EARS HAVE EYES: spatial conjuring and ear-specific art for the radio | Week 4 of 11
Hosted by Caitlind r.c. Brown & Wayne Garrett.
The first of three radio-based Hibernation themes, EARS HAVE EYES: spatial conjuring and ear specific art for the radio explores the interspace between senses. This radio program invited artists to submit audio works exploring the spatial aspects of sound to “illustrate” invisible worlds. Whether creating synaesthetic experiences, mapping the relationship between sound, sight, and identity, or using sonic means to create shapes, volumes, or places, EARS HAVE EYES invites the listener to reconsider the relationship between sight and sound.
Thanks to CJSW (Tyra, Lily, Adam, and Jasmine), Tyler Stewart, and my Grama (Ro Skulsky).
Alexandra Spence
Alexandra Spence is a sound artist and musician living on unceded Wangal land in Sydney, Australia. Through her practice, Alex attempts to reimagine the intricate relationships between the listener, the object, and the surrounding environment as a kind of communion or conversation. Her aesthetic favours field recordings, analogue technologies and object interventions.
Bodies in Place is from album Waking She Heard the Fluttering. “What has sprung forth with this album is a kind of ‘home-seeking’ using sound as way to better ‘know’ the objects, subjects, places and processes that surround me; as a way to connect myself with the places in which I’ve been.”
~ Alexandra Spence
Chris Dadge
Singing Rooms was recorded in and around the Banff Centre, October 2016. Edited and mixed January 2022 in Calgary, Alberta at Child Stone Studios.
Hair Control
Hair Control is a project from Ryan Bourne and Rebecca Reid. The existential lofi workout jam for your melancholic fantasy – baroque pop that pulses with disco anxiety and orphic sensuality.
Gold Reaps is a special sound collage edit of an unreleased Hair Control track that features singing bowl, synthesizers, 4 track cassette bed tracks, vocals and a 4 am avian symphony from last Spring – orphic echo location for your ears.
jamilah malika abu-bakare
jamilah abu-bakare is an artist and writer contemplating refusal, repetition, dedication, and intimacy through sound art, video essay, text off-page and/or installation. Whatever the form, she centers Black women with care and puts on listening before looking. By doing so, both jamilah and the audience move towards their collective freedom. Her work has played or shown from Berlin to LA, and across Canada, including Contemporary Field Gallery (Vancouver,) Circuit Gallery (Toronto), and Artscape (Peterborough). her writing most recently appeared in Canadian Art magazine.
You can find jamilah’s first curatorial project, AURAL ALTERITIES, on auralalterirites.com.
jamilah’s work can be heard as part of a group exhibition of sound art at Two Rivers Gallery in Prince George, as part of an exhibition called The Politics of Sound, curated by Tyler Stewart.
listen to Black women (again) 2021 is a second edition of the artist’s earlier soundscape “listen to Black women” 2019. The central theme remains Black women talk about talking as Black women. this new installment features the voices of Amara La Negra, Rihanna, Angela Davis, Keke Palmer, Azealia Banks and Jully Black. Composed exclusively of found sounds sourced online from interviews and speeches, this sonic essay interrogates the listener and their relationships to Black women (do you listen to Black women? When last? How do/did you engage?) in the hopes your next exchange with a Black woman, whether familiar or famous, will shift towards her liberation.
John Abram
John Abram is a composer and audio engineer living in Calgary. His work has been heard around the world in concert halls, on stages, movie theatres, ferries, garages and living rooms.
Snow Impromptu is a recording of the artist stomping around in the snow at Chimney Lake, BC some time in a winter of the late 1980s. The sounds are richly textured, taking on the resonance of the underlying surface (grass, ice, wood) and the surroundings (lake, cabin, deck). The recording is largely untreated, though there is some enhancement of the stereo image at certain points.
Noel Bégin
Noel Bégin is a practical observationalist within the field of contemporary art, working spatially with objects, all manner of projected media, and performance. Noel has exhibited and/or curated installation, performance, and media art with the 2013 Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art, Decidedly Jazz Danceworks, Particle + Wave Festival, Art Gallery of Calgary, the Glenbow Museum, Banff Centre, the Mountain Standard Time Performance Festival, the Art City Festival and Calgary area Artist-Run Centres including EMMEDIA. Noel has served on the board and committees of numerous artist-run centres in Calgary.
A Capture of The Night Airs and Distant Atmospheres that the Sky Sequesters is a field recording of fireworks in the distance above the Calgary Stampede. The title “references a Michael Nyman album that I love, and combines it with the as yet impractical Carbon Capture (Utilization) and Sequestration technology that oil sands miners are desperately clinging to as their salvation.”
~ Noel Begin
Rosina Skulsky & Caitlind Brown
Ro Skulsky is a retired nurse, mother, and grandmother living in Calgary, Canada. Born to an Italian immigrant family in Nordegg, Alberta in 1925, Ro has lived a wild life, too big for a short biography to adequately capture. She spends her days listening to books on tape, talking on the phone, and visiting with friends and family.
Ghosties is an interview between grandmother and granddaughter where Ro describes her secret experience of seeing mysterious figures in her bedroom, and uncovering the cause behind their spooky presence.
Tunnel
Tunnel is the shared soundworld of Tio’tia:ke/Montreal-based Jen Reimer and rural Treaty 8-based Magnus Tiesenhausen. Taking form through happenings, exhibitions, deep listening sessions, sculptural works, audio recordings, multiples, and photographs, tunnel is an intuitive methodology that explores resonance and acoustics in architecture, and the embodied experience of sound and space.
A Monument to Tears (excerpt) is a track from Tunnel’s upcoming double-LP release on Calgary/Halifax noise label Aught\Void. An excerpt from a site-specific choral performance, the full piece was recorded in 2016 in the Saddleridge Reservoir underneath northeast Calgary (pictured above) in an unedited, unaffected single-take of audio. The recording is a collaboration with the massive concrete chamber. The artists voices respond to and interweave with the resonance and reverb inherent to the architecture of the reservoir.
Wihtikow ᐃᐧᐦᑎᑯᐤ
Wihtikow is a queer indigenous electronic music artist from Edmonton (amiskwaciwaskihikan), Alberta Canada.
1879 is from Wihtikow’s self-titled album “ᐃᐧᐦᑎᑯᐤ” (Wihtikow), released on February 4. “The entire album is my journey on the story and legend of the Windigo. This particular track is focused on the crimes of Swift Runner. In the winter of 1878/79 Swift Runner murdered and cannibalized his entire family. This particular part of this story resonated with me: ‘At first, Swift Runner became haunted by dreams. A Windigo spirit called on him to consume the people around him. The spirit crept through his mind, gradually taking control. Finally he was Windigo, and Swift Runner no longer. Then the Windigo killed and ate Swift Runner’s wife.'”
~ Wihtikow, with quoted text by Joey Storm Walker
Thank you to the artists & listeners! Special thanks to CJSW, Tyler Stewart, and my Grama.
THE HIBERNATION PROJECT 
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