[{"id":"9641","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S5E7, ShortCuts Live! Talking about Listening with Moynan King, Erica Isomura, and Rémy Bocquillon, 3 June 2024, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/shortcuts-live-special-edition/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 5"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2024],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/c9448971-5d6f-4edc-8389-6965f8c8fcd1/audio/cd747ce4-9bf8-4436-a9e9-a0a6013b5185/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"spokenweb-june-episode-long-shortcuts-master-v22.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:54:55\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"(52,728,937 bytes)\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"spokenweb-june-episode-long-shortcuts-master-v22\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/shortcuts-live-special-edition/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2024-06-03\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"SHOW NOTES \\n\\nTRACE at Theatre Passe Muraille\\n\\nSteve Roach, Quiet Music 1\\n\\nFalse Knees, Montreal-based graphic artist drawing birds talking\\n\\nÉliane Radigue\\n\\nKishi Bashi, “Manchester.” (Did you catch that this song is about writing a novel and Erica had just talked about novels? Not to mention the bird references. There are many more Kishi Bashi songs to listen to, but linking this since we played a clip from this one in the episode for these serendipitous reasons!)\\n\\n\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549755002880,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["In this month’s episode of The SpokenWeb Podcast, ShortCuts is taking over the airwaves.\n\nShortCuts is the monthly minisode that takes you on a deep dive into archival sound through a short ‘cut’ of audio. In this fifth season, ShortCuts producer Katherine McLeod has been presenting a series of live conversations recorded at the 2023 SpokenWeb Symposium – and in this full episode, we’re rolling out the last of those recordings. You’ll hear from Moynan King, Erica Isomura and Rémy Bocquillon. You’ll also hear the voices of our then-supervising producer Kate Moffatt and our then-sound designer Miranda Eastwood, who was there behind-the-scenes recording the audio and who joins in the conversations too.\n\nListening is at the heart of each conversation, and each conversation ends with the question: What are you listening to now? That ends up being quite an eclectic playlist and do check the Show Notes below for links.\n\nIf you like what you hear, check out the rest of Season Five of ShortCuts for conversations with Jennifer Waits, Brian Fauteaux, and XiaoXuan Huang. And, of course, this month’s episode with the longest ShortCuts yet: “ShortCuts Live! Talking about Listening with Moynan King, Erica Isomura, and Rémy Bocquillon.”\n\n00:01\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Song:\t[Instrumental music overlapped with feminine voice]\nCan you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n00:19\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb podcast, stories about how literature sounds.\n[Music fades]\nMy name is Hannah McGregor–\n00:37\tKatherine McLeod:\tAnd my name is Katherine McLeod. And each month, we’ll be bringing you different stories that explore the intersection of sound, poetry, literature, and history, created by scholars, poets, and students and artists from across Canada.\nIn this month’s episode, Shortcuts is taking over the airwaves. Shortcuts is a monthly minisode, or short episode, distributed on the same podcast feed. Produced by me, Katherine McLeod, Shortcuts takes you on a deep dive into archival sound through a shortcut of audio.\nAnd it wouldn’t quite be Shortcuts without the Shortcuts intro. So, let’s press play on the music and begin.\n01:23\tShortcuts Theme Music\t[Electronic music begins playing.]\n01:27\tKatherine McLeod:\tWelcome to Shortcuts. In season five of Shortcuts, you’ve been hearing Shortcuts Live, conversations recorded at the 2023 SpokenWeb symposium.\nFor this episode, we’re rolling out the last of those recordings. You’ll hear from Moyen King, Erica Isomura, and Rémy Bocquillon. You’ll also hear the voices of Kate Moffatt, our then-supervising producer. And you’ll hear Miranda Eastwood, who is there behind the scenes recording the audio. Miranda even jumps into the conversation from time to time.\nListening is at the heart of each conversation, and each conversation ends with a question: What are you listening to now? That ends up being quite a playlist and do check the show notes for those links.