the breaks is a LACA project of newly commissioned music for break room at the Hammer Museum during Made in LA 2023. Here you can listen to music, grab a cup of coffee, microwave leftovers, rest, and handle archival materials directly from shelves organized around ideas about work, break, and pleasure. 

During the breaks, you can listen to new music by artists Cody Perkins, Maya Edmond, Scott Benzel, L. Coats and Tristan Hirsch. Their tracks break down, glitch, and disrupt the typical ambience that isolates and individualizes the ways we rest and create, calling us together into mystery, resonance, heaviness, and bliss. Taking in music and smells, joking loudly, and crying in the archive, remind us that these are shared spaces and can be what the group, collective, or public need.

If we are building a world we want to live in then music and our tears do not need to be stifled, hidden, or relegated in our downtime.  In break room we gossip, drink, research, and behave disorderly, exercising the muscles that help us dream and create.