THE TIME BETWEEN US: duration and anticipation, chronological or nonlinear | Week 9 of 11
With thanks to Rebecca Bruton for her contribution from Graveyards & Gardens, including excerpts of sound from Caroline Shaw.
Hosted by Wayne Garrett & Caitlind Brown.
The third of three radio-based Hibernation themes, sound artists, musicians, and storytellers explore, deconstruct, and reimagine the relationship between sound and time. Responses to the theme are diverse, spatial, and intimate, speaking both to chronos (the universal measurement of time) and kairos (the experiential passage of time). Some compositions are nostalgic, others philosophical; some dissect grief, others reflect on the accumulations of time. A sonic excursion across decades and right back to the moment these soundwaves touch your eardrums, the time between us narrows just a little bit through the enduring sound works of these artists.
True to form, we split this program into two parts, spread across radio time.
Thanks to the participating artists and our friends at CJSW!
Audrey Lane Cockett
Audrey Lane Cockett is a spoken word poet, filmmaker, soundscape artist, artistic director, educator, and ecologist based in Treaty 7 land, Calgary AB. Their work embodies wild feminist rhetoric, political discontent, tender feels in a body that overheard it was broken, deep time, and river rhythm.
Capitalism is part of an unreleased album that “they” DoNT WanT YoU To KnoW ABouT – Conspiracy Theories. Using cash sounds remixed from the first few seconds of Pink Floyd’s Money and samples of casino money counter machine, Capitalism embodies the aphorism “time is money.”
Chris Reimer & Nikki Reimer
Chris Reimer
Chris Reimer (1986-2012) was a musician, vocalist, composer, and beloved member of Calgary’s music community. He played with bands including Veritas, Beneath These Idle Tides, Azeda Booth, Women, Church of the Very Bright Lights, Gold, and more. The accumulation of works composed and recorded by Chris during his life have overflowed across the last decade in posthumous albums and continued collaborations, notably with his partner Rena Kozak (Child Actress) and, most recently, with his sister Nikki Reimer’s interactive sound project GRIEFWAVE. As a way of honouring the Chris’ memory, his family and friends have created a legacy fund offering resources for youth studying dance and music.
The Lady Forgot Her Purse and Beneluxx are compositions from an album of Chris Reimer’s work compiled in 2018 and released under the title, Hello People. As written on Chris’ legacy website:
“Hello People is a deeply-personal document from a multi-faceted artist — at times confrontational, at times warm and intimate. Compiled from a huge range of recordings spanning lush four-track projects to raw phone memos, the album veers from ambient guitar-pedal soundscapes, to delicate acoustic melody, and all the way to drone noise experimentation. Hello People takes the listener through an experience of composition and creation from the mind of a deeply-talented spirit whose vision was cut short all too soon.”
Chris’s work was shared on EARS HAVE EYES with permission from his family, and programmed in concert with Nikki Reimer’s work (below).
Nikki Reimer
Nikki Reimer is a writer and multidisciplinary artist currently living in Mohkinstsis/Calgary. She’s the author of three books of poetry, multiple essays on grief, and is a founding co-director of the Chris Reimer Legacy Fund Society.
Nikki Reimer created Elegy for Collective Subjectivity in the throes of early grief about a year after her brother, Chris Reimer, passed away suddenly in 2012. Released in February 2022 as part of an experiential, web-based project called GRIEFWAVE, this composition is one small part of her ambitious and moving sound art series. In Nikki’s words:
“I was in residency at the Banff Centre, and I was playing around with sound, using instruments like an analog synthesizer I’d found in his room, recordings of ambient sound around the Centre, and a shaker I made with the metal coffee pot in my room. The clang heard in the piece is a metal gate in the Old Banff Cemetery, reverberating in the wind. I was wading around in the wilderness of my grief, trying to understand how the consciousness of my closest kin could suddenly be gone. The first section of text was found in one of his notebooks — I thought ‘the cadence is time back and forth, beating’ was poetic and profound. The way we both wrote was so similar, and I was trying to understand that as well. The second portion of the text is written by me. As with all the sound pieces in GRIEFWAVE I am pulling Chris into collaboration with me, walking alongside what’s left of him in the world.”