\n02:22\tKatherine McLeod:\tIf you like what you hear, check out the rest of this season five of Shortcuts. There, you’ll find the other Shortcuts live conversations from that same symposium. You’ll hear Jennifer Waits talking about the magic in the archives of college radio stations and Brian Fauteux on widescreen radio. Yes, widescreen radio. And Xiaoxuan Huang speaking about “hybrid poetics” and much more in that conversation.\nSo, without further ado, here is the longest Shortcuts episode yet: Shortcuts Live, Talking About Listening with Moynan King, Erica Isomura, and Rémy Bocquillon.\n03:04\tShortcuts Theme Music\t[Music fades away.]\n03:10\tKate Moffatt:\tSo, hello and welcome to an episode of Shortcuts Live. I am recording this with Moynan King at the 2023 SpokenWeb Symposium at the University of Alberta.\nMoynan, thank you so much for joining us today.\n03:26\tMoynan King:\tOh my gosh, thank you for having me.\n03:28\tKate Moffatt:\tYeah! Um, oh, and I should introduce myself quickly because this is not the voice people usually hear on SpokenWeb Shortcuts. I am Kate Moffatt, the supervising producer, stepping in for our intrepid usual host, Katherine McLeod.\nSo, to get us going here, Moynan, would you just introduce yourself for us briefly?\n03:47\tMoynan King:\tYeah. My name is Moynan King. I’m a theater artist, performance artist, writer, you know, sometimes academic. I’m doing a postdoc at Western University, and the subject of my postdoctoral studies is “Queer Resonance.” So, I’m exploring the concept of sound as queer, queerness as sound, within communities and also within performance practices and art in general.\n04:24\tKate Moffatt:\tIncredible. Yeah. I cannot wait to chat and hear more about this. But I think we’ll kick off by listening to what you’ve brought for us today.\n04:33\tMoynan King:\tSounds good. So, for the listeners, it’s about a minute and 20 seconds. [Overlap from Kate: Perfect.] So, we’ll just have a listen.\n04:42\tAudio Recording:\t[Audio of harmonizing voices starts playing]\n06:09\tMoynan King:\tI guess that’s where it stops. There’s just a bit of dead air at the end.\n06:14\tKate Moffatt:\tWonderful. The listeners won’t be able to see this, but I had to literally put my hand on my chest. I was feeling that in my chest while I was listening. That was so fantastic.\n06:26\tMoynan King:\tThank you.\n06:27\tKate Moffatt:\tYeah, I was gonna say, tell us, what we were just listening to?\n06:29\tMoynan King:\tOkay. So, this is a track called “Ghosts,” and it’s a composition by Tristan R Whiston from a show that Tristan and I co-created called “Trace,” that we started to develop back in, oh my gosh, 2012.\nIt started as an installation performance. We toured it across Canada. So we went to Regina; I know you’re from Saskatchewan. [Overlap from Kate: I am]. In 2015, we went to Regina, Yellowknife, Whitehorse, and Montreal. There’s someone else in our booth from Montreal. [Miranda Eastwood laughs]\nAnd then we put it away, put it in its massive storage cases, and then Theatre Passe Muraille just asked us to remount it. And when we did that, we turned it from being an installation into a play. So, we tore it apart and put it forward. [Overlap from Kate: Wow.]\nAnd, so, what you’re listening to here is a track composed by Tristan Wiston; composed by him and of him.\n07:32\tMoynan King:\tSo, Tristan is a trans singer, performer, community activist. And over the course of his transition – that is over the course of the period during which he started taking “T” [Referring to Testosterone] – he recorded his voice almost every day, repeatedly singing the same songs and, you know, talking and singing and kind of expressing himself into this recorder and then also singing repeatedly over and over these songs.\nAnd one important thing to know about Tristan is that prior to transition, he was an incredible soprano singer. And so had one of those perfect high-pitched voices. And for many, many years, Tristan and I worked together in a group, Toronto-based group called “The Boy Choir of Lesbos.”\nAnd, so, we used to, there were a bunch of us, and we would dress as boys and we would sing in, you know, the harmonies of an Anglican boy choir. [Overlap from Kate: Right.] And so, we would sing and that was just sort of part of the collaborative history of Tristan and I. [Overlap from Kate: Incredible.]\nSo, Tristan came to me, and I think it was around 2011, and said, “I really wanna do something with these tracks. I wanna do something with all this material that I have.” And he’d already, then at that point, done a podcast. Well, you know, I guess at that time we didn’t call it a podcast. I think it had a different name, right? [Laughs]\n08:57\tKate Moffatt:\tAn audio essay. A piece–\n9:00\tMoynan King:\tYes, yes. An audio essay. Thank you.