Constellations

This piece feels like rifling through a scrapbook inside someone's head.

Its structure is as flowing and choppy as the ocean that Phoebe so often

alludes to. We love Phoebe's play with music, and the raw meticulousness of

the tape she's collected. This is a piece that resists traditional personal

narrative storytelling arcs; it reveals itself slowly through additional

listens.

This piece does a magic thing of infusing a recording with the nowness of

live music; it is as much a happening as the musical performances that were

its building blocks, with the failure of the recording technology as

performer and conductor.

In a percussive wave of otherworldly sighs and stutters, the richly

textured sound leaves us guessing, with memorable sonic moments passing

before can fully process them, so that when they stay longer than expected

we are moved and curious - but the tape rolls on.

This piece sits somewhere between music and installation. As a 'narrator',

Anna's 'air' is endowed with aliveness, and palpably shifts in mood and

voice throughout the piece, at times sounding almost human. 

Clinging to its gliding tail, listeners catch glimpses of urban spaces.

Sometimes evoking chamber music, and other times, wind, static, and other

manipulated field recordings, in this piece Anna tenderly blurs the line

between music and noise.

We're excited by the tactile nature of this project -imagining the

recorders Jeff sent out waiting on 50 strangers' bedside tables, and their

sleep-drunk fumbles with the record button.

As an ensemble, the dream tapes are a peek into an alternate subconscious

reality. The speakers are recording as they cross the boundary between

sleep and waking. Their words slip past the mind's sense censor and thus

possess a kind of intimacy that is interesting beyond the psychedelic

content of the dreams.

We love the interdisciplinary and collaborative approach that Karen took in

this piece. The scoring of this piece feels raw and vivid - clearly the

cello is a second narrator in this piece, seamlessly harmonizing with the

speaking voice and pointing to both speech's and the narrative's

musicality. This piece makes time slow right down, with musical interludes

complex and abstract enough to bring the listener fully into this conjured

fluttering space. On every listen, we're left with a potent sense of

wonder.

Rignam reached out to us about this piece after recently having moved to

Winnipeg. He said it would be inspired by "the prairie wind - outside my

apartment windows, you can hear it howl". His piece takes us to the

prairies and beyond, sweeps us across a vast and melancholic landscape

while kicking up the dust of the world under its heels. In this piece, the

wind is an omniscient character whose powers seem matched only by the

anxious pulls of technology.

“When I read a story in the back of the newspaper about a young man who had

wandered across the U.S./Mexico border, I became curious about what his

experience must have been like. I imagined how he might wander through his

mind, talking to no one in particular, remembering his town, his mother,

and the things he heard and saw along the way—how he kept repeating that he

was ‘walking in bad circles,’ as if any of us walk a linear, knowable

journey.“

As this roller coaster of a year comes to a close, we thought this sonic

manifesto and portrait was the perfect toast for ushering in the new year:

To taking artistic risks! To having the courage to struggle on stage!  This

piece, and the collaborative, political and tactile world of Bread and

Puppet that it conjures, embody the ethos of experimentalism,

interdisciplinarity, and community that Constellations aspires to. And we

can't think of a voice more suited to sewing this cardboard cacophony

together than Aleks'.

“I love the work of the 60s era NFB experimental filmmaker Arthur Lipsett

and so I wanted to try and do what he does. The piece is also an

exploration of the digital subconscious that exists on my MacBook.  It's

made up of sounds on my hard drive that I recorded over the last year that

just felt right together."

“What's a transcriber, you ask? Well, it's a human who listens to words and

then writes them down for other people. It's a dying art that we were

trying to capture. In the making of this piece we were trying to cultivate

the monotony, drudgery, brutality of transcription work which we were both

doing a lot of at the time."