Sound Migrations is also a live immersive experience.
Oct 23-25, 2020
Western Front
unceded Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Territories (Vancouver)
Meredith Bates invited vocalist and sound engineer Lief Hall and visual artist Josema Zamorano to co-create an improvisational music-video performance as the final part of her artist residency at the Western Front. The collaboration converged, looking for a dialogue between fully-immersive aural, visual and spatial experiences, reflecting on migration and the living transformations and relationships that are part of it.
sound becoming body movement, voice and violin becoming ocean waves and birds, music becoming awareness of space, wind becoming texture, the forest becoming cellular copulation, colour becoming mood, perception becoming the environment itself
The audio is performed live on an octophonic surround sound system and consists of live acoustic and processed violin; Meredith's field recordings; Lief's live acoustic and processed voice; and octophonic manipulation, also by Lief Hall. The concert happened 7 times for a live audience of 8 people at each iteration. No performance was identical.
The video-performance aspect was created in dialogue with the moment by using a digital camera as an instrument to "play" two photomontages that depict abstracted landscapes. The imagery, read via body movements and gestural modulations over the lens, was processed in-camera to produce moving colour fields, and was live-fed to dual projections covering the east and west walls of the Luxe Hall.
Sound Migrations; photo Josema Zamorano
The audience migrated through lit spots on the floor to experience diverse aural and visual perspectives, their energy and presence becoming part of the work as a whole, both physically, as their shadows danced on the wall like trees, and sonically, as the sound of their breathing and movements meshed with the ambience of the musicians and the room.
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.