EARS HAVE EYES // Episode 19
Airing Wednesday, August 12, 2023 at 8 pm MST
on CJSW 90.9 FM
PART 1 of 2
FOREST PERSPECTIVE:
whispers, wildfires, and rewilding words
Abican
Đurđija Vucini
Ears to the Ground
Lawrence Galve Parcón
leo magnien
Luba Diduch
Mecanique des Sons
Sebastián Pafundo
Shashank Kothari
Co-hosted by Wayne Garrett & Caitlind Brown, produced and edited by Caitlind Brown, supported by Kaamil Kareemi and CJSW 90.9 FM.
Forest projection by Caitlind Brown & Wayne Garrett, Arrow Mountain, 2021
EARS HAVE EYES is a monthly sound art radio program airing on CJSW 90.9 FM in Calgary/Mohkinstsis. You can listen to podcasts of previous episodes here.
In Western Canada, like so many parts of the Northern Hemisphere, smoke from nearby wildfires intermittently fills the sky, painting the sun electric pink. In acknowledgement of the hottest July on record, this month’s radio program invited artists to reflect on the non-human perspectives of forests.
What does it mean to think like a tree? To sway in unison with the wind and breath unwanted toxins from the air? To gather and chart histories through carbon? To touch and share nutrients by networks of mycelium, running like gossamer threads through the mysterious underground places of the forest? What does it mean to house animals and tree forts? To be cut down for lumber or catch fire and burn…
In a broader sense, this episode of EARS HAVE EYES asks: can radio be used as a tool for rewilding? For planting seeds of sound to build empathy and action between human listeners and the forests that surround, touch, and sustain us?
This is FOREST PERSPECTIVE: Part 1. Part 2 will air on the second Wednesday of September, 2023.
Thanks to the participating artists and our friends at CJSW!
Abican
Abican (Can Etterlin) is a sound and visual artist, multi-instrumentalist, composer and improviser, partly based in Zug, Switzerland. Abican cleverly dances along stylistic habits and artistic boundaries, merges supposedly conflictive things into something of his own and, in doing so, creates something experimentally new. Whether on the piano or on the synth, on the drums or on the PC, in improvisation or composition, in installations or in performances – Abican only knows one way: forward.
About Drifting Wood:
At my residency in 2021, in Nairs, Switzerland, I spent 2 months in the mountains, always carrying my video camera and various microphones, to record me performing in and with nature. The concept: to be guided by nature as if you were part of it. With the help of contact microphones, which I placed on tree trunks or any other reasonably vibrating woods, I was able to breathe life into long-dead organisms, simulate their old life, or give them a different meaning. I always filmed myself, capturing the performance and the sound of the performance. Later, however, I extracted the sound of the performances and put them into new contexts, completely detached from the original context, from the concept and from the particular performance. Trying to imagine a speculative life of the sampled nature, I put together an immersive audiovisual composition “Das Wasser ist niemals einsam”. The composition has three parts, and here I present the second part of the piece, which is called “drifting wood”, for which I recored my performances in the deep woods of the Alps on wood and with wood.
Đurđija Vucini
Đurđija Vucinic is a musicologist, composer and media artist based in New York City. In video and sound work, she is exploring a role of time and duration in the natural impulse of a spectator and listener to create a pattern from “chaos” and complete the action.
if you don’t come too close, you can hear the music is an audio collage of recordings the artist took in the past 5 years. “All of them are rooted and can be connected to the life of a tree, a forest. Sounds and stories are overlapping: taxi driver, georgian immigrant repeating words that are making a reference to rings of a tree, meditative music from the street that’s turning into the wind and soundscape of the woods as my friend and i are waking up from a nap before hearing T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets by Kaija Saariaho ‘If you do not come too close, if you do not come too close, On a summer midnight, you can hear the music.'”
Ears to the Ground
Ears to the Ground is a transmedia project from Krishna Jhaveri and Sanaya Ardeshir which investigates the potential of being able to hear climate change by centering field recordings, activated listening and the potential for climate justice through community building, performance, and installations. In the last three years, E2TG’s constellation of projects have resembled workshops around art and ecology, community listening sessions, albums of field recordings, fundraisers for reforestation projects through sample packs of wild sound, and most recently, a live performance in quadraphonic audio of experimentations with audio reactive visuals, field recordings from the Western Ghats, synthesis and various audio manipulation techniques, which took place in Mumbai in 2023. The project seeks to reinvent itself at every juncture in an attempt to reimagine our collective sonic futures and is currently a sound-forward exploration of the oldest Mountain range in India, the Western Ghats.
About Everything the Light Touches:
A soundscape reveals an evolution from wild or natural sounds and slow devolution towards a distorted but humanised future soundscape. Interspersed with clips of AI generated voice recordings from interviews with locals conducted in the Western Ghats – the piece speaks of changing patterns of rainfall, disappearing species, and the few positive outcomes of human endeavour to keep up with these changes.
