All the Little Objectiles
2017
Site-specific sound installation and two-hour live performance
Slow Wave, a two-part series organized by Gabi Dao
Western Front, Vancouver
All the Little Objectiles was the last event of Gabi Dao’s two-part Slow Wave series. Composed by Michelle Helene Mackenzie, it is a sound installation of site-specific sonic works distributed throughout the Western Front. These pieces are “works” in the sense that they labour away in the air of each room: each attempts to open a sonic space within an architectural one, to load a “right here” with a historically inflected “elsewhere”, while treating the architecture of the Western Front as a compositional skeleton for a sonic homage.
As listeners drift from room to room, the soundscapes merge into a multidimensional soundhouse, ripe for aural conjuring, temporal hopscotch and the colliding of parallel dimensions of unrealized and unheard sonic histories, past and future. The works were made within and for their sites, and include solo compositions alongside the amplified, tweaked and ever-prophetic sounds and voices of Daphne Oram, Yoko Ono, Delia Derbyshire and others. They are “feeling spaces” as much as “thinking spaces”, loosely connected so that listeners are free to make their own associations as they traverse and re-traverse the building. All that is asked of the listener is a willingness to float about.
Works: 1. workshop (modular synthesizer, samples); 2. pulse comb for lumber room (modular synthesizer); 3. suspended investigations xi (modular synthesizer); 4. kitchen river (on behalf of green) (modular synthesizer); 5. tunnel of pulled voices (samples); 6. weight bubbles (modular synthesizer, samples); 7. toy city error (assorted synthesizers, samples); 8. low pressure spindle closet (assorted synthesizers); 9. except forest orange drones (modular synthesizer). All 2017.
With a sample patchwork from the interviews, words, sound works, compositions, acoustic environments and radio plays of Delia Derbyshire, Yoko Ono, Laurie Spiegel, Daphne Oram, Clarice Lispector, Ikue Mori, Éliane Radigue and Midori Takada.
The accompanying booklet maps each work onto the building’s floor plans, alongside a sequence of texts on Daphne Oram’s unrealized Still Point and the history of the building, built in 1922 by the Knights of Pythias as a hall and social club and sold in 1972 to the group of artists who founded the Western Front in 1973.
Images courtesy of Justin Patterson.