Remote Access: Women in Electroacoustic Music

Description:

This was the second concert of the Remote Access series. It featured electroacoustic music compositions and performances of four women composers in an hour-long show, with the audience immersed in darkness in the Grand Luxe Hall.

Sandy Scofield’s work Forever (2007), is a reimagining of a poem by Secwepemc and Ktunaxa writer and spoken-word artist Vera Manuel entitled “L.A. Obsession.” Using Manuel’s spoken voice reciting an excerpt, Scofield created the piece through extensive digital processing and is intended to take the listener on a journey through love lost.

Islands of One (2007) by Katharine Norman was inspired by the artist’s personal experience of becoming seriously ill (and hallucinating wildly) while living on Pender Island. The piece is a consideration of mind and body—not so much on the more popularly held notions of dualism, but rather on the fragility of whatever thread it is that holds our sense of self together. It featured her own text and voice and recordings from her time on the island. 

Hildegard Westerkamp performed Attending to Sacred Matters (2002). The artist contemplates what is sacred through an audio journey of the sounds of the many religious and spiritual practices that she encountered and recorded while traveling in India.

Tara Rodgers presented a three-part work, Three Sonic Panoramas: Vancouver, BC (2007) that was developed while in residence at Western Front. It incorporated a projected slideshow of three locales where the artist took photographs, and in which colour data from each pixel was converted into sound using the programming language SuperCollider. The resulting sonic panoramas offered a data-driven representation of time and place to be mediated by individual encounters.

Curated by DB Boyko and Ben Wilson.

Video documentation available upon request.