My piece Intermediary was presented in January at Centre CLARK’s Poste audio, a space dedicated to audio work within their contemporary art program. I developed this piece outside of the body of work that exists as Reliquary V, and with an intention toward creating an experience of sound that isn’t quite musical. The piece itself is 5 minutes long, created for headphones with some light spatialization via a binaural plugin. I really wanted to create something that felt like both a presence, an apparition, and a temporal experience, like the darkness in the movie theater between the frames of film.
There are many metaphors that come to mind when I try to describe how I work with sound. As a bodily sense, sound is invisible, yet it has so much influence on how we perceive physical reality: where objects and the landscape sit in relation to us. I’m interested in this language of perception and how it can blur the boundaries of reality via the physical sense of hearing. My way of thinking about Intermediary has a lot to do with my own experience and perception of sound in the landscape.
I approached this piece as a form of abstract or fragmented storytelling. I have a longtime writing practice, which started as poems I’d write as a kid based on mental images that appeared to me. There was a certain feeling in these images that I wanted to capture. Many of my intuitive images come in the form of landscapes.
My approach to writing continues to be informed by this sort of spontaneous intuition and the desire to give shape to that inner image or feeling. Sound is very intimate: inseparable from our own presence and embodiment. The work I’ve done in poetry is also about this sensitivity to perception, with the senses as a sort of looking glass into a second world on the other side of the mirror.
Another childhood phenomenon I experienced was a type of recurring auditory hallucination, which I never told anyone about. I’d perceive ambient sounds as voices or conversation coming from corners of the house late at night. Sometimes I’d get up and walk around trying to find the source of the sounds. When I came closer, I looked into the darkness and saw nothing. I think that’s where my fascination for shadows, apparitions, phantoms and traces of presence comes from.
For this piece, I was inspired to create something that evokes the landscape of Montréal, through the lens of a fictional personal narrative. I would call this fictional because it has bits of real life (field recordings) that are transformed into an artificial world of sound. It’s meant to evoke a feeling that we are in reality even when we aren’t.
Listen to Intermediary on Bandcamp here. Headphones recommended.