The piece was performed live in quadraphonic sound. The recording you are listening to has been collapsed to stereo and is an excerpt of a larger 40 min piece.
Lawrence Galve Parcón
Lawrence Galve Parcón is a composer, multi-instrumentalist, and music educator based in the Philippines. His compositional style is founded on the use of Philippine and Southeast Asian music traditions as channels of expression in the contemporary milieu. His music has been performed and recognized in Asia, parts of Europe, and the USA.
About Pánggas-Gápas (sow-and-reap):
“Pánggas”, meaning to sow, is an act of creating, and nurturing something -in hopes that someday it will become fruitful. “Gápas” on the other hand, is reaping the fruits and consequences of what has been sown. Pánggas-Gápas teaches us, in the metaphor of seed to fruit, to be responsible for the results of our actions. This short piece is composed of aphorisms as basic cells, expanding, transforming, and decaying in organic counterpoint.
For context, the first half of this piece “Pánggas” was composed in 2021 for a new Hungarian instrument, the Glissotar. The “Gápas” part is the inverse of the first part.
leo magnien
leo magnien is a sound artist and broadcast engineer. During night shifts in a radio station, he discovered the poetic nature of acousmatic sound and transmission. He has since developed a practice of listening that results in the use of phonography as a basis of all his works. His focus is on the subtle variations, the tenuous perceptions, and how to present these to the listener. He lives in a natural zone in northern france.
un relief suspendu, par transparence is part of an album which is focused on creating a sense of place in each track. The main layer throughout this piece is a field recording, which follows my ethos in landscape phonography: record a space where anthropic sounds are filtered through the non-human features of the place, thus vegetation and topography. Here, two microphones are attached to a shrub, in an urban park in Portland, OR. The proximity of the dry leaves and the wind make them preponderant over other activities without occulting them. Analog feedback sounds, with their tidal movements, establish a relationship with the breathing of the place recorded.
Luba Diduch
Luba Diduch‘s art practice involves collecting digitized field sounds, making drawings and physical plant specimens, while wandering through forested environments. A soundwalk can transcend the sounds that we hear in the environment and these sonic experiences can become psycho-geographic layerings of sounds heard in a space – as well as imagined sounds that have been stimulated by the experience of wandering and listening. Her ongoing project titled ‘Sounds from the Biome’ involves the creation of sound recordings, drawings and ephemera found in unique ecosystems.
About BabaYaga_ForestWalk:
“My audio piece allows the listener to experience the sounds of Baba Yaga’s forest in my imagination. The Baba Yaga is a Slavic earth goddess who claims the forest as her domain and fiercely protects it–challenging everyone who enters it. Her appearance as a witch is terrifying and her sense of smell is as strong like a wolf. She is associated with dark forests, death, rebirth, sickness, dying, but also healing, wisdom and advice. Baba Yaga’s story is a cautionary tale–may her fierce protection of her forest home be a lesson to us.“
Mecanique des Sons
As a teenager, Jérôme (Mecanique des Sons) recorded radio broadcasts and family atmospheres on cassettes, the first steps that took him to community radio. It was during a report at night in the marshes that he fell in love with capturing natural sounds with ambient microphones. In 2023, this project Pouvoir s’entendre allows him to take up the challenge of a work that bears witness to precious sound moments specific to a city like Douai, recorded collectively, thus asking the question: How else to hear the sounds of everyday life beyond the generalized urban noise?
About Peat, birds and drone from Marchiennes Forest:
“I composed a soundcapes in the Marchiennes Forest from the north of France, with peat, birds and drone sounds.“
Sebastián Pafundo
Compositor, bajista y experimentador sonoro.
About Viaje a lo profundo:
Arde el planeta y nuestras mentes.
Shashank Kothari
Shashank Kothari is a sound designer and ambient musician from India. In the process of understanding the elements of sounds design, the artist is also trying to explore the relation between tonalities and textures of sonic elements with their surroundings. Shashank graduated in Sound Recording and design from Film and Television Institute of India.
About Air:
“After the pandemic, the very basic idea of breathing has been affected. The compulsion of the masks and the feeling of being choked has forced us to change the way we use to function before. Apart from this, the rapid rate of deforestation and increasing pollution level in the cities have already made the air unbreathable. This soundscape is an amalgamation of field recordings and ambient synthesized sounds from the forests of Central India. Deforestation is on high in this particular region which is going through a major transition phase and the whole ecosystem has just started to fall out. I have tried to create an abstract sonic space with a motive to sensitize the listeners about their surroundings. A space where human beings could be felt as a part of the nature and not superior to any other living organism.“
Thank you to the artists & listeners!
Special thanks to CJSW.
Want to share your sound art on future episodes of EARS HAVE EYES?
Visit this link for more information.
THE HIBERNATION PROJECT 