Bringing together the late evening and the flow of cities at the water’s edge this show profiles the recent presentation of Touch at a Distance and the recent release of Enrico Coniglio’s TEREDO NAVALIS.
Track Resources:
* Nancy Tam – Lonely Ghost – Isolation Series * Enrico Coniglio – Band Camp
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Touch at a distance – Publik Secrets – Event Announcement
an outdoor broadcast event organized by Publik Secrets
Last March the implications of a globalized public health emergency forced the hand of commerce and travel to temporarily halt. In recognition of the need for solidarity and collective action to save lives, the hustle and bustle of our cities quickly shifted to a new and unfamiliar state of dense isolation and stillness. While it remains to be seen whether Covid-19 will be treated as the wake-up call to confront our growing social and ecological crises, it did temporarily show us what other rhythms of life might be like. As artists and musicians, we could especially feel the force of this relative stillness reflected in the soundscape. To our ears, sounds long drowned out by a base line of human hyper-activity suddenly became foregrounded in surprising ways. Many of us wondered, are the birds actually singing louder now or are we just now hearing the absence of an industrialized soundscape for the first time?
We have always believed in the importance of listening, both inclusive and exclusive to music, as a way to stimulate a sense of presence and meaning amongst a daily life dominated by capitalist demands for growth, productivity, and extraction. In slowing down, perhaps we can more clearly see sound not just as an element of aesthetic frustration or pleasure, but as a resource for understanding the environment and as a shared space we are always in the process of making. The intimate nature of sound, how it envelopes us, is captured eloquently in Anne Fernald’s description of sound as a form of touch at a distance. In a time of physical distancing, we can perhaps perceive sounds touch ever more sharply, reminding us of our interconnections and entanglements to the environment and each other.
In light of the crisis still unfolding, this year’s event shifts towards an outdoor broadcast format, continuing our focus on ambient & soundscape based practices. We invite audiences to think of ambience as a state of awareness and conduct, a kind of immersion in, and with, other entities. We’ve invited four Vancouver-based interdisciplinary sound artists to share soundscape compositions for Hadden Park, using a collection of field recordings collected in the park and surrounding environment as their raw materials. Their creations, diffused through outdoor speakers, provoke listening as a kind of ambient sensitivity, what thinker Thibaud describes as “not a simple passive reception but rather the power of intensification and transformation of our relation to the world”.
Please register your attendance in advance of the event using the free ticket listed here (limited to 25 attendees). We will be social distancing during this event. Please be mindful of your proximity to others at all times. You are encouraged to bring a blanket+mask and join us for an evening of sounds under the canopy of trees at Hadden Park, unceded coast salish territory.
Time: 6pm to 8pm
about the artists:
