Sounds Like V Audio Art Festival
July 23 – 25 2015, Saskatoon SK
Daily schedule details: TBA
AKA Artist-Run, PAVED Arts and Ed Video Media Artist-Run Centre in partnership with Holophon
Artists participating in Sounds Like 2015 explore the thematic of Locations and Borders through experimental audio performance and installation. Spread throughout the three-day festival, performances and installations will be held within AKA and PAVED Arts shared building at 424 20th Street West as well as various off-site locations throughout Saskatoon.
Festival passes $20 for three days or $10 each night. Passes available in advance on Picatic, or at the door.
Artists
Kyle Armstrong and Mark Templeton (Edmonton, AB) will perform Extensions inspired by Marshall McLuhan’s prediction for the “extensions of man” and the present and future impact of technology and media. The trio Burden comprised of Caitlin Hutchison, Doreen Girard and Shelagh Pizey-Allen (Winnipeg, MB) perform on an amplified piano soundboard using handmade tools and found objects. Anitra Hamilton (Toronto, ON) will install Territoriality, a captured sound recording of a gas-powered push mower which experienced outside of its performed action creates a sense of displacement. Eric Hill (Regina, SK) explores the space between audio and video, converting one into the other in an ongoing improvised loop. David Jensenius (Kitchener, ON) will collect sounds throughout Saskatchewan, presenting a special version of his mobile application network FoundSounds in which the audience can interact with and contribute to the collected audio. Karl Fousek (Montreal, QC) will present Solo Synthesizer an ongoing performance based on the aleph sound computer that relies on interaction and decision made by both computer and performer. Ben Grossman (Guelph, ON) will create a kind of invisible audio sculpture from sine waves and room dimensions in the performance Invitation. Wasted Cathedraland Chad Munson (Saskatoon, SK) will collaborate to perform Auditory Borders, drawing on spatial division, temporal frequency, environmental manipulation and collaborative sound synthesis in an oppositional but interlocking auditory dialogue. In partnership with BlackFlash Magazine and The Roxy Theatre we are pleased to screen A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness written by Ben Rivers and Ben Russell featuring Robert AA Lowe (OM, Lichens) and others in three situations and locations: an Estonian island, the isolated wilderness of Northern Finland and in Norway during a black metal concert, in what is described as “an inquiry into transcendence that sees the cinema as a site for transformation”. In addition to the outlined performers the kick-off evening of Thursday, July 23 will include a DJ line-up and party to be announced. Finally, Sounds Like is happy to partner with MoSoFest in the presentation of Le Révélateur Roger Tellier-Craig and Sabrina Ratté, June 20 at The Refinery, Saskatoon, SK.
About the Artists/Projects
Kyle Armstrong and Mark Templeton have collaborated on a 30 minute film/record released as a 12” LP and DVD in tribute to Canadian media visionary Marshall McLuhan. The audiovisual elements include both original and sampled film and audio inspired by the media visionary. Their live approach is an improvised audiovisual performance, using both digital and analog tools. 2015 marks the 104th birthday of Canadian visionary Marshall McLuhan. With each passing year the revelatory nature of his prophetic vision becomes more evident. The global village is becoming a distinct reality in this technological age. www.fieldsawake.com
Burden is Caitlin Hutchison, Doreen Girard, and Shelagh Pizey-Allen. Their collaboration emerged from working together at Negative Space, a collectively-run venue and art space. Where they released two tapes independently in 2014. Burden is a trio that creates composed and improvised works for the amplified piano soundboard. Amplifying the soundboard of a disassembled piano with contact microphones. Using handmade tools and found objects, the artists manipulate its strings and frame to create dark warm drones and immersive soundscapes. Removing the piano’s dampers has created a resonant instrument that requires an intimate form of collaboration. https://bbrrddnn.bandcamp.com/album/burden-3
Eric Hill is a self described dabbler. He has worked in various mediums such as film, video, projection, installation, music, and sound art. Lately, he has worked to combine these separate interests into participatory or interactive events for both performer and audience. Through the assistance of the Holophon Mentorship program, he was able to create such an event with new software and techniques under his belt. This Must be the Space (Naive Technology) is an exploration of the space between audio and video. Using MaxMSP, video information is turned into audio and then through the use of CoGe is then turned back into video information. As well, sci-fi sounds and samples are part of the mix, adding to the tumbling feedback loop.
