On ShortCuts this month, producer Katherine McLeod talks with poet, novelist, and sound performer Kaie Kellough about a memorable recording from The Words & Music Show.  

What are we listening to? Kellough upacks what we are listening to — which turns out to be a highly technical, performative, and polyphonic sonic object, along with it being an early version of a passage from his Griffin Prize-winning book of poetry, Magnetic Equator. 

Listen to this ShortCuts for the story behind one archival recording, and what this story reveals about how we remember the feelings infused within live performance. 

EPISODE NOTES

A fresh take on sounds from the past, ShortCuts is a monthly feature on The SpokenWeb Podcast feed and an extension of the ShortCuts blog posts on SPOKENWEBLOG. Stay tuned for monthly episodes of ShortCuts on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week) following the monthly SpokenWeb podcast episode.

Producer: Katherine McLeod

Host: Hannah McGregor

Supervising Producer: Judith Burr

ARCHIVAL AUDIO

Archival audio in this episode is excerpted from a recording of The Words and Music Show on November 20, 2016 (Casa del Popolo, Montreal). 

The performers that night were Eve Nixen, Kaie Kellough, Tawhida Tanya Evanson’s Zenship [Tawhaida Tanya Evanson (voice); Mark Haynes (bass); Ziya Tabassian (percussion); Caulder Nash (keyboards), with guest performance by Nina Segalowitz (Inuit throat singing)], Paul Dutton* and pianist Stefan Christoff.

SHOW NOTES

Kellough, Kaie. Magnetic Equator. McClelland and Stewart, 2020. 

—“Rough Craft: Notes on the creation of the audio / visual / textual work Small Stones.” SPOKENWEBLOG, 22 May, 2021, https://spokenweb.ca/rough-craft-notes-on-the-creation-of-the-audio-visual-textual-work-small-stones/.

“The Show Goes On.” Producer Jason Camlot. The SpokenWeb Podcast, 7 Feb 2022. https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-show-goes-on-words-and-music-in-a-pandemic/.