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Sound-Art from Canada
but not from anywhere in particular
curated by Tobias Van Veen
Curatorial Statement
Vast expanse often leads to bouts of topographical uncertainty: where and how does a sense of coherence, or even incoherence, form in a characteristic Western experience that is typically and all that much more sharply divided between the metropolis and our othered sense of nature? Predominantly products of urban environments, Canadian artists are perhaps particularily attenuated to the historical, progammatic violence that constructs the nation-state. It is only by denying First Nations people entitlement and by deploying a fixed notion of property that Canada enforces its territory and established its governance. These memories of topography are coursed with violence, and are to be found echoing, as traces and tactics, through sound recordings, manipulations and sonic rearticulations that consider a vast region of topics but always retain the grit and dust, the violence, that forms the struggles of power over the topos.
Artists
[6.]Title:
Music for Radio no x [esther b live on WMBR/Cambridge_MIT], 8:25
The vinyl record is the center of my audio practice, the result of an exploration and application of a study of contemporary sculpture, sound art, pop culture, inspired by media art and philosophy. Douglas Kahn, new media theorician, notes that, as with cinema and photography, it took a while for the vinyl record to get its own media autonomy. Inspired by this direction, I work as a sound ready-madist with the vinyl record and the turntable, integrated them in a field where music and visual art made an equation. I experimented with the vinyl record as a medium of creation, a research material open to intervention. I use the expression “Vinylbrikol” to name the little vinyl-creation which came literally from the spontaneous operations of alteration (e.g. cutting, sanding, scratching, painting) in combination with different materials (e.g. collage). The music is improvised and allowed to go in many directions. Esther B.
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[7]Title:
Siphon – 2.11
Because some sounds need a sonic midwife and cannot come from nothing.
i8u’s audio art can be qualified as “sound-sculpture”. It reveals powerful, opaque and complex sound environments where analog and digital meet. Her Web art can be said to follow a parallel path, enter twining both musical and visual elements. i8u ‘s musical path is rather special. From classical music to the blues, it took only one chance meeting with David Kristian to get her involved in electronic music.
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[8].i)Title:
Bauer Codec – 4:45
The duo of Dean King and Tomas Phillips came together as Eto Ami in 2000 with the mere intention of exploring a shared aesthetic. This partnership soon developed a trajectory of its own, however, compelling us to push the compositional process towards further levels of refinement and performative dexterity. What this continues to mean for us is the achievement of a balance between digital and non-digital sound and a functional recognition of their differences in terms of utility and signification. Whilst computer technology remains central to our work, we make an effort to locate composition within a space of physicality, a space in which the composing subject(s) is allowed to ‘become,’ in the language of Deleuze, alongside the relative self-sufficiency of software. Hence our use of acoustic instrumentation and field recordings gathered on the periphery of laptops. By extension, we seek to foreground the act of listening (as composers and audience alike) in the slowly evolving tradition of microsound without precluding the possibility of active and engaged harmony. Implicitin our work, then, is the notion that melodiousness does not necessarilyimply a compromised territorialization. ‘Bauer Codec’ (here reduced somewhat due to a time constraint) is theopening track of our disc entitled Course (2002).
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