritage-rooted works that explore the forgotten, the near-forgotten and the reimagined. Her piece Prayers from the Sea is included in the compilation Phantomnesis: Sites, Streets & Sacred Spaces, five pieces that listen closely to places. The album gathers works built from field recordings of real locations, and Prayers from the Sea closes it, with the call to prayer carried across water in Istanbul.
An international jury of six professional composers, performers and researchers reviewed each submission. Their own careers embody the premise of the call. The jurors work in Toronto, Hannover, Skopje, Bangkok and Tehran, and across Vienna, Graz and Klagenfurt in Austria. They considered each work for its engagement with forgotten or near-forgotten material, its compositional richness and its artistic conviction. The five works in the compilation emerged from that process, and their composers are also invited to join the Cambiata Arts roster.
Istanbul sits at the meeting point of two continents and two seas. The Bosphorus, the narrow strait between Europe and Asia, carries the Sea of Marmara into the Black Sea, with an unbroken circulation of ferries, cargo ships and fishing boats. The city's soundscape is shaped by this geography: calls to prayer from hundreds of mosques overlap with the water, layered with ship horns, street vendors and crowds moving along the waterfront. The whole piece is based on field recording of street sounds and the call to prayer, and Lyu's process is to recompose the recording so that it evokes the imagination correlated with that soundscape.
What drew her to the recording was the tidal quality of Istanbul's human activity. People pass through the city the way water passes through the strait, in currents that shift with the hour and the season. The call to prayer marks this rhythm, since its timings change daily according to astronomical calculation. In the recording the call is very faint and distant, accompanied by street sounds and people's chatter, yet it is still breathtaking. She is not religious, but she is deeply drawn to the epic-like spectacle that the chant creates through such a simple soundscape.
To respond to the site, she added a traditional string instrument and ship horns, which sit alongside a drone and elements of the original mosque recordings. The result is a piece born from the location but departing from it, reflecting on Istanbul as a threshold between worlds, seas and histories. It re-imagines how the chant works its power to connect all beings, locations, landscapes and senses within a wider field.
Phantomnesis: Sites, Streets & Sacred Spaces will be released on November 10th, 2026, curated and published by CambiataArt Records. Each artist retains full ownership and rights to their work.
Shan Lyu works with sound as a medium for generating intimate, immense and multi-sensory perception that touches the unconscious. She treats listening as a form of auditory alchemy, seeking to dissolve the boundary between material vibration and psychological perception, and brings attention to sonic spatial structure and aural awareness. Her forms range from sound installations, live performance and sound walks to recorded music.
Her materials include acoustic instruments, field recordings, digitally generated signals and inaudible frequencies. She collects and interprets these often enigmatic sounds as primary materials for spiritual and sonic transmutation, and explores how states of unconsciousness can be induced by the materiality of sound-making. Alchemical thinking, Jungian analytical psychology and Daoist inner alchemy inform her research.
Her recent work turns toward hidden systems: electromagnetic signals, VLF radio frequencies and the vibration of rails and submarine sound are made audible as the concealed networks of information and memory that sustain human movement. In performance such as Un-proofed, audiences use their own devices to interact with electromagnetic microphones, becoming part of the listening room. Together, her pieces make listening itself the subject, an invitation to hear what usually passes unheard.