45 years later, the sites and sound of Biggs’ NFB film are re-visited and re-heard as a 16mm film installation.

Watch the Original

“Hands sweeping across radio dials are recorded from around the world (and trapped under glass).”

LONDON: Ema Bonifacic

BOLOGNA: Alessandro Bocci

DAWSON CITY: Ken Gregory

HONG KONG: Jacqui Cheung

MEXICO CITY: Gabriel Villalobos

PETERBOROUGH: Anna Friz

PRAGUE: Eliska Plina

RIO DE JANEIRO: Mariana Magalhães Costa

BEIRUT: Mazen Kerbaj

LONDON: Thelius Zamprogno

MONTREAL: Hélène Prévost

PARIS: Gonçalo Vasconcelos

TUKTOYAKTUK: Charles Stankievech

PORT CHALMERS: Michael Morley

*AKVK would like to deeply thank all our kind friends for participating in this project.

89.0 FM Performances Include:

[ Streaming Audio Link ]

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Thursday February 25th 15:00 Charles Stankievech Snow for Snow

Snow for Snow is a performance of Michael Snow’s 1980 “Short Wavelength” composition actualised by mixing two live short wavelength radio feeds while rebroadcasting the performance in realtime on FM stereo radio. Consisting mostly of radio static and white noise with the occasional distorted signal, the broadcast was transmitted from a storefront window on St. Catherine street, Montréal while it was snowing outside.

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Saturday February 27 20:00-01:00 AKVK

For Nuit Blanche AKVK plays a mix of thrift store items and a Ghost Acoustics remix.

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Wednesday March 10 17:00-18:00 Kathy Kennedy

Kathy Kennedy is a sound artist with formal training in visual art as well as classical singing. Her art practice generally involves the voice and issues of interface with technology, often using telephony or radio transmission. Her large scale sonic installation/performances for over 100 singers and radio, called “sonic choreographies,” have been performed internationally including the inauguration of the Vancouver New Public Library and at the Lincoln Center’s Out of Doors Series. She frequently gives lectures and workshops on listening skills, acoustic ecology and vocal improvisation.

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Wednesday March 10 18:00-21:00 Mark Lanctôt

Plays an eclectic collection of moldy records stored in a damp garage in Habitat 67.

Mark Lanctôt is a curator at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal

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Thursday March 11, 17:00-18:00 Dinner Music: Songs for Early Evening

This is TM’s first foray into radio and public anonymity. Anonymous, not so much.

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Friday March 12 14:00-16:00 Javiera Ovalle Sazie & Sarah Barr

For her ra(i)dio performance, Javiera Ovalle Sazie, armed with a thrift store air pressurized super soaker, will write with water onto the glass of the vitrine. The sounds of these writings will bring linguistic and personal translations from the news of the recent Chilean earthquake.

Sarah Barr will teach others texts from her memory - a double translation - making room for more loss but also for more possibility, the layering of genres, authors, memory, bodies and voices. The flow and present moment of radio offers a greater wager within the development of this textual relationship.

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Friday March 12 18:30-19:12 Matthew Fellows

Matthew Fellows is recent transplant to Montreal from Los Angeles who loves public transportation. He has recorded his daily commute from his apartment to his office and back which includes the sounds of the Metro and fellow Metro riders.

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Sunday March 14 20:00-22:00 Jo-Anne Balcaen & Tim Dallett

JB: “Backmasking to Backwoods” Subliminal messages; Psychiatric Consultations No. 4: Anxiety; Getting Through: A Guide to Better Understanding of the Hard of Hearing; Mother Earth’s Plantasia: Songs to help plants Grow; Music by Artists, Music about Art … and much more

- - - - - - - - - - - -_, or, why do I have these 45s?

I’ve never paid that much attention to the 7” vinyl format. By comparison to the 12” LP, the 7” (whether 33 or 45 RPM) always seemed too short and inconvenient. But somehow I wound up with a few. There’s nothing dramatic or exceptional about these discs. As a group, they’re really just markers of past interests: points on a line. A set of 13 or 14 a and/or b sides, about 45 minutes worth, with something else to fill the hour if there is time left over. Making choices, but making them by having made them long ago.
Tim Dallett

Jo-Anne Balcaen and Tim Dallett are Montreal-based artists and cultural workers.