GRIEFWAVE was mastered by Chris’s Partner Rena Kozak.
Curved Walls (Richard Gallant)
Curved Walls is the solo project of Calgary based multi-instrumentalist session musician and Hermitess member Richard Gallant. Utilizing a diverse assortment of stringed instruments both ancient and modern, Gallant constructs rich sonic tapestries that contrast and build on the distinct timbral identities of his wide collection of traditional instruments. Expect to hear the medieval tones of the Hurdy Gurdy and Psaltery contrasted against ambient electronics and heavy electric guitar riffs, all blended together into intricately organized studio confections designed to delight the ear of the headphone aficionado. Boldly experimental, while still maintaining keen melodicism and meditative, harmonic grounding, Curved Walls takes the adventurous listener along on a rich and rewarding sonic excursion.
THE TIMES BETWEEN US features CURVED WALLS’ track Anticipation.
Edzi’u
Edzi’u is a Tahltan and Tlingit artist, based in Vancouver, Canada on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. An innovative songwriter and composer, they paint stories of the past, present and future with textures, elders stories and words, and ethereal voice. Their music and sound installations have been featured on CBC Radio Reclaimed, Talking Stick festival, shown in Tkaronto’s film festival imagineNATIVE 2018 as well as 2019, while debuting internationally in 2019 at the Document Film Festival in Glasgow, Scotland.
THE TIME BETWEEN US features compositions Halfbreed Special, Pt. 1 & 2 from Edzi’u’s debut album, Kime Ani. Featuring three generations of their grandmothers voices, as well as audio of future generations, Kime Ani asks the listener to examine their hearts, mind, and place amidst colonial so called Canada. Being rich in culture, full of passion and spirit, the power behind their use of sound goes deep within the listener, inspiring them to be bold and genuine, while living fully within their hearts.
Lesick vs. Woulg
(Kurtis) Lesick’s, writing, art installations, media works, digital performances, and cross-media collaborations work as a sort of praxis-based philosophy that plays with concepts of materiality, our knowledge and perception of the physical world and our fundamental (mis)understandings of it. His work has been presented in Canada, and internationally in the United States, the United Kingdom, Spain, Italy, and Greece. Lesick is also a professor of media arts at the Alberta University of the Arts.
Woulg (Greg Debicki), creates dark sonic landscapes disrupted by glitches that are equally likely to break into dark pounding techno as they are to expand into ambient bubbles of texture ready to burst; reminding us that nothing lasts, that we should always expect the unexpected. His mind bending live sets explore these ideas while taking the crowd on an unpredictable journey, inexorably leading to dance. Woulg has done live audio/visual performances all over the world from the Miraikan in Tokyo to the World Trade Center in Dubai, to Tipper and Friends in Florida.
The Soup Meditations are an experimental collaboration between artists Kurtis Lesick and Woulg (Greg Debicki) for the radio show “Ears Have Eyes”. As Lesick recalls, the project came out of a rather serious inquiry he had been doing on the philosophies of Hegel, Heidegger, Levinas, Nancy, Barad, and others. In this instance he was specifically focussed on thinking through elements of time in relation matter and mattering. As he was writing the initial text it absolutely refused to take itself seriously — the more profound the text tried to be the more abstract and meaningless it became. Hegel had a philosophical technique called “letting” (lassen) where you let the thought compose itself without presupposition or intent. Lesick threw away all the quotes and research and just began writing about what was “there” letting the phenomena around him do the thinking for him. The result is this text on soup, banality, time and human condition (but mostly on soup). The piece was then sent to Woulg to instinctively interpret playing with cadence, time, space, and materiality in sound.
Lodgepole Kind
Lodgepole Kind is a Canadian indie electronic music duo operating out of Montreal and Calgary
We Are Getting Older attempts to capture the changes that can occur between people over time, both subtle and obvious.
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.
