EARS HAVE EYES // Episode 22
Airing Wednesday, November 8, 2023 at 8 pm MST
on CJSW 90.9 FM & Golden Co-Op Radio
MOUTH SOUNDS:
verbal, vocal, voiced, voracious
ARTISTS:
AnimaeNoctis
Ernestus Jiminy Chald
Hilda Daniel
João Pedro Oliveira
Magda Lambropoulou
Mat Ward
Melike Ceylan
Thomas Ellison
Vasiliki Legaki
& featuring a sound project created in collaboration with campus & community radio broadcasters from across Canada through the most recent NCRA conference in June!
Co-hosted by Wayne Garrett & Caitlind Brown, produced and edited by Caitlind Brown, supported by Kaamil Kareemi, CJSW 90.9 FM, Claire Dibble, and Golden Co-op Radio. This program is volunteer-run.
EARS HAVE EYES is a monthly sound art radio program airing on CJSW 90.9 FM in Calgary/Mohkinstsis, and Golden Co-op Radio in Golden, BC. You can listen to podcasts of previous episodes here.
As human beings, MOUTH SOUNDS are our main phonic interface for communicating through language. The works on this month’s program navigate foreign tongues, deconstruct syntax, amplify verboten radio vocalizations, analyze the many meanings of singing to babies, and remix the essential sounds of words. Joyful, political, guttural, and curious, please join us for an auditory adventure responding to one of our primary forms of expression – mouth first!
Thanks to the participating artists and our friends at CJSW & Golden Co-op Radio!
AnimaeNoctis
AnimaeNoctis is a EuroAmerican duo: Silvia Marcantoni Taddei (1994) & Massimo Sannelli (1973). They deal with multimedia art practice since 2019, after years of personal studying and self-healing. Their new album is What Did You Miss, Mayakovsky? (NN Records, 2023:
Loss of Identity is based on a quotation from Through The Gates Of The Silver Key by H.P. Lovecraft performed by a Google Translator voice + 2 human voices + 4 hands piano.
AnimaeNoctis is developing a new concept album based on Lovecraft’s Kadath cycle, to be released by NN Records in 2024.
Ernestus Jiminy Chald
Ernestus Jiminy Chald is a Chicago-based experimental radio artist, writer, composer, and enigmatographer. His radio work has been broadcast on Free Radio Santa Cruz, WPOX, WFMU, Radiophrenia, and Earlid among others, and featured at the National Audio Theatre Festival. His literary work has been published by the Journal of Experimental Fiction, Oilcan Press, Smart Rhino Publications, and Peisithanatos Press.
CAKEHOLE was produced by Ernestus Jiminy Chald exclusively for the Ears Have Eyes’ “Mouth Sounds” program. Composed entirely of sounds made by the human mouth that Chald has painstakingly manipulated and transmogrified, CAKEHOLE envelopes the listener in a maximalistic sonic tapestry of oral splendor that elevates meaningless, mundane sounds produced by the mouth into something epic and mesmerizing.
Hilda Daniel
Hilda Daniel is an American multi-media artist from Singapore currently living/working in New York City. She is very grateful to have had her work included in curated galleries, film festivals and sound exhibitions in major cities of the US, UK, Europe, Mexico and Canada, and to have it written about in the New York Times, Performance Art Journal and other publications.
About Echolullia:
“Echolullia is a chorus of lullabies. Beautiful and broken, here they represent the psychic violence of genocide – as songs to soothe and prayers for safety, lullabies are intimate evocations of what’s lost in these ravages of violence. A sonic monument made in commemoration of the anniversary of Kristallnacht and on the theme of genocides, it features recorded words severed, moribund technology twisted, and human voices manipulated to mimic warfare in a three-part choir of tenderness and derangement. Named after “echolalia”, a term describing sounds babies make to mimic those they’ve heard, echo (sonic repetition) is used in the piece to represent this mimicry; the multitude of voices; serial killing in war; and a corruption of time – an aftermath of violence resonating outward in ruptures of the psyche passed on through generations. A chaos of loss remains in every lull and lullaby, it’s there in every breath.
For Echolullia, I asked friends to send recordings of themselves singing songs they’d sung to their babies (their lullabies). The singers include a good friend whose work involves counseling Holocaust survivors, a Japanese American whose family was interned in US camps during the War, and my sister, whose experience of the Holocaust comes from stories of our parents in Japanese concentration camps for Jews in Singapore. These internal histories and a history of sound technologies is traversed in the cycles of the piece: vocalization, vinyl recordings, rudimentary mechanical sound and digital technology. They include traditional American and French folk songs; a music box playing the melody from Johannes Brahms, op.49 Nr 4; a 1915 recording of the song performed by Ernestine Schumann-Heink (1861-1936); a reading of Louisa May Alcott’s poem, “Lullaby”; and other recordings in the public domain. Dissonant bits of the recording technology itself (tape squeals and clicks decapitating voices) (like tiny bits of devastation) allude to the accelerated advancement of technologies for mechanized mass violence; human voices are wrought to mimic technology – the 1915 recording was manipulated in pitch to produce the siren introducing the third passage in the piece. As literal and conceptual depictions of echo, the sounds degraded in the piece are vestiges of their own aural landscapes and form a collective of trauma’s traces, bits of stories reverberating in time and intimate internal terrain. There is a feeling of emotional pressure, of tenderness and quiet shattered and scattered in a bedlam of a thousand little desolations.”