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Sunday March 14 22:00-24:00 Anonymous

Tribute to Montréal music producer Gino Soccio

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Monday March 15 16:00-17:00 Hélène Prévost

Sound artist, musician and radio producer. Using field recordings, editing, remixing, radios and multiple recording devices, she has developed, since 2006, an instrument that is an evolving combination between a radio studio and a laboratory of sound and electric confrontations.

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Monday March 15 19:00-20:00 Leisure Projects

Leisure presents…. Jano, Laura, Charlerie, Odile, Natalie, Taylor, Bunny, Sheena, Francesca, Samantha, Aretha, Louisa, Jannetta, Holly, Kumari, Isa, Olivia, Carly, Donna, Tess

Leisure Projects is an artist-curator collaborative practice begun in 2004, which explores popular imaginaries of leisure through curated exhibitions, performed events or published texts. Leisure Projects is the delirious brainchild of artist/curators Meredith Carruthers and Susannah Wesley.

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Wednesday March 17  08:00-09:00 Douglas Moffat

Morning sounds.

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Wednesday March 17 22:00-24:00  Anonymous

A more active engagement with the vinyl record…

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Thursday March 18 17:00-20:00 Jon Knowles

Plays selections from his project, The Robert Smithson Record Collection (2004-)

Jon Knowles is an artist who works across artistic disciplines, materials and methods and has developed an idiosyncratic approach to artistic research. Knowles was included in Rien ne se perd, rien ne se cree, tous se transforme at the Musée d’art Contemporain de Montréal; The Perception of Ideas leads to new ideas at the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen Düsseldorf; OFF BNL MTL Pavilion Projects; Exalted Beings: Animal Relationships and Actual both at Dalhousie Art Gallery; and Converse without leaving home at Cooper Gallery, Dundee, Scotland.

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Thursday March 18 Tim Hecker 20:00-22:00 

Plays selections from junk-store radio and hard-drive entrails….

Tim Hecker is a musical composer and sound artist. Over the past decade he has released work on a variety of international imprints and has toured widely. He resides in Montreal.

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Saturday March 20 18:00-20:00 Cristobal Urbina

DJ Poontz (Cristobal Urbina) was born June 18, 1974 in Santiago, Chile. He moved around North and South America for the first twenty years of his life, before making Montreal, Canada his home in 1995. From 1996 on Poontz has been promoting and playing weekly nights as well as special events . His focus has been underground electronic music, from house, electro, techno, to breakbeats and hip hop, basically anything with Heavy Bass and Funk goes. He now runs a small Montreal based label to be launched in June 2010.

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Saturday March 20 20:00 - 22:00 Cem Zafir and Donna Akrey

Cem Zafir and Donna Akrey are both interested in musique actuelle and were both Canada Post employees at one time or another. We would like to play a mélange of tracks mixing musicals, music actuelle and comedy….all in a futile attempt to create a new genre.

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Saturday March 20 Sunset Joshua Bonnetta

Josh Bonnetta = .33333 AKVK.

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More to be confirmed…

CONTACT MICROPHONE RECORDINGS
FROM ST. PAUL’S CATHEDRAL, LONDON

Drawing from multiple segments of a recording of an evensong mass this project composites choral voice, a 400 year-old pipe organ with the everyday ambient sound of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London.

The source material was recorded with a contact microphone, which   captures sound through the vibration of materials  (in this case, Portland limestone quarried from Dorset). Not unlike a stethoscope, the contact microphone allows an entry point into Christopher Wren’s monument to reveal both the building’s acoustic signature and the sounds contoured through its inner architecture.

Three individual sound works were created from these recordings,
transferred to ¼” tape and spliced into long loops.  Together, each creates a physical tracing of the vitrine space. At disparate lengths, the loops constantly meet at different junctures to create a composition in flux - reflective of the changing sound of the space itself.

Employing a special transducer, Evensongs transposes the resonance of the cathedral walls into the glass panels of the gallery vitrine, projecting for the moment, the acoustic ghost of St. Paul’s cathedral.