Noel shares two works on THE TIME BETWEEN US. The first was captured completely in his own house over COVID, captured in high resolution and played back at 25% speed. In the artist’s words: “it turns out that time is a plastic fabric, one that is modified not by us but by what I had thought was the arbitrary ‘social fabric’ where isolating and restrictions distort our relationship with space-time. Spending the majority of my time at home, in a space / house where I’ve modified every structure and surface, reveals the acoustic qualities of its structures and systems. Some of these sounds I’ve intended to record for over a decade. Expanding time / recordings of this house revealed entirely unexpected characteristics that feel like sub-plots or other-real-nesses. It turns out that building (sound) sculpture with those other-real-nesses helps me reconnect with the fabrics.”
The second piece was recorded in January 1999 and implicated the sci-fi possibilities of time travel. This 23-year-old recording captures sounds from an episode of the original Star Trek about time travel back to the 1950’s when the reel-to-reel tape recorder was made. When re-recorded in 1999, Noel physically time-warped the track using the speed knob and his fingers to slow down the tape and speed it up, doing the inverse to time when the tape is played back. Listening back over 2 decades later, one hears not only the pop-culture source material from a pre-millenium era, but a fictional attempt to travel through time, layered onto the reality of time passing since the recording was made in 1999, captured physically on a material from another time: analog tape. How does time travel through us and around us – captured in fictions, encased in material (slowly degrading), and elapsing in fact?
Reiko Yamada & Artur Majewski
Reiko Yamada is a composer and sound artist, originally from Hiroshima, Japan. She composes concert works, creates sound art installations and works with interdisciplinary collaborators. Her work explores the aesthetic concept of imperfection in a variety of contexts.
Artur Majewski (cornet and live electronics) and Reiko Yamada (analog synthesizers and electronics)
Rabi Oscillation is a composition-in-progress from the album Interpreting Quantum Randomness, due for release on Phonos netlabel at the end of April. Limited number of LP will be released in June.
Randomness has attracted great interest in the field of music composition for quite some time. As early as 1962, Iannis Xenakis started exploring a stochastic approach to randomness by using computer-based interlinking probability functions to determine compositional structure, pitches and their durations. Soon after, composers and music technologists started to explore randomness with various methods of algorithmic compositions, sometimes with the help of artificial intelligence. However, in most cases, the source of randomness they used was in fact deterministic in nature. That is to say, the random numbers that they employed are imperfect in the strict sense (simply put, perfect random numbers never have repeating patterns). Moreover, the method in which they produced such randomness was extrinsic to the method in which randomness was applied. In this project, we attempt to take a further step by directly producing sound events from the genuine quantum true randomness of quantum physical systems. Through this method, we aim at achieving a new sense of aesthetic effect in music which derives from the true randomness that prevails in the natural quantum world.
Tawni Bias
Tawni Bias is an artist from Calgary, creating music in layers with a focus on emotional content and healing. His music is an exploration into both the emotional cadence and the hidden sonic guidance of unique vocal chords.
Flare Intropin is from Tawni Bias’ 2021 album, SEL Fellow, an auditory experience meant to outline each step of a grief struggle. As the name suggests, (“flare,” a device used as a call to attention, and “Intropin,” something you administer when the body receives trauma) each word together profiles the steps we take to understand the pains inflicted upon ourselves and know how to begin healing again.
Griever, the second track featured on THE TIME BETWEEN US, speaks to Tawni Bias’ assertion that “acceptance is fleeting as it tends to come in waves … [taking] the emotional cycle back to sorrow. It was my intention to use only sound as a way to encapsulate the emotion of grief — the calm movements of low, acoustic noise mixed with sombre tones of vocals calling out without words. It is far from a typical or chronological layout of a song as my intentions were to be truthful and vulnerable to where the song took me — anticipation and expectation removed for what it would become.”
WKO
WKO is a new project from Whitney Ota, also of Burro, Yankee Yankee, Form, Oracle XP and others. This new project from Ota takes his synthesizer explorations one step further, composing almost entirely on a eurorack modular synth and recording directly to tape, allowing for grittier, more imperfect sounds.
THE TIME BETWEEN US features WKO’s nonlinear track Slipping Time.
Thank you to the artists & listeners! Special thanks to CJSW.
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