EARS HAVE EYES // Episode 48
Airing Wednesday, March 11, 2026 at 11 am & 8 pm MST
on CJSW 90.9 FM, NAISA, & Golden Co-Op Radio
GRIEF:
in it
FEATURING:
53cm
Azurite Sun
Boyi Bai
Chantal Francoeur
Gero von Randow
Her Motives Are Silent
Nicola Fumo Frattegiani
Owen Duff
Sylvain Souklaye
Tyler Delaney Reed
This program is co-hosted by Caitlind r.c. Brown & Wayne Garrett and edited by Caitlind Brown. Thanks to CJSW, Golden Co-Op Radio, and NAISA (especially Kaamil, Claire, and Darren) for supporting the show.
EARS HAVE EYES is a monthly sound art radio program airing on CJSW 90.9 FM in Calgary/Mohkinstsis, Golden Co-op Radio in Golden, BC, and NAISA Radio in South River, Ontario. You can listen to podcasts of previous episodes here.
March is one of the worst months in Calgary. Winter darkness still falls across the land, but gone is the glittering white twinkle of those early snow-falls. We are in the long, interminable, muddy stretch towards Spring. This is a particularly dangerous time for human creatures: statistically, the highest rates of death in Canada transpire between December and March each year. On a philosophical level, March marks a pre-Spring mourning unfolding in each of us – grief as an expression of radical change.
Many of the works on today’s program commemorate those who have transitioned beyond life, but our GRIEF episode explores something broader and deeper than death. There is a sublingual thread tying the rawest expressions of grief with the creation of sound. There are no words strong enough to support the weight of grief. Grief is something you feel involuntarily, almost like an automatic response – a sound that leaks out of you. It is beyond our control or conscious understanding. And yet we all share this human experience. Grief is the price we pay for love.
Thanks to the participating artists and our friends at CJSW, NAISA, and Golden Co-op Radio!
53 cm
53cm is an electronic music artist based in Le Havre. His world navigates between ambient, experimental, and noise. Armed with hardware— drum machines, samplers—he composes raw and immersive soundscapes.
About Retour à Saint Mars:
“This sound piece is a tribute to my great-aunt, who recently passed away.
In it, I imagine returning to her house in the countryside, but a return shaped by absence. The sonic material is deliberately repetitive, almost circular, like the thoughts that keep looping in the aftermath of a loss.“
Azurite Sun
Azurite Sun ( Léa Thirion) is a composer, sound artist, and visual artist from Lyon. She is the co-founder of the art book label/publisher “Mutiny Grrrls.” Initially interested in film restoration, she developed a passion for experimental cinema. This interest extended to her visual and sound work, naturally leading her to an experimental approach to music. She draws inspiration from both contemporary music and underground sound art.
About The Future Hides In Pockets Of Light, Stitched Into The Edges Of A Nightmare:
“I was working in my studio when I received the sad and disturbing news. I composed this piece with a heavy heart, hoping it could gently and tenderly accompany my friend to the other world she had chosen to rest in. What is experienced as tragic for those who remain can be a relief for those who depart. Farewell, dear C., may our paths cross in another dimension, and may I once again experience your kindness, generosity, and sense of humor.”
Boyi Bai
Boyi Bai is an electronic music composer and sound artist specialising in field recording, soundscape composition and interactive VR spatial audio, whose practice-led works transform environmental sound into immersive auditory spaces while exploring the intrinsic relationships between place, memory and media. His creations have been widely presented at internationally acclaimed festivals, art exhibitions and radio programmes, including BBC Radio 6, MA/IN Festival, SOUND/IMAGE Festival, MANTRA, PAYSAGES | COMPOSÉS Festival, San Francisco Tape Music Festival and Radiophrenia, building an extensive exhibition profile in the global fields of sound art and electronic music. Recognised for his distinctive artistic approach, he has received the first prize in the Electronic Acousmatic Music category at the 6th Dani Award International Electronic Music Competition, been shortlisted for the Sound of the Year Awards 2024, and earned other internationally prestigious professional accolades.
Take Me Back to Indonesia begins with a field recording of children playing near an old well in Indonesia’s Mentawai Islands. Soft, serene echoes weave through a dreamlike soundscape that feels like a fleeting refuge. This quiet tranquillity is soon shattered by harsh, unrelenting sounds: phone alarms, bustling urban noise, and a child’s cry, all pressing in to dismantle the calm of memory. As fragments of the original recording flicker alongside these intrusive real-world pressures, the work lingers in a space of quiet helplessness. It captures the feeling of clinging to a peace that slips further away, trapped between the warmth of what was and the cold weight of what is.
Chantal Francoeur
Chantal Francoeur is an audio artist/researcher. She teaches Journalism at UQAM, Universite du Quebec in Montreal. She works and lives in Quebec, Canada, along the Saint-Laurence River.
About Requiem Ecolo:
“Sandpipers meet with an unexpected four wheels on the foreshore. Science, poetry and ecological sounds in the background. A poignant requiem.”