João Pedro Oliveira
Composer João Pedro Oliveira holds the Corwin Endowed Chair in Composition for the University of California at Santa Barbara. He completed a Ph.D. in Music at the University of New York at Stony Brook. He has received over 70 international prizes and awards for his works, including the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship in 2023, the Bourges Magisterium Prize, and the Giga-Hertz Special Award, among others.
N’vi’ah is an Old Testament word meaning prophetess. A prophetess conveys one or more divine messages often in the form of inspired songs. And many times her words are cryptic, requiring interpretation or even translation.
Magda Lambropoulou
Magda Lambropoulou (b. 1977 Athens) is a sculptress and sound artist. Her work engages with diverse, expressive media including audio, performance, sculpture, installations, and video. She holds a degree in Sculpture (MArt) from the Athens School of Fine Arts.
About Speech Chain:
“In this piece we listen to various words in Greek which gradually transform into other words, by removing a letter or syllable each time they are repeated. My aim in composing the words this way is to convey the confusion caused by mishearing as I seek to express an alternative empathic experience of hearing-impaired people. {e.g, we hear the phrase “-Μ’ ακούς;” [Makus?] (= “Can you hear me?”) and then the word [Fisika] (=Of course), which I replay continuously [fisika-fska-skafi-kapos-kopos-topos-postopes], until it concludes with the phrase [Pos to pes] (= What did you say?)}.”
Mat Ward
Mat Ward is an Australian musician and researcher whose practice encompasses performance, installation, film scoring, noise art, sonic portraiture and improvisation. This encompasses the study of the history of Noise as a valid compositional and performative component of contemporary music. He collaborates extensively across the world and is currently co-ordinating an art music collective titled Then She Reaches For The Gun featuring more than 50 musicians from 20 countries.
About la plage était un vaste village dont il était l’idiot:
“la plage était un vaste village dont il était l’idiot is the first piece in a small suite of sound works that explore how recorded human speech can be used as the building blocks for contemporary composition. Its starting point was an ongoing fascination with the rhythm and timbre of language which was made more acute when listening to non-english languages during travel. Unable to fully (if at all) understand the meaning of conversations my mind tended to focus on the implied meaning as expressed through inflection, tone, rhythm and dynamics much in the same way as listening to instruments and environmental sound and noise. Observation of these elements eventually morphed into an appreciation for the pure sound of speech divorced of his communicative function. la plage était un vaste village dont il était l’idiot was the first experiment inspired by the above thoughts and uses a variety of software effects to manipulate the words to produce the harmonies and melodies in the ‘music’. The original text, spoken by Cy Bianne, is from the writing of Pierre Charras and explores the inspiration Francis Bacon found for his paintings on a beach one day.”
Melike Ceylan
Melike Ceylan (she/her) is a sound artist specializing in electroacoustic music, radio arts, and vocal arts. Her works have been showcased in various settings including exhibitions, live performances, and radio broadcasts. She also works as a sound designer and composer for various media, including theatre, video art, and multimedia installations. Melike holds a PhD degree in Sonic Arts from the University of Calgary.
Voice Station I is a fixed-media radio piece composed solely of recorded human voices. It evokes the casual act of radio dialing by presenting a wide range of vocal gestures and textures that loosely resemble sounds associated with radio broadcasting. Each station catalogues distinct timbres of disembodied radio voices, transformed and extended beyond syntax.
Thomas Ellison
Thomas Ellison is a musician making electronic music with acoustic elements. He enjoys experimenting with different instruments, voice, field recordings and percussion.
Interaction With A Cat is an attempt to express that feline energy of grace, play, independence and affection. The composition mixes the cat’s voice and the human voice in an improvised way.
Vasiliki Legaki
Vasiliki Legaki is a Greek composer within a wide range of settings, from symphony orchestra, chamber music, solo to acousmatic music and sound installations. Her works have been performed in Europe, US and Latin America by diverse musicians and ensembles, including the ensembles Klangforum Wien & PPCM II, Trio Accanto, BBC Singers, Riot Ensemble, Zone Expérimentale, AleaIII, and Mdi Ensemble and the soloists Xuefei Yang (classical guitar), Belle Chen (piano), Hsiang-ting Tseng (marimba), and Janne Valkeajoki (accordion). Her music has gained recognition in several competitions and festivals, such as the artistic and multimedia competition of Hellenic Public Power Corporation Meets the Art 2022 (“Rotations” for 13 loudspeakers/Sound Installation, first prize), the 32nd International Composition Competition of AleaIII 2016, Boston, USA (“The Passage” for seven bassoons, first prize and audience prize), Sorodha International Composition Competition, Antwerp (“43 Sunsets” for solo marimba, finalist), Atemporánea Festival 2023 (Buenos Aires, Argentina), the Musical Βridge Βetween Onassis Foundation and Panteion University of Athens 2021, Impuls Academy 2017 (Graz, Austria), Darmstadt Summer Festival 2018 (Germany), 30th Music Bienalle Zagreb 2019 (Croatia), OutHear New Music Week 2019 (Larissa, Greece), Park Lane Group 2016 (London, UK). Vasiliki has studied musicology and music composition (BMus, MMus) at Royal Holloway, University of London.
About Auditory Hallucination:
In between reality and imagination, existence and fantasy, the piece examines the female voice as the basic implement for creating multilevel and multifocus acoustic atmospheres. Being designed for stereo set up, it presents linear and dotted sounds (vowels and consonants), as well as breaths, that all mingle in a journey of transformations and shiftings, and apply in a spatial compositional context.
Thank you to the artists & listeners!
Special thanks to CJSW.
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