| 00:10 |
Hannah McGregor: |
[Start Music: ShortCuts Theme Music] Welcome to SpokenWeb ShortCuts each month on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week) following the monthly SpokenWeb Podcast episode, you can join me, Hannah McGregor and our minisode host and curator, Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb’s ShortCuts mini series. We’ll share with you specially curated audio clips from deep in the SpokenWeb archives to ask: what does it mean to cut and splice digitally? What kinds of new stories and audio criticism can be produced through these short archival clips? ShortCuts is an extension of the ShortCuts blog posts on Spoken Web blog. So if you love what you hear, make sure to head over to SpokenWeb.ca for more. If you’re a researcher with the SpokenWeb Project, think about joining Katherine on ShortCuts to discuss an archival clip that has impacted your work. Especially if you’re a student who has been digitizing and cataloguing recordings, and there’s a sound that stands out to you after all those hours of listening, let Katherine know pitch Katherine, your audio by emailing SpokenWebPodcast@gmail.com. [End Music: ShortCuts Theme Music] Now here is Katherine McLeod with SpokenWeb ShortCuts, mini stories about how literature sounds. [Music Interlude: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music] |
| 01:27 |
Katherine McLeod: |
Welcome to ShortCuts. When this ShortCuts comes out, it will be in the same week of this year’s SpokenWeb Symposium and Sound Institute. At the end of last year’s symposium called “Listening, Sound, Agency” there was an online Words & Music Show. Here is SpokenWeb’s Jason Camlot, welcoming those tuning in and explaining the relationship between this event and the symposium week that was coming to an end. |
| 01:58 |
Audio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words & Music Show, 2021: |
Well, we’re gonna get things started. I just, I wanted to say a few words before I turn things over to the host of the evening and of all Words and Music Shows – Ian Ferrier – who you just saw. I’m Jason Camlot. I’m a co-host of this show. I’ve actually been co-hosting these, or background hosting them with Ian, since March 2020, when pandemic forced us onto Zoom, out of the Casa del Popolo, which you see in the background of my screen, my fake background. This event was imagined as a celebration of that symposium, and as a way of bringing the local community in touch with some of the participants in the symposium. For me, it’s a really fun way to finish what’s been an amazing week of activity and thinking and sharing. |
| 02:48 |
Katherine McLeod: |
Along with SpokenWeb and Symposium poets – Kevin McNeilly, Cole Mash, Erin Scott, and Klara du Plessis who performed that night – the special guest for that show was poet and intermedia artist Oana Avasilichioaei. Oana had performed live at the 2019 SpokenWeb Symposium in Vancouver, along with participating in various SpokenWeb events in Montreal. In 2021, her book Eight Track had just received great acclaim and was nominated for the Governor General’s Award for poetry. Featuring her on that night was part of a way of making a connection between the symposium and local Montreal poets. At the symposium, I had, in fact, presented a paper with Dr. Emily Murphy about Oana’s poetry as notation. For that presentation we had been working with a recording of Chambersonic that is published digitally in visual and audio formats on the Capilano Review. But Oana’s performance of a version of Chambersonic on that night of the online Words & Music Show was its own version. It was performed live. And, after listening, again, to this performance by Oana, I was struck by what Klara du Plessis chooses to read, following Oana’s performance. In listening to the recording, we are hearing a listening taking place within the event. And so in this ShortCuts we’ll be listening to Oana – and then we’ll be listening to Klara – as a listening to the event. What the event sounds like, what it feels like. What are its traces left behind, and its shifts in time? Here’s Ian Ferrier introducing Oana Avasilichioaei. |
| 04:37 |
Audio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words & Music, 2021: |