Gero von Randow
Gero von Randow lives in Vienna (Austria), where he explores electronic experimental music. He plays in bands and as a soloist. Recent works were presented at festivals in Italy, United Kingdom, Germany and Austria. In 2026 he will work as artist in residence for the precept-coincept-percept festival for contemporary music in Bled, Solvenia.
Downfall is about loss. The sound is sculpted with a SOMA LYRA nonlinear synthesizer.
Her Motives Are Silent
Her Motives Are Silent is a project founded by artist, composer, and producer, Michael Valenzuela.
Melodic ballads, layered with rich sonic textures, vulnerable lyrics, and melancholy nuance. The blend of alternative, orchestral, and electronic elements has drawn comparisons to Nine Inch Nails, Radiohead, Amon Tobin, Ólafur Arnalds, and Copeland.
About Letters to Those We Lost:
“‘Letters to Those We Lost’ was not planned. It was very much a stream of consciousness expression that came out of me one night. I improvised the piano parts as I looped various ambient textures. It was composed and recorded as I went.
This song starts in C Minor, to represent the pain, anger, fear, sorrow, and frustration. But then it hangs on the E Flat and transitions into a more hopeful moment of reflection, introspection, acceptance, and healing.
Grief has been a very prominent aspect of my life for the past few years. I lost my mother in 2019, and my father in 2025. I also lost some friends along the way, and people close to me have lost loved ones too. There’s also the collective Global grief being felt with all the tragedies and atrocities happening in the world right now. Just so much to process and work through. And we don’t often talk about it with anyone.
You have to feel all the heavy stuff first to get to the moments of release and healing. It’s ok to feel all of these emotions as they come up. There’s no right or wrong way to process these things. Hopefully, we can remember that there is still beauty and hope in the world. Hopefully, we can always cherish the memories of those we lost. If we could write them letters, what would those letters say? What words would we share?”
Nicola Fumo Frattegiani
Nicola Fumo Frattegiani is an electroacoustic composer living in Perugia, Italy. His works have been presented at several prestigious national and international festivals of electroacoustic music and experimental arts.
Acoustic Vision from Beyond was created using exclusively a recording of a traditional Vietnamese funeral ceremony. Fragments were taken from the original track and subsequently manipulated. In particular, the resonances produced by the percussive instrument were extracted, thus creating long sound bands, onto which the distant dirge is grafted. The intent was to create an internal acoustic vision imagined from the deceased’s perspective.
Owen Duff
Owen Duff works across multiple musical and artistic fields. As a singer-songwriter he has recorded five EPs and five albums, one of which, rather than releasing, he hid in secret locations around the world for people to find at random. His last album release was the concept album, bed, which tells a queer love story using the imagery of beds to explore intimacy, procreation, death, religion and refuge. As a creator of experimental music and sound, Owen was Highly Commended in the ‘Composed with Sound’ category for UK Sound of the Year in 2023, created the sound art/poetry collaboration Ghost Dance with poet Emily Berry, which was a featured premiere on BBC’s Late Junction in 2024, and had work selected for an In The Dark listening event the same year.
About This is how you grieve:
“This is part of an experimental piano/voice/sound design piece on the theme of grief and loss. I wrote the lyrics and then recorded myself improvising playing and singing those lyrics. The first recording unfortunately had a technical error in one channel which made it unusable, so the final pieces were recreations of the original improvisations.“
Sylvain Souklaye
Sylvain Souklaye is a French Caribbean Brooklyn-based live artist, sonic maker and author whose work explores the interiority of broken bodies, environmental urgencies and political retribution through gut-wrenching performances and sonic installations. Drawing from his Martinican Neg marron heritage and Lyon’s revolutionary history, Souklaye crafts experiences of collective intimacy where audiences become activated participants, with notable works including *Depopulated* (Judson Church), *UNDERMYOUR-OURSKIN* (ChaShaMa Gala), and *Liquid Soul* (Helsinki Central Library Oodi). A current Harvestworks fellow and commissioned artist with International Contemporary Ensemble, Souklaye has been recognized in Aesthetica Art Prize’s top 100 Contemporary Artists and continues to merge noise, granular synthesis, and lyrical intensity into transformative live experiences.
About MYLITTLECHAOS:
“Insomnia for one, two or three. Endless grieving as a poetic of memories. Caribbean bats orchestra reshaping sonic realty. Home from another timeline telling an unknown narrative.“
Tyler Delaney Reed
Tyler Delaney Reed is a multi-instrumentalist, music instructor and artist from Shelburne Ontario. He writes and records music primarily on stringed instruments, but often incorporates loops, drones and other electronic elements. Reed released an instrumental album in 2021 titled “Ancestry”, and has released several singles ranging from ambient/drone music to jazz and jamband inspired improvisations.
Blues for Dexter is an ambient piece that was written as a tribute to a family member who passed away in November. The song builds tension and reaches a peak towards the end symbolizing our emotions during a rough period, but ultimately comes through on the other side.
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 