EARS HAVE EYES // Episode 29
Airing Wednesday, July 10, 2024 at 8 pm MST
on CJSW 90.9 FM & Golden Co-Op Radio
PRESSURE:
water systems, storms, and a rising wash of sound
ARTISTS:
Broken City Lab
Cobra Collins
Elissa Goodrich
Jeremy Gignoux
Noel Begin
Hosted by Caitlind Brown & Wayne Garrett, produced by Caitlind Brown, edited by Caitlind Brown and Wayne Garrett, supported by Kaamil Kareemi, CJSW 90.9 FM, Claire Dibble, and Golden Co-op Radio. This program is volunteer-run. Thank you to the artists for sharing their work with us!
Photo by Caitlind Brown
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.
Our July episode responds to a 5-week water crisis still resolving in Calgary, where a massive pipe rupture led to the fear of taps running dry to over a million citizens. We expanded this anxiety into an abstract exploration of pressure, uncertainty, and water as a catalyst for sound.
This episode features interviews with experimental composer Jeremy Gignoux, and Hiba Abdallah and Josh Babcock of Broken City Lab art collective.
Thanks to the participating artists and our friends at CJSW & Golden Co-op Radio!
Broken City Lab
Broken City Lab is an artist-led interdisciplinary collective and non-profit organization working to explore and unfold curiosities around locality, infrastructures, education, and creative practice leading towards civic change.
Broken City Lab originated in Windsor, Ontario and has included a rotating cast of participants & collaborators – read more about them here.
For this episode of EARS HAVE EYES, we interviewed Broken City Lab collaborators, Hiba Abdallah and Josh Babcock about their upcoming re-kindling of an earlier river-based project created through Watershed+ in 2014. The original project included an exhibition at Stride Gallery called Varying Proximities, featuring candy made from river water, a series of signs (seen above) which were later placed along outflows on the riverpath, and a telephone line to dial the Bow River.
This Summer, Broken City Lab returns to Calgary – 10 years after their initial project – to rekindle their Bow River hotline, this time in collaboration with CADA Public Art. Billboards, signs, and targeted social media ads will invite you to dial 1-855-BOW-LSTN to be connected to site-specific sounds of the Bow River. You can hear more about why and how in our interview with the artists.
Cobra Collins
Cobra Collins is a Mohkínstsis based Indigenous and settler poet of significant height. She has represented our city on a national level at the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word and was humbled to sit as Indigenous advocate on the Writers’ Union of Canada’s (TWUC) National Council in 2021 and 2022. Her debut short film “Hop Along Hang On” has been featured nationwide and internationally in numerous film festivals and has won several awards, including Best short film, Black Hills film festival. Cobra was also honoured to be shortlisted as a nominee for Calgary’s 2016 & 2018 poet laureate.
We first read Making a Living as the World Burns on Cobra’s social media. The poem is short, sharp, and indicative of Cobra’s style (“xo”) but it captured something vital about the intersectionality of the local water crisis – especially when viewed through a lens expanded to include the many Indigenous water crises that continue to impact communities across what is currently called Canada. We invited Cobra to record this poem as a voice memo. Hugged between sound pieces, there is an irony and bite in Cobra’s words: “I cannot Girl Boss my way out of this apocalypse / manufacture clean water / now that we care about clean water for everyone, again […]”
Elissa Goodrich
Elissa Goodrich is a musician, composer and sound artist, with an abiding interest in collaborations; both within and across artforms, musical idioms, and with climate scientists. Elissa’s works play in festivals across Europe, North America and Australasia. Elissa is an invited artist-member of UNESCO’s Ocean Decade Network.
About Building waves ii :
“This sound art work continues a series of sonic studies I am creating devised and inspired by my work alongside “Surf Sounds” – a team of climate scientists (fluid dynamics engineers) led by Professor Richard Manasseh who are studying bubbles’ behaviours and ocean waves. In this soundart work I am exploring ways of interpreting both data and patterns in waves and bubbles. I am also experimenting with how live new music (my own compositions recorded live with the ensemble) and treated sound samples can be merged and yet remain distinct within a single electro-acoustic sound art composition.”
Credits: Excerpt from live, raw, archive recording from first showing of work in progress for Professor Richard Manasseh’s scientific team ‘Surf Sounds’ event – May 2nd, Swinburne, Melbourne.
Gideon Brazil – woodwinds,
Elliott Folvig -electric guitar (documentation recording)
Miranda Hill – double bass
Elissa Goodrich – vibraphone, composition, sound design
Jeremy Gignoux
Fiddle/violin, composition/improvisation, tradition/avant-garde, jazz/country, artist/family man, French/Albertan. Jeremy Gignoux spends a great deal of time making thriving complements out of apparent contradictions. Based in Mohkinstsis on Treaty 7 Land (Calgary, AB), he loves collaborating with other performing arts, and was part of the house band for two Decidedly Jazz Danceworks productions and a musical with Rosebud Theatre. In 2017, he was the composer and sole musician for Catherine Hayward’s piece in Dancer’s Studio West’s Metamorphosis. His main project the Acoustic Ensemble plays lyrical instrumental music that defies genre classification, stretching from Parisian Swing to folk experiments. His compositions are featured in his album Cinacoustic.
We interviewed Jeremy about his recent experimental album Odd Stillness.
About the project:
“A few winters ago I injured a nerve which impaired the use of my left hand for a few months. Unable to play violin and deprived of my principal means of artistic expression, I was forced to stop everything and look at different ways of making music. That’s where the concept for Odd Stillness was born. Looking away from harmonic progression and instrumental virtuosity, this recording embraces stagnation, inviting the listener to contemplate the serenity or tension within the moment. Like an ambivalent musical meditation, Odd Stillness doesn’t pretend that introspection is all blissful. Stillness can be relaxing, but it can also be frustrating, maddening, joyful, voluptuous, or bleak.
I invited some of my favourite local musicians to take on the challenge of improvising within strict bounds, using only one note at a time, blindly overdubbing several times before uncovering the final result. Their personalities radiate through their playing and I am immensely grateful for their contributions.“
EARS HAVE EYES played three compositions from Odd Stillness, including:
Quimsie, featuring Jiajia Li
Brustred, featuring Mark Dejong
Pedire, featuring Andé Wickenheiser and Carsten Rubeling
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.
One Drop is an unbelievably slow sound recording responding to the water main break in Calgary/Mohkinstsis through the falling of a single drop, from the artist’s roof into a water barrel. The sound of this drop was slowed to 1% of its original speed, creating a 5 minute composition minimally altered by the artist.
Thank you to the artists & listeners!
Special thanks to CJSW.
Want to share your sound art on future episodes of EARS HAVE EYES?
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