…our star performer of the evening. Her work interweaves poetry, sound, photography, and translation to explore an expanded idea of language, polyphonic structures and borders of listening. Her six collections of poetry and poetry-hybrids include Eight Track from Talonbooks, which is the finalist for the Klein prize for poetry and the Governor General’s Award, and Liminal from Talonbooks in 2015. She’s created many performance and sound works, written a libretto for a one act opera called Cells of Wind in 2020, and translated 10 books of poetry and prose from French and Romanian, most recently Bertrand Laverdure’s The Neptune Room which is also a finalist for the Governor General’s literary award for translation. She’s performed a number of times in our show and each time has brought amazing work. So please welcome Oana tonight. Yeah. |
| 05:33 |
Audio Recording, Oana Avasilichioaei, Words & Music, 2021: |
Thank you, thank you so much, Ian. Thank you so much for having me and I’m super happy to be here. So I’m going to share two pieces. The first piece is a video piece that I made last fall, which I call a filmpoem. It’s called “Tracking Animal (an extemporization)”, and it uses some text from the long work in this – in a track called “Tracking Animal.” And in fact, it will take us back outside. I’m just going to share my screen here and play it for you. |
| 06:14 |
Katherine McLeod: |
When Oana said those words, she did take us back outside. The visuals then showed her standing and walking in recognizable local Montreal spaces. She had recorded this video alone during the early times of the pandemic. You could see and feel that aloneness. The tracking of the self. It’s also quite moving that the spaces that she recorded in are spaces that many Montrealers have used to create art on their own during the pandemic — and that those spaces will soon, once again, be vibrant with arts events happening in them this summer outside. It is a beautiful piece, this video, and you can find a link to it in the show notes. The fact that she took us outside resonated with me as a listener, because I remember that when I was tuning into this show, I was listening on my balcony. I took a photo that night of my listening with my computer and Oana and the moon shining above. I sent that photo to her the next day as a form of thanks. And I look at it again now to remind myself that it was live. I stress the word live because the next piece she performed and the one that we’ll listen to was a version of Chambersonic, and it was performed live. |
| 07:45 |
Audio Recording, Oana Avasilichioaei, Words & Music, 2021: |
The second piece I’m going to do is actually going to be a live work. It’s new, it’s from a new body of work that I’m working on called Chambersonic — the larger project. And each piece I’m doing is numbered. So this is “Chambersonic (IV)”, and it’s based on a score, “Chambersonic (I)”, that looks like this [Shows Page to Audience] , and it was a version of both the score and the sound piece that was published in The Capilano Review in their fall issue. So, I’m going to need to change some audio settings. And then I’m going to start the piece… [Oana Performing, Voice Effect Reverberates, Sounds Play in Background] This, this is a lecture on phonetics. This is a setting on music. This is a sounding of silence. This is a manifest of now, this is a variant of being, this is a lecture on phonetics. This is a setting on music. This is a sounding of silence. This is a manifest of now. This is a variant of being… Let form be oral. A foundation…. [Singing] Sonority… An impossible lone sound… —netic … Recording… [Whispered] The ghost of sound. Let form be oral. A foundation… [Voices overlap] Corporeal, phonetic, fragments, re-assemblages. [Whispered] The ghost of sound… |
| 10:45 |
Katherine McLeod: |
This, this is a setting on music. This is. What is this? It is as though she is asking us to consider what is this this-ness — of sonority? Of an impossible lone sound? Of the ghost of sound? It is as though she is saying, I am performing now. This is the performance. This. We hear this even while knowing that there is an accompanying score. Is that too a this? She conveys an assertion of presence in the performance itself, which is why it feels so powerful to remember that it is happening live. As you are listening to this recording. How does listening now differ from me listening on my balcony under the moon to the live-stream? Where is the event now? [Audio of Oana’s Performance Begins] Let’s re-enter the sound and we’ll hear Ian Ferrier take us from Oana’s performance into Klara du Plessis’s reading that follows, and you’ll hear why I let the tape play and where Klara’s reading takes us… |