Play (FOFA Edit)

In the summer of 2009, we were staying with friends in a small house in South London. One evening, after a long day of teaching we were listening to Joy Division’s song Transmission out in the garden on tinny laptop speakers.

Many listens later, JB mentioned how great the intro to the song was, the sound of the amps warming up just before the first drum hit. SB quickly made a small loop of it on his computer and let it play.

As darkness fell, the loop continued, seeming to melt into the surroundings. Each of us now playing variations of this fragment, we placed our laptops in different locations around the garden.

This record captures that brief moment.

The record was pressed by Leon at Transition Records, also in London. The accompanying video follows the cutting of this particular record in real time.

A test pressing, the record is not made to stand up to repeated plays. Over time, as listeners in the gallery play the record it will begin to deteriorate, eventually becoming unplayable.

Each week, AKVK selects records that coincide, collide or conspire with Ghost Acoustics.

Why Vinyl?

SB: My interest in vinyl records is as much about the music etched into the material, intent and gesture formed through electrical current into vinyl grooves, as the distribution systems and networks that move them around the world, the tiny little operations and efforts made by independent record labels and the enormous impact these cultural artifacts leave in their wake.

DM: I am interested in site-specific sounds. Sounds of spaces themselves or how spaces change sound is a key component in my work. For me, the vinyl record is like a site itself, a location that one must go to in order to hear what is inscribed on its surfaces. For Vinyl Kiosk, I have tried to select records that approach this idea in different ways.

JB: I am interested in records both as found objects and as aural material for my own film and animation work. Their superior archival quality and ubiquity make them a practical source to draw on as a sonic accompaniment that is temporally congruent to archival moving images.
As easily accessible references of a specific mode of time, process and technology, records fascinate me. However, one of the most interesting qualities is the materiality of records - how they are capable of holding more than just a sound recording. Dust, finger prints, someone’s scrawling in short hand…these marks point to something or someone outside the medium, often no longer here. These qualities evoke narratives. How did a particular recording make its way into someone’s possession? What did it mean to them?
For me, this representational dualism is a defining aspect of the specific medium of records.

This is a sound system that does not belong in a gallery. 

Designed and built to weather difficult climactic condtions and curious listeners, these knots of speakers and cables comprise a long-term sound project for the Jardins de Métis International Garden Festival, in Grand Métis, Québec.

For the extent of this exhibition however, this equipment has been
captured from it’s wilder, forest habitat and loaded into a truck to be transported to the gallery.

While in the gallery, these sonic scavengers become the archive for the activities that surround the Ghost Acoustics exhibition. Beginning with only the small sounds of their internal electronics, over time they will broadcast fragmented sounds from performances, screenings and workshops as they happen over the next few weeks.

In a final act, they will be loaded up again into a car and taken out into the Montreal night as workshop participants let them loose to distribute unexpected sounds into the winter night.

FILM SERIES 1: CATASTROPHIC SILENCES

Sunday March 7 2pm

YORK AMPHITHEATRE
EV-1-605 1515 Ste-Catherine West
As part of the GHOST ACOUSTICS
exhibition, AKVK has assembled a
three-part film series.

The first of this series presents three
films, each considers catastrophic
moments that become lasting silences.

23 SKIDOO
Julian Biggs
CA | 1964 | 8 min. | BW | 16mm to DVD | English
Montreal has been left abandoned, forgotten sounds
remain.

LA SOUFRIÈRE:
Warten auf eine unausweichliche Katastrophe
Werner Herzog
DE | 1977 |  30 min. | COLOR | 16mm to DVD | English
Fearing volcanic eruption, an island is evacuated.
Herzog arrives to film those refusing to leave.

AWAY
Peter Mettler
CA | 2007 | 3 min. | COLOR | DV to DVD | English
With hardly any power left in his camera batteries,
Mettler walks off into the Costa Rica rainforest.

FILM SERIES 2: PICTURES OF LIGHT Sunday March 14 2pm

J.A. de SÈVE CINEMA  
J.W. McConnell Building (Library)
1400 de Maisonneuve West

As part of the GHOST ACOUSTICS
exhibition, AKVK has assembled a
three-part film series.

