extremely pleased to announce my audio installation for +15 soundscapes a time and place, revisted is happening from now until the start of january. a network of discreet speakers spread across a downtown calgary city block playing a soundscape i created, 24 hours a day. many thanks to arts commons to selecting my work for this, constantine katsiris and sheena jardine-olade for helping prep my work behind the scenes. and extra special thanks to tanya tagaq for letting me use her voice in the work and hosting me in her home community of cambridge bay, which allowed for the whole thing to happen in the first place.
arts commons wrote up their own description of the project, so i figured i'd share the description, in my words, below..
- PROJECT DESCRIPTION
A Time and Place, Revisited is a meditative sound journey of music and soundscapes created exclusively from audio recorded in and around Cambridge Bay, Nunavut. Invited by musical collaborator Tanya Tagaq, and an acclaimed Inuit throat singer, Michael Red flew up to the far north in 2006 to carefully record sounds from the land, life and Tanya in her home community. Sounds gathered include wind, rushing water, still water, slush, ice melting and crackling, birds, sled dogs, a qillauti (drum) played and tightened, swishing ulus (knives) together, fingers running through furs and feathers, objects being banged and clanging together at the community dump, the 10 o'clock siren, kids laughing and playing, and Tanya singing and experimenting with her voice. Over the course of three years, back in Vancouver, Red meticulously processed and categorized the three weeks of raw material he recorded and shaped them into a comprehensive sound library. This library includes full sets of drums, percussion, bass, melodic instruments, and atmospheres - all created the recordings from up north and computer software process's. Michael has used parts of this library in performance with Tanya, as well as in part of a installation for CODE:live (part of the 2010 Olympics), but never dove deep in the full expanses of the nunavut sound library until now.
A Time and Place, Revisited is a continuous cycling mix of the songs, soundscapes and sound art inspired by, and made from, the Canadian Artic. It is intended as a cyclical story that can be picked up anywhere, moving between the quieter moments of ambient field recordings and more dramatic areas like beat-driven songs. It is a sound expression of an experience - a compilation of ideas, emotions and expressions inspired from land above the treeline.
- ARTIST STATEMENT
A Time and Place, Revisited is a journey that engages the listener in a similar way to how they might experience the north themselves: quiet contemplations, wildly raw and powerful moments, mysterious and magical diversions, simple natural beauty.
This work is very much “alive”. Finding the life in raw audio recordings of things like wind and water, and allowing space for that life to speak in it's own voice.
The first appearance of this work was part of an art installation for the Vancouver 2010 Olympics. This is a further developed and refined version of that work, hence the “revisited” in the title.