| 11:56 |
Audio Recording, Oana Avasilichioaei, Words & Music, 2021: |
[Oana Performing, Voice Effect Reverberates, Sounds Play in Background] Voice… Of timbre… The voice. Fills the void. The activity of sound, quieter, and louder, longer, and shorter… [Overlapping voice] The activity of sound — and quieter. Higher, and lower. Longer, and short. The activity of sound, louder and quieter, higher and lower… where silence differentiates. |
| 13:36 |
Audio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words & Music, 2021: |
Oh, that was lovely. Yeah. So nice to hear. And I love the sung voice and the talking voice and the whisper voice and the industrial sound beneath it. That’s really just a beautiful piece. Thank you so much. |
| 13:51 |
Audio Recording, Oana Avasilichioaei, Words & Music, 2021: |
Thank you. Thank you. Took me a moment to get back. [Laughs] |
| 13:57 |
Audio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words & Music, 2021: |
Yeah, it took me a moment too. I’m still [Sings] louder [Laughs] right. So thank you so much for that. |
| 14:07 |
Audio Recording, Oana Avasilichioaei, Words & Music, 2021: |
Thanks so much for having me again. |
| 14:09 |
Audio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words & Music, 2021: |
Yeah. Nice to see you. Yeah, yeah. And next up we have a person who’s been working quite a bit through the symposium as well. Her name is Klara du Plessis. She’s a poet, a critic, a literary curator too. And she resides in Montreal. She’s the winner of the 2019 Pat Lowther Memorial award for her debut collection Ekke, which was published with Palimpsest Press. Her second book, which was released in the fall of 2020 is Hell Light Flesh, and Klara is currently a PhD candidate at Concordia University researching the recent, contemporary, and experimental curation of poetry readings. Please welcome Klara du Plessis. |
| 14:54 |
Audio Recording, Klara du Plessis, Words & Music, 2021: |
Thank you so much for that really generous introduction, Ian. I’m still astounded by Oana’s performance and everything that came before. And so I feel like I’m still in a transitional phase, trying to get my bearings. It’s also the end of an incredible symposium week that’s been running since Tuesday night, and maybe as a result of that, I made a couple of decisions. One of them is to read new work. I’ve decided to try out some works that are in what I would call a draft and a half [Laugh]. So they’ve been lying around for a while they’re maybe six months or eight months old. But I only really edited them very lightly. I’m reading it because I feel like I kind of trust the people here and feel comfortable with a kind of tradition that Words & Music seems to have for people to try things. But the second reason that I am I’ve decided to read from this work is because I feel like it emanates from the research I’ve been doing at Concordia. And very much is a result of me reading works on archives and doing work in audio, audio and digital, both analog and digital archives. And, it’s a short, long poem. The kind of character in the poem is the event. But while I was writing it, because I was kind of thinking of postmortem and anatomy and so on, I did at some point look at that famous old Rembrandt painting of the anatomy table, which has the kind of famous, strange hand, like the hand, if you look at that painting, it’s got a hand that’s supposed to be the right hand, but it’s actually a left hand or a reverse. Um, and that kind of made its way into this poem also. So it’s called “Post-mortem of the event.” [Klara reading poem] The event lies on the table with its left hand and frontal arm dissected, sinuses and muscles, and maybe one disposable bone strumming like lines from a poem, pink inner exposeé, rationalizes the soul from vessel to enlightenment the latter so mystical, who knows how the verse becomes a multidimensional grid. Logic of the luminous skin of the other hand, intact pale rams brawn of the Cartesian Caucasian corpse. The event opened undocumented archive over the table, displayed, displayed, played, and atomically laid out to rest resist laboratory pages white as coats. Only thing is that the left hand is not the left, but the right, but not the right hand, but a second right hand, multifarious body mirroring itself in hands in hand rippling along its definitions of progress, usage and control. On the one hand, and on the other hand as wingspan on the one hand and on the one hand or on the other hand, and on the other hand, the archive of hands fans out fingers replicating selves, look, really look at this artwork. So strange armoured in mourning like the night… |