Karl Fousek is an emerging electronic sound composer and performer. Recently his work has focused exclusively on analogue voltage controlled modular synthesizers, culminating in 2014 with the release of his debut album on Relative Position of Figures on Danish imprint Phinery. Fousek has been developing a live electronic performance system based on the aleph sound computer designed by monome and Ezra Buchla (son of synthesis pioneer Don Buchla). The aleph acts as control device for a small analog voltage controlled synthesizer by generating user controlled, probability based control signals, while acting as a virtual tape splicing machine, reorganizing the synthesizers audio output in real-time. The system as a whole skirts the borders of generative composition and live free improvisation. www.karlfousek.com http://soundcloud.com/analogue01/live-at-casa-del-popolo-montreal-01122014
Ben Grossman is a hurdy-gurdy player, percussionist, composer and improviser. He performs both as a soloist and as part of various ensembles. Grossman’s work is featured on over 80 CDs. He has also been recorded for film soundtracks, radio dramas, as well as for television shows and commercials. His performance for Sounds Like, Invitation, explores the borders between installation and performance, and seeks to create an invisible audio sculpture from nothing but sine waves and room dimensions. http://macrophone.org
Anitra Hamilton‘s works have been presented at the 8th Havana Biennale, Zendai Moma, Shanghai, The Centre For Contemporary Art Thessaloniki, Greece, the Art Gallery of York University, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Albright-Knox Gallery and the Marrakech Biennale. Territoriality is a captured digital sound recording of a professional gardener employing a gas- powered push lawn mower to cut the grass at a client’s home in a wealthy district of Toronto. At times the recording resembles the sound of a droning bomber airplane creating a sense of displacement. As innocent as home gardening/maintenance may appear on the surface, it often becomes a platform for competition/conflict between neighbours. The notion of a sound-based work featuring the recording of a lawn in the process of being mowed/manicured and later presented in an area of Saskatoon that is rapidly gentrifying speaks of the unfortunate reality in order to create we must destroy something that is currently extant.
David Jensenius has developed a mobile application network, FoundSounds, for recording and sharing sounds. Each recorded sound is geotagged, allowing users to interact with a map and see where sounds are recorded. Users can also collage geographically located sounds together to create an artificial sound environment informed by what other users have recorded. Finally, FoundSounds allows users to go for a sound walk. nearby sounds get louder or softer as you physically navigate towards or away from their recorded location, creating a sort of temporal collage. For Sounds Like, an installation of FoundSounds, with sound collected in Saskatchewan, will enable audience interaction through both installation and app. www.david.jensenius.org www.foundsounds.me
Wasted Cathedral is Christopher Laramee a performer creating recordings of looped sound from melodic arcs to dissonant feedback. Laramee plays guitar in Saskatoon bands Shooting Guns, The Radiation Flowers, The Foggy Notions and The Switching Yard. Chad Munson is an instrumentalist and sound engineer producing textural pieces focused around analog synthesis and guitar manipulations. Munson runs the cassette label Magnetic Domain and performs with The Moas and Grey Light District. Auditory Borders draws on the elements of spatial division, temporal frequency, environmental manipulation and collaborative sound synthesis through audio performance. Exploring concepts of the theory proposed initially by composer Iannis Xenakis that, “all sound, even continuous musical variation, is conceived as an assemblage of a large number of elementary sounds adequately disposed in time. In the attack, body, and decline of a complex sound, thousands of pure sounds appear in a more or less short interval of time.” The piece explores this concept as well as expands and further challenge these ideas through the utilization of a physical divide. https://soundcloud.com/wastedcathedral https://soundcloud.com/chadmunson/citation
A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness follows an unnamed character through three seemingly disparate moments in his life. With little explanation, we join him in the midst of a 15-person collective on a small Estonian island; in isolation in the majestic wilderness of Northern Finland; and during a concert as the singer and guitarist of a black met al band in Norway. Marked by loneliness, ecstatic beauty and an optimism of the darkest sort, A SPELL is a radical proposition for the existence of utopia in the present. Starring musician Robert AA Lowe (best known for his intense live performances under the name LICHENS) in the lead role, A SPELL lies somewhere between fiction and non-fiction – it is at once a document of experience and an experience itself, an inquiry into transcendence that sees the cinema as a site for transformation. http://www.aspelltowardoffthedarkness.com
Thank you to our partners Ed Video Media Artist-Run Centre and AKA Artist Run and to the Sounds Like 2015 Programming Committee of Travis Cole (Managing Editor BlackFlash Magazine, co-founder Open City Cinema), Tod Emel (intermedia artist) and Stephanie Norris (photographer) and the jury Travis Cole, Stephanie Norris, Mehta Youngs (sound artist, past Sounds Like performer) and Chris Worden (Director Eclectic Electrics Festival). Thank you to our festival partners BlackFlash Magazine, MoSoFest, The Roxy Theatre and Prairie Sun Brewery. Thanks to our generous funders the Saskatchewan Arts Board, SaskLotteries, SaskCulture and the Canada Council for the Arts.
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