FILM SERIES 2:
AKVK are thrilled to be able to present
a 35mm print of Peter Mettler’s
celebrated film.

PICTURE OF LIGHT
Peter Mettler
CA | 2007 | 83 min. | COLOR | 35mm | English
“We live in a time where things do not
seem to exist if they are not contained
as an image. But if you look into this
darkness you may see the lights of your
own retina. Not unlike the northern
lights, not unlike the movements of
thought, not unlike a shapeless
accumulation of everything we have
ever seen.”

Made possible through the collaboration of the Leonard and
Bina Ellen Gallery, in parallel with “Magnetic Norths”
curated by Charles Stankievech and the kind support of
Grimthorpe Films.

FILM SERIES 3: ILLUMINATIONS Sunday March 21 2pm

YORK AMPHITHEATRE
EV-1-605 1515 Ste-Catherine West

As part of the GHOST ACOUSTICS
exhibition, AKVK has assembled a
three-part film series.

FILM SERIES 3 ILLUMINATIONS:
In the dark, sounds become imagination,
dreams, nightmares.

NIGHT MAYOR
Guy Maddin
CA | 2009 | 10 min. | BW | 16mm to DVD | English

PHANTOM CARRIAGE
Victor Sjöström, KTL Edition
SE | 1921 | 93 min. | BW Tinted | 35mm to DVD
Swedish with English subtitles
With new soundtrack by KTL
(Stephen O’Malley and Peter Rehberg)

WORKSHOP 1: THRIFT STORE RADIO

Wednesday February 24 1pm until 7pm

Montreal’s thrift stores are distinct sites of discarded sounds. Thrift Store Radio    rescues this sonic material to prepare  personalized responses, ready for radio broadcast.

LOCATION:
Beginning with a record collecting trip to local thrift stores, raw materials will be selected and brought back to the Ghost Acoustics exhibition at the FOFA gallery.

ACTION:
Working with AKVK, different methods of treating, editing, deconstructing and mixing this sonic material will be discussed and demonstrated as participants put together their own personal broadcasts.

TRANSMIT:
The exhibition is equipped with a small radio transmitter capable of broadcasting sound in the vicinity of the gallery. The broadcasts prepared in this workshop will form a radio program ready for transmission.

ARCHIVE:
As well as the moment of transmission, these broadcasts will live on as a streaming webcast and become part of the ‘Coyote’ installation in the exhibition.

PARTICIPATE:
This workshop is open to all interested participants. No previous experience is necessary. Please send an email with a short expression of interest to fofagall@alcor.concordia.ca or contact gallery staff. The maximum number of participants will be 6.

WORKSHOP 2: COYOTE

Friday, March 5 3pm (until late)

Coyote is an all-weather, mongrel
sound-system, built to distribute
unexpected sounds in unusual places.
Let loose from the exhibition for one day
and carrying sonic materials from the
Ghost Acoustics exhibition, this workshop
seeks out other acoustic habitats.

LOCATION: Various sites, selected in discussion with
workshop participants, will become sites for clandestine sonic
intervention. Visiting these locations, Coyote units will be set
into these surroundings and switched on…

MATERIALS: Participants are invited to work with the audio
archive from the Ghost Acoustics exhibition, or to bring their
own sound in any format.

LISTEN: This workshop is concerned primarily with listening and
the effects of the spaces on the sounds themselves. Different
techniques of treating, editing, deconstructing sound will be
discussed within the larger context of field recording.

ARCHIVE: These brief sonic installations will become field
recordings themselves, recorded in situ. These recording will be
come part of the ongoing archive stored in the Coyote units as
they wait in the gallery. As well, short videos of these installations
will live on in online archive.

PARTICIPATE:
This workshop is open to all interested participants. No previous
experience is necessary. Please send an email with a short
expression of interest to fofagall@alcor.concordia.ca or contact
gallery staff.

The maximum number of participants will be 6.
* For more information please contact gallery staff.

23 Skidoo | Julian Biggs | 1964 | 8 min 12 s