\n9:03\tKate Moffatt:\tYeah, you’re welcome.\n09:03\tMoynan King:\t–called “Middle C,” and that was with the CBC [The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation] – I mentioned that because I believe it’s still in the CBC archives. But he brought it to me because he wanted to do something more experimental with it, something less linear.\nSo, we started to work with all these tracks. And so, we did like tons of listening over, you know, a long period of time and kind of compartmentalize things. So, the important thing to know about that track, and in fact about “Trace” the show, is that all of the sound is made from Tristan’s voice–\n09:38\tKate Moffatt:\tWow–\n09:38\tMoynan King:\tAnd so a lot of the sounds that you hear in this track are fragments taken from different periods, different stages of his transition. And one of the big discoveries we made with, originally working with these tracks – and to be clear, Trey Justin is the composer. [Overlap from Kate: Okay.] So, but in a way maybe I, you could kind of call me a “doctor.” A “compositional dramaturg,” you know, because we worked so much together on the creation of the show, and those compositions were being created at that time. But so just to be clear, this is Tristan’s composition, but that I was involved in the process of it. And so yeah, that’s what you were listening to.\n10:21\tKate Moffatt:\tWow. That’s fantastic. And I’ve already got so many questions around things like the amount of audio that you end up with, like the recordings that become almost like an archive of sorts, that you’re then kind of like working with and engaging with, you know.\nI just think that’s so, so interesting. Wow. Okay. I don’t even know where to start with this. I feel so delighted. So I guess, and I would love to kind of tap into a little bit of that kind of collaboration that you were talking about. I’d love to hear more about that and maybe to think a little bit too about kind of like the role that listening is playing in that I feel like, you know, when it’s multiple people, at multiple ears, and especially working with that much audio. Anyway, I, anything there, that you would like to kind of speak to? I feel like that’s so rich.\n11:13\tMoynan King:\tYeah. It’s so interesting because I think just to address the topic of collaboration, you know, that it’s a collaboration. This piece, “Trace,” is a collaboration, you know, first of all for Tristan with himself [Laughs], you know–\n11:30\tKate Moffatt:\tOh, yeah, yeah, yeah–\n11:31\tMoynan King:\t–With all of his selves, you know, over time. [Overlap from Kate: Totally.]\nAnd then of course with me and, also thinking about collaboration and, artistic collaborations, Tristan and I like to say we’ve been working together since the late 19 hundreds. And because I think saying it that way gives you a sense of the depth of our collaboration and the amount of time and how much we have both changed in many, many ways. And also, how we have not changed in many other ways. You know?\n12:06\tKate Moffatt:\tThat’s such a gorgeous way to think about it.\n12:08\tMoynan King:\tSo, when we, and so when we were, when we created the first piece and, so it’s, again, it’s called “Trace.” And we are the co-creators of it. He kind of takes up certain roles and I take up other roles, but we always developed the thing together. You know, we really had a vision of creating this very immersive piece. And I still love that style, and I’m really committed to that style, like immersive installation, performance, that sort of stuff.\nBut when Theater Passe Muraille, which is a theatre in Toronto, it’s a very old theatre. It’s been around since I think the 1960s. And the space is certainly conducive to certain kinds of performance, but it’s very much a, like theatre, you know, with an audience and a playing space–\n12:56\tKate Moffatt:\tYes–\n12:56\tMoynan King:\tAnd so, what was exciting for us as collaborators was when Theater Passe Muraille approached us to remount – and you can’t see the air quotes, but I’m doing them [Laughs] – remount “Trace,” we just said “Yes.”\nBecause, you know, coming outta the pandemic, we’re like, “Oh God, great. Yes. Like, let’s just do a show. Oh, yeah.” You know, everything has been so crazy, and you all know what I mean.