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The work of Vancouver-based sound artist, improviser, and composer Rachael Wadham often hinges upon a certain pack-rat sensibility, with sounds scavenged from mundane, remote, or even derelict sources, squirrelled away with humble meticulousness. Even her improvisational playing on a falling-apart zither evinces this sense of coarse rigour, as she displays such a strong extended-technique vocabulary in such an unpredictable and limited medium. Her uncanny ability to extract hidden sounds: melodies—rhythmic motives, and other clandestine goings-on—from deceptively primitive means is also the driving force behind her current work in progress You Are a Great Listener.
You Are a Great Listener is an installation in development, and currently exists as a blog that features an assortment of Wadham’s eccentric and personal recording of found sound. The blog allows the listener to combine the various sounds at will, thus offering a glimpse of what’s at the core of the installation. I spoke to Wadham about her approach to found sound, and about the inspirations for and development of You Are a Great Listener.
Read more in the print edition.
Image: From You are a Great Listener blog. Image by: Rachael Wadham
Nick Storring is a Toronto-based composer, musician, and writer, and a contributing editor to Musicworks. His music has been presented and performed by the Esprit Orchestra, Eve Egoyan, Quatuor Bozzini, Beijing’s Musicacoustica Festival, and Vancouver New Music. An avid collaborator, Storring has composed for films by Terrance Odette, Ingrid Veninger and, in collaboration with Dafydd Hughes, for the National Film Board’s award-winning Web documentary High Rise: Universe Within (2015), directed by Katerina Cizek. He’s also scored productions by Litmus Theatre and MT Space, worked with celebrated choreographers Yvonne Ng, Marie Josée Chartier, Brandy Leary, and Deepti Gupta, and created music for “ambient gaming environment” Tentacle, which was mounted at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 2011. Storring’s writing has appeared in Exclaim!, The Wire, and AUX.tv. He also contributed liner notes to Alga Marghen’s reissue of the ’60s band Intersystems’ entire recorded output, as well as RVNG Intl.’s box of early psych trio Syrinx’s reissues and previously unreleased material Tumblers from the Vault.