| 18:49 |
Katherine McLeod: |
The poem that Klara is reading from will be part of a forthcoming book in 2024. Post-mortem of the Event is, in fact, the working title of that collection. Oana’s performance that night is also a work-in-progress. It’s one version of “Chambersonic (IV)” of Chambersonic and the written textual material traces of that project will be coming out as a book also in 2024 under the title, Chambersonic. Let’s hear how Klara’s poem ends, and then we’ll hear Ian’s voice again, asking what comes next? |
| 19:25 |
Audio Recording, Klara du Plessis, Words & Music, 2021: |
[Klara reading poem] …with eight men and an extra dead struck still in time in the instant before darkness hits before bodies speed up moving the event, rapid fire and risqué rinsing themselves in light and a handshake with air. Thank you. |
| 19:48 |
Audio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words & Music, 2021: |
What a great piece. And that’s in progress? |
| 19:53 |
Audio Recording, Klara du Plessis, Words & Music, 2021: |
Yeah, this is new stuff. [Laughs] |
| 19:55 |
Audio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words & Music, 2021: |
[Laughs] Yeah, it’s really great. It’s really, really, really stunning all the different parts connecting around the event. So thank you very much for that. And thank you for your work on this conference and to Jason and to Ali as well. It’s been an amazing journey, which I guess you get to relax from tomorrow. Or do you do a post-mortem, or what happens at the end of all this? |
| 20:22 |
Katherine McLeod: |
When Ian asks Klara about the post-mortem of the event, it’s quite funny to hear that now because our symposium committee for listening sound agency has gone on to produce many collaborative outputs. The event has not ended. There’s an art book called Quotes edited by Klara and Emma Telaro about to be at this year’s symposium; also to be launched is a vinyl record with sounds from symposium participants, compiled by Deanna Fong, Angus Tarnowsky and Jason Camlot; a podcast episode has been released about the symposium and it was produced by Mathieu Aubin and Stephanie Ricci. And there will be a forthcoming issue of English Studies in Canada called “New Sonic Approaches to Literary Studies” edited by Jason Camlot and me, Katherine McLeod. So when you hear the end of this event, know that it is not the end, just like the poems that we have listened to continue to be in progress. This, this too is the event. [Start Music: ShortCuts Theme Music] |
| 21:32 |
Audio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words & Music, 2021: |
So nice to see everybody tonight. Thanks for your performances to Klara, to Cole, to Erin, to Oana, to Kevin. It’s been a really fun ride tonight. So thank you. |
| 21:43 |
Audio Recording, Klara du Plessis, Words & Music, 2021: |
Thank you. Thank you both. |
| 21:46 |
Audio Recording, Kevin McNeilly, Words & Music, 2021: |
Thanks so much. It’s terrific. |
| 21:49 |
Audio Recording, Ian Ferrier, Words & Music, 2021: |
Goodnight, everyone. Thanks for sharing. Thanks for coming. |
| 21:51 |
Audio Recording, Jason Camlot, Words & Music, 2021: |
We’ll see you all soon. |
| 21:58 |
Katherine McLeod: |
You’ve been listening to ShortCuts. If you want to learn more about where the sounds you’ve heard have come from head to SpokenWeb.ca and check the show notes for ShortCuts. If you’re listening to this on the release day, and you want to tune-in to SpokenWeb’s Symposium this year, head to spoken web.ca and click on “Symposia.” Plus you can find the podcast episode based on last year’s symposium by checking previous episodes of The SpokenWeb Podcast. You’ll find “Listening, Sound, Agency: a retrospective listening to the 2021 SpokenWeb Symposium” as the March, 2022 episode. ShortCuts is hosted by Hannah McGregor transcribed by Kelly Cubbon mixed and mastered by Judith Burr, Kate Moffatt, and Miranda Eastwood, and produced by me, Katherine McLeod. Thanks for listening. [End Music: ShortCuts Theme Music] |
