JOURNEY: sound walks, travel, and traversing the land
Hosted by Wayne Garrett & Caitlind Brown.
Rising water is personal and political, caught between the cold tinkle of ice in a glass on a hot summer day, and the slow rise of oceans brought about by carbon dioxide emissions melting polar ice caps. Water is a caress and a rush, essential and deadly. Here in Calgary/Mohkinstsis, located at the confluence of the Bow and Elbow Rivers, we are approaching the 9th anniversary of the 2013 flood. We consider the tension between how rivers move, like snakes across the landscape, shifting in a serpentine and every-changing pathway, and our built environment around the river, home to hundreds of thousands of Calgarians, constructed from right angles of wood and steel and concrete and spilling out across the flood plain.
Rising water is personal. Rising water is communal. Rising water is global. The artists on this week’s program explore the theme through storytelling, myth, metaphor, and soundscape, inviting you to wade in, beginning – as always – with your ears.
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.
Emotional Ecology is a spoken word essay initially developed for TRAction’s Climate Art Web in May 2022, written for an online conference of climate artists – each grappling, in their own way, with the weight of creating eco-art in a time defined by climate catastrophe, species extinction, public apathy, and urgent need. This essay came out of the artist’s desire to tether this work to the necessity of feeling – feeling as a way of knowing, as a way of valuing.
This essay was created with support from TRAction, a collective of interdisciplinary artists who actively and publicly address issues of climate justice, and their Climate Art Web. To learn more, visit www.caw-wac.earth.
Christina Milinusic
Christina Milinusic is a sound practitioner, thereminist and current chapter head for SoundGirls Alberta. A masters student at the University of Lethbridge, her arts-based research explores the thresholds of sonic perception and how soundscapes connect living beings within acoustic environments. Christina’s art-based thesis research uses soundscape compositions to increase awareness of how soundscapes extend beyond the human hearing range into the infra- and ultrasonic ranges.
WatEar features various soundscape recordings including Santa Monica’s oceans waves, North Vancouver’s waterfalls, Calgary’s spring thunderstorms as well as composer and thereminist Christina Milinusic’s own heartbeat. Aiming to transport listeners into an immersive womb, the story these soggy sounds recite was perhaps first heard in Earth’s primordial waters.
Daria Baiocchi
Daria Baiocchi is a Professor of Harmony and Music Analysis in Fermo Conservatorium, the speaker of the Radio Program FM 103,00-87,5-98,1 Mz (Italy-as volunteer) “Classical music and…”: new performers, contemporary music composers and sound design composers and is the Director of the Sound Art Museum Online in Ascoli Piceno.
IceVoice was created by recording ice during its dissolution with a hydromicrophone. This work is composed in three sections: in the first section features the ice dissolution sounds with a reverb, evoking a cave and rain on ice; in the second part there are interpolated sounds that come from ice; in the third part the rain return. The piece is called IceVoice because all the samples the artist used come from ice. Nature is always speaking to us.
Deep Dive Sound
Deep Dive Sound (Rafael Diogo, featuring Cary Crankson) is an ambient composer and sound designer based in London, whose works move across experimental paths and natural investigations into everyday sounds, focused on the manipulation and mixture between organic materials, synthesis and acoustic instruments to convey experience. I create soundscapes in a variety of moods and shapes but mainly I favour the sound of stories embedded into objects and places, a feeling of great immediacy, the phenomenological sense of place and time, the despair for that loss, a memory. The practice of traveling enabled me to embrace the boundless possibilities of perceiving the world from many distinct angles. My body of work maintains both an ecologic focus that emphasizes nature’s challenges and fragilities and a wide-eyed spirit of exploration, creating unforeseen liminal soundscapes that can reveal hidden information about a place or a moment that no longer exists.
Life Between Tides is a musical performance. In the words of the artist, the piece “[draws] on the lack of knowledge stored in our cultural background in terms of ocean awareness. I suggest that not practicing adequate access to culture can be detrimental. Not engaging in an ecological lifestyle eases the emotional and natural aural senses from having an utter symbiosis relationship with the ocean.
The monologue in this performance is the voice of the sea communicating its inner state to the audience, involving narrative poems, storytelling and sound interaction with the audience. It, therefore, is instrumental in transposing someone else’s experience or the sea’s experience to the listener. While it feels immediate, it becomes an experience. A warning to humanity.
A tiny drop of water has one desire, and one desire only, and that desire is to merge back from where it started. In its desire to join with the ocean, it moves mountains, shapes land. It creates and it destroys. It can be mighty and destructive like a tsunami and it can be gentle, still and sustain life like a simple glass of water.”
Lauren Wong
Lauren Wong ia a sound engineer who lives in Hong Kong and likes experimental sound.
Be Water (in the words of the artist)
“We had gathered but were scattered. Carrying all our grief in the past, we’re getting over mountains and passing through deserts. We’re craving our canyon in the darkest moment before dawn. We will be together, one day.“
Manja Ristić
Manja Ristić born in Belgrade in 1979, is a violinist, sound artist, published poet, curator and researcher. Manja’s sound-related research besides contemporary performance in the field of instrumental electro–acoustics, is focused on interdisciplinary approaches to sound and field recording as well as experimental radio arts. Manja works and lives on the island of Korčula, Croatia.
The Rings of Water is a soundscape composition incorporating poetry and ambience, based on continuous artistic research. In the artist’s own words:
“In the context of my long-term explorations of the ancient stone-cutting and stone-trading sites on the island of Korčula, I have extended the remit of my research to include listening to and recording the intriguing locale of a purportedly submerged town. According to local legend, the town lays deep under the sea bed off the coast of the village of Lumbarda on the south side of the island overlooking the island of Lastovo.
Intergenerational oral traditions contend that the settlement commonly known as Vilinski grad, The City of Fairies, was possibly constructed on pillars similar to the Venetian style, whilst other sources based on archaeological dives claim that the large underwater area consists of structured planes and infrastructures reflecting the possible existence of roads and fortress remains. The sea bed at that site consists of both deep underwater caves, deep layers of sand and the wildest Adriatic undersea flora & fauna. There are no official archaeological records of the settlement.
Extensive under and above water listening at this location has inspired a poetical sonic construct, metaphorically wrapped in the idea of the lost island kingdom of Atlantis, which remains one of the world’s greatest mysteries and has become a byword for any and all supposedly lost advanced civilizations. […] In The Rings of Water I chose the metaphor of Atlantis in juxtaposition to the present-day quest for the perfect society. The context in which the narrative of the composition is taking place is an artificial syncopation of time involving movement through the past, present and future in overlapping sonic constructs. Whilst symbolically lamenting over the myth and its historical sources, I am searching for topoi that could bring in to closer relation the historiography and the abstract notion of the memory of the world perceived as an organic and omnipresent formative element.”
Dr. Tibor Donath
Dr. Tibor Donath is a Hungarian sound artist, lawyer and journalist, founder of SynthXLoop Audio. Since 2020, his sound installations have been exhibited mainly in fine art exhibitions.
Water Fate (in the words of the artist)
Eternal heaven bear witness
Before all heaven’s fools:
Though ships bob on the surface
And oceans run beneath us
It is the water rules.
Thank you to the artists & listeners! Special thanks to CJSW.
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