\nSo we just said “yes.” And then of course, at our first meeting, we were both like, “Yeah, but we’re not gonna do the same show” [Laughs]. We’re not even [Laughs], we’re not even gonna tell Theater Passe Muraille because we don’t want any questions. We just wanna do what we wanna do. But the important thing to understand, I think, about this piece, in terms of its like thematic, and this is very much connected to the topic of collaboration and community and the concept of becoming, this is something we were working with a lot that it’s an ongoing process of inventing and reinventing yourself, you know?\n13:57\tMoynan King:\tAnd this idea of like coming out, which is something we do over and over and over again, you know. And there’s a line in the new “Trace” where Tristan’s talking about his sister’s gender reveal party for a child, and then he says “I, nobody ever threw me a gender reveal party. I have to do it myself all the time.” [Laughs]. You know, kind of…And so this idea, it says, connected to this. And so these themes of, these taking the themes of Tristan’s unique experience as a performer and as a singer, and then kind of applying them to broader experiences and to the idea that, to ideas that are familiar to everyone, then that is that non…that stasis is counter to life. That, as long as we are alive, we are changing, and we are becoming. We–\n14:54\tKate Moffatt:\tNever stay the same–\n14:54\tMoynan King:\tYeah. And so the piece had to change too, because the last time we had performed it prior to this was 2015, and we had changed.\n15:02\tKate Moffatt:\tAbsolutely. [Overlap from Moynan: You know?] Okay. And actually, that was the next question that I wanted to take up was you talked about changing it from an “installation” into something.\nAnd it was interesting ’cause as you were, as you were telling us, you even were using your hands to indicate how you had to kind of “break it down,” and you moved your hands in a sweeping motion, and then you were like, and then you pushed away from yourself. You said we had to put it forward, right? [Overlap from Moynan: Yeah.]\nYou had to really reorient yourself [Overlap from Moynan: Yeah.] for the piece. And I thought that was so interesting ’cause to go back, even to my own, like my hand going directly to my chest, like a couple of seconds in, I was like, I could feel it in my chest and then I could feel it in my mouth and it was somehow just this extremely embodied listening experience.\nSo I would love to hear more about what that was like, having to think about the ways in which this piece and the show itself even like that, it’s just the embodiment of the archive that’s creating it. And the process that it was. And anything I did this last time, I very, I’m good at asking twisty questions. So anything there that you’d like to take up? I’d love to hear more about.\n16:07\tMoynan King:\tWell, I think there are a couple of key things that you brought up there. And one of them is that shape, changing the shape of a piece. And, for the listener that, yes, when I was talking about the installation, I kind of moved my fingers into sort of circular motion to sort of indicate like a space within which…And then when I talked about the theatre as Kate said, I put my hands and pushed away. So it’s like putting something out towards the audience so much, and I’m directly addressing you.\nAnd so changing the shape of a piece changes the fundamental quality and essence of the piece. Right? [Overlap from Kate: Yeah.] And then I’ll, I’d like to also talk about the archive a little bit more after that. [Overlap from Kate: Please. Yeah.]\nBut when we decided to do that, just to sort of give you a bit more information, there is some stuff online, which I can give you a link to some of these sounds, are online if anybody wants to listen to more of them.\n17:09\tMoynan King:\tBut, the idea we started with was this idea kind of an idea of Tristan walking through a forest of his own voices. [Overlap from Kate: Wow.]\nYou know, you have in your studio here the YSM5s [Yorkville Sound YSM5 are compact powered studio monitors] beautiful speakers. We had 10 of those. When we created the piece, you know, we first showed it in the summer of 2012 and then toured it in 2015.\nWhen we did that, we had to hire someone to create custom software for us in order to channel the 12 different tracks to 12 different speakers. Sorry, 10, 10, sorry, my numbers come from another iteration. But anyway, so the 10, the 10 speakers, and of course now you can just do that on QLab [QLab is a cue-based multimedia playback software], right? Like, it’s like, and so interesting just in terms of change and time and how the technology has changed along with us, and how in 2012 we were so cutting edge, you know?