BLAZING: red hot words, essential feelings
Hosted by Wayne Garrett & Caitlind Brown.
Thanks to the participating artists and our friends at CJSW!
Our program this month features work from local, national, and international sound artists across Turtle Island, Asia, and Western and Central Europe. Their work is challenging – rising in voices of dissent, instruments of revolution, calls for decolonization, field recordings from political protests, responses to anti-abortion legislation, and artworks shining light on everyday injustice.
And yet, what is challenging to listen to is also empowering to say.
Each participant speaks from their heart, sometimes in riddles, sometimes in musical compositions, and sometimes in blazing words. The terrain we’re covering today is broad and specific to each artist’s point of view, but the common thread is thick and daring. On this Summer day, we invite you to hear these red hot works, and let them light a fire within you.
Thanks to the participating artists and our friends at CJSW!
Anna Friz
Anna Friz is a radio and transmission artist, composer, and media studies scholar. Since 1998 she has created self-reflexive radio for broadcast, installation or performance, where radio is the source, subject, and medium of the work. She also creates large-scale audiovisual installations and composes for theater, contemporary dance, and film. Anna is Assistant Professor of Sound in the Film and Digital Media Department of the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Unbox: what is to be done with all that remains? is a recording of a solo performance by Anna Friz for voice, radiophonic instruments, cottage-built electronics, and various boxes with their stuff. The piece was created for an online presentation in March 2021 to celebrate the 20th anniversary of New Adventures in Sound Art.
Thank you to New Adventures in Sound Art (NAISA) where we found Anna’s work. Learn more about their excellent programming here.
Daring Nomad // Jared Tailfeathers
Daring Nomads is a project by Jared Tailfeathers, sometimes in collaboration with other musicians. Musically and thematically focused on improvised experimentation, Jared’s Invented Instruments and unusual other Instrumentation. Often with an overall album story/narrative.
Jared Tailfeathers is a Blackfoot multi-disciplinary artist and multi-instrumental musician working in the gap between arts and culture. His work includes installation art, performance, interactive and conceptual projects, and music. He is best known for making one-of-a-kind musical instruments, musical installations and narrative based conceptual projects.
EARS HAVE EYES features two tracks from Jared Tailfeather’s first solo album with Daring Nomads, Dog Trail – a narrative concept album is about a young man listening to the stories of an ancient dog. She convinces him to go on a journey for a 13-moon calendar cycle, to visit with his distant relations, the other nations of his people. To visit interlopers who don’t recognize the relationship with the land and teach them harsh lessons if needed. To write songs of honour and document those places and his deeds along the way.
The two tracks featured on EARS HAVE EYES are Read the Stars – where the young man stops at the Majorville cairns/star chart to participate in star tracking – and the next track, Dream Vision – where he is visited by an owl and has nightmares about newcomers and interlopers that he’ll need to prove his worth by either chase out or kill so that they stop stealing the resources and occupying the land without understanding her (night visions past Medicine Hat into the Saskatchewan territory) he travels on to the cypress hills to circle back and camps along the Harris lake.
You can find the complete album here.
January Rogers
January Marie Rogers is a poet, broadcaster, media producer, and sound artist of Mohawk/Tuscarora ancestry from the Six Nations band in southern Ontario. She currently resides on the traditional lands of the Coast Salish people in Victoria, British Columbia. She facilitates the works of other Indigenous writers with Ojistoh Publishing – a very small independent Indigenous owned publishing label.
Calls to Action Mixdown 1 1 is poetry inspired by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action. January wrote and produced this track during her term as the University of Northern British Columbia’s Writer in Residence.
Kevin Logan
Kevin Logan is an artist, researcher, and educator based in London, UK. His work engages cross-disciplinary fields and incorporates installation, sound, moving-image, and performance.
DavefromCardiff (Supplementary Benefit, £32.70 mix) is a short work is based around a piece of dialogue taken from a 1980s BBC radio program. The unattributed source material was found on an eBay purchased 1/4-inch reel-to-reel tape. The words and feelings expressed have been repurposed in order to examine historical notions of the British welfare state and its historical application of benefits and social security.
Natalia Mamcarczyk
Natalia Mamcarczyk is a Polish sound recordist, composer, artist, with main focus on soundscape, binaural recordings, use of pickup coils.
In the artist’s own words, “In the use of sound I believe in strong purpose of improving our human condition through interaction with art, questioning the boundaries of compassion and inviting society to (sometimes) uncomfortable listening.”
Hańba // Disgrace was created in 2020, near the beginning of the COVID 19 Pandemic, in response to tightening regulations around abortion access in Poland. Anti-abortion legislation was intensified while protests and gatherings in the street were restricted by COVID measures. Featuring the artist’s own voice, the work uses audio sampled from Black Lives Matter protests, as well as documentaries featuring women struggling with the aftermath of the Eighth Amendment in Ireland – an 1983 amendment to the Irish constitution, legislating the same right to life to an unborn fetus as a pregnant parent.
In the words of the artist, “15th of April 2020, 21st Century, Pandemic: the men in Polish government have the right to own women’s bodies to the point that in the midst of pandemic and one of the most authoritarian lockdowns in Europe, pull out the abortion ban back onto the legislation table. No protests or gatherings are allowed on the streets.“
Stephanie Quilliams
Stephanie Quilliams is an animator, puppeteer, and maker of things and such.
In the words of the artist, My Dead Sister was created “to communicate the pain I felt when I lost my sister to suicide.”
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.
Marquis Victory Song (in the artist’s own words):
“There is a small country in the heart of Europe where people want to replace the corrupt #regime that has been in power for 12 years. That’s what they are fighting for. The Marquis was their only hope. You could feel the heightened, almost revolutionary anticipation in the air. Everyone was enthusiastic, no one could foresee that everything was predetermined and that simple enthusiasm could not defeat a rotten and corrupt regime.”
The Worst Mankind
The Worst Mankind is a sound artist in the middle of nowhere.
Your World and Our World is described by the artist through a quote: “The world is yours, as well as ours, but in the last analysis, it is yours. You young people, full of vigor and vitality, are in the bloom of life, like the sun at eight or nine in the morning. Our hope is placed on you.”
Thank you to the artists & listeners! Special thanks to CJSW.
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