\n18:09\tKate Moffatt:\tRight, right–\n18:10\tMoynan King:\tAnd now basically it’s something anybody can do if you can have 12 if you can own the 10 speakers [Overlap from Kate: Right, right.] [Laughter] and the cable to get them, not a small thing to do. [Overlap from Kate: Yeah, yeah.]\nNot a small thing to have access to those things. So we were really working with this idea of change and, a lot of the key songs that Tristan was singing over and over as his voice changed were very water-related. Okay. So one of those, the “Waters Wide,” and the other one is called, I think, called “I Am Sailing.” And so interesting. And so we used that theme, and we created kind of a beach scenario, and we had these three huts, and one of them was sort of Tristan’s “Command Central,” and he operated the entire show.\n18:56\tMoynan King:\tAt some point in our development rehearsal process, I remember coming into rehearsal one day and just saying to Tristan, “You have to do everything.” So it’s like, it was like, I, you know, we were creating the piece together, but then when it actually came to the performance, he had to control everything.\nAnd I feel like that was really connected to the thematic of it, that it was, everything was coming out of his body and that this environment represented his whole body. And then he was kind of like the homunculus, if you know, that you would know that term as someone who studies that era. [Overlap from Kate: Yeah.]\nAnyway, that’s what that was. And then we also recorded, set up booths, and had an interactive element where the audience recorded their voices, too.\n19:44\tKate Moffatt:\tThat’s very cool.\n19:45\tMoynan King:\tSo trying to share with the audience this experience that Tristan had of sitting and recording your own voice. And so we set it up with like fragment sentence fragments and ask people to finish them. So we have this incredible archive segue. Here I go segue.\n19:59\tKate Moffatt:\tYes, segue. That was beautifully done.\n20:02\tMoynan King:\tVoices from across the country of people completing the same sentences. And it’s a massive archive. And we use it, we use it in Toronto at the end of the show, so we finish the show with it.\nBut I feel like there’s another thing there. It’s, and I don’t know, [Overlap from Kate: Yeah. Yeah.] it’s untapped. [Overlap from Kate: Yeah. Yeah.]\nI don’t know what it is. So then when we went to do the second iteration, or no, sorry, the latest iteration, because really even in 12 to 15, there were a number of iterations and turn the show out. So again, I’m pushing my hands out in front of me to, for an audience. Early on in our developmental discussions, we started thinking about a lot, about time and change and how much we’ve changed and our archive. So then we reached back further into history prior to, you know, Tristan’s transition in the end of the “Boy Choir” into the deep, into the “Boy Choir” archives.\n20:53\tMoynan King:\tSo we used that material.\nAnd so in 1997, we had done a production, the “Boy Choir of Lesbos and Lord of the Flies.” So we did a production of “Lord of the Flies.” [Overlap from Kate: Oh, wow.]\nAnd we luckily have this incredible VHS [Video Home System] tape of it. So, you know, I mean, back when we were doing VHS, we were like, “Oh my God, it’s not film,” [Laughs]. And now we’re like, “Oh my God, it’s VHS, it’s a VHS,” [Laughs].\nSo that’s really exciting. And so we brought in these archives of the “Boy Choir” and integrated these images with this new material. And then in the process of that, at some point, once we decided to bring in the “Boy Choir,” we thought, “Oh, we need a new choir. We need to make a new choir.” And we need to make a choir that both Tristan and I could be in. So we created this non-binary choir that we then called the “Epic Choir of Trace Land.” [Overlap from Kate: Wow.] And so the show, our show in Toronto ends with the “Epic Choir of Trace Land,” and we plan to keep the “Epic Choir” going, actually. So–\n21:58\tKate Moffatt:\tI’m obsessed with this. I love that so much. This is incredible. And just, you’re talking and I’m like, I’m almost getting, I’m getting goosebumps. Because this is like, you’ve got so many different kinds of archives happening here. And like, intersecting and almost like creating a new one. And I just think this is, it’s so rich, it’s so the possibility, everything here. Oh, wow. And the embodiment and the, oh, all of it. It’s so good. Okay. Last question to wrap up here. [Overlap from Moynan: Okay.] I wanna ask [Overlap from Moynan: Yes.]: What you’re listening to now, like either at the conference or just kind of generally what’s, what are you listening to?\n22:34\tMoynan King:\tSo interesting, because that was the question you asked me. And the reason I brought this was because our show just closed on Sunday. [Overlap from Kate: Oh, yeah.] So all I’ve been listening to is “Trace,” right? Like, we just closed. So I’ve been listening to that.\nAnd then of course, you know, I don’t, I presented at the conference yesterday, and right now I’m engaged in a process of creating what I call “meditations.” And so other than “Trace,” I’ve been listening to meditations and to meditative music. And of course, working on my own material with that. But like last night when I went to bed, I listened to Steve Roach’s “Quiet Music 1.” Highly recommend it [Laughs[, go on YouTube, “Quiet Music 1,” play it quietly. Yep. 1970s experimental electronica. Yep. So that’s it.\n23:38\tKate Moffatt:\tIncredible. Moynan, thank you so much for sitting down and talking to us about this today and for playing the clip. This has just been such a fantastic conversation. Thank you again.\n23:48\tMoynan King:\tThank you very much, Kate. Thanks for listening and thanks for inviting me. It’s wonderful to be here.\n23:53\tKate Moffatt:\t[Background ambient music starts playing] Yeah. This was so good. Thank you. Alright. Yay.\n23:58\tMiranda Eastwood:\tYay.\n23:58\tKate Moffatt:\tOkay. I’m gonna hit stop, which I did last time.\n24:00\tMusic:\t[Ambient music plays faintly]\n24:10\tKate Moffatt:\tOkay. So, hi and welcome back to Shortcuts. This is another episode of Shortcuts Live at the University of Alberta.\nWe are here for the 2023 SpokenWeb Symposium, and we are actually sitting outside if you can hear [Laughs] if you can hear some of our wonderful ambient sounds right now.\nIt has been so insanely beautiful and hot this week. I think it’s about, what do we say, 27 degrees right now? It’s warm.\nMy name is Kate Moffitt. I’m the project manager and supervising producer of the SpokenWeb podcast, stepping in for our usual host and producer, Katherine McLeod. And I am so excited to be joined by Erica Isomura today. Erica, would you mind telling us a little bit about yourself?\n24:52\tErica Isomura:\tSure. Hi everyone. Thanks for having me. My name is Erica, and I am a writer, a poet, and currently an MFA [Master of Fine Arts] student, actually at the University of Guelf. I like drawing, gardening, being outside. I currently live in Toronto, but I was born and raised in New Westminster in Vancouver.\n25:17\tKate Moffatt:\tI love New West [Laughs].\n25:20\tErica Isomura:\tYeah, and it’s really great to be here in Edmonton in Treaty Six Territory. I’ve been really enjoying being here.\n25:25\tKate Moffatt:\tIt’s been so, so lovely. It’s been a great week. Amazing. Okay. Well, we’re gonna listen to something. I don’t know if you wanna say a couple words or if you wanna just, are we gonna jump in?\n25:33\tErica Isomura:\tLet’s just jump into it, and we can chat about it afterwards. So hopefully the volume is up on this. [Wrong audio plays] Oh, sorry. That’s the wrong audio [Laughs].\n25:45\tKate Moffatt:\tThat’s okay.\n25:48\tErica Isomura:\tThat was cool, though, [Laughs]. [Overlap: That was it.]\n25:52\tAudio Recording:\t[Audio recording of chirping and nature sounds]\n26:39\tKate Moffatt:\tWow. Thank you so much. Please tell me what we were just listening to. I feel like there are so many cool layers here because we’re currently sitting outside. What was that?\n26:45\tErica Isomura:\tThat was recorded on a road trip that I took with my sibling to Prince Rupert. We drove from our hometown all the way up north to a three-and-a-half-day drive to Prince Rupert, which is on the northwest coast.\nAnd that audio was of a group of European starlings that were gathered on this, under this dock, on this building where I think a ferry comes in. And so there were so many birds. I hadn’t seen so many like European starlings gathered together before. And it was really cool to see a bird that was also familiar.\nSince being here in Edmonton, I’ve actually seen magpies for the first time. I definitely took some video footage of them on my way to the campus, and I hadn’t seen them before. So it’s always exciting to see new birds and also cool to see birds that you’re familiar with.\n27:44\tKate Moffatt:\tI wanted to ask, ’cause I know I attended your fantastic plenary panel yesterday. And thinking about the ways in which I guess I just, I’ve been thinking about kind of like nature and nature sounds all week and how we listen to it and how we re-listen to it after when we record it, and kind of how we end up being these sort of like mediators between that sound as it’s originally happening and then, and listening to it later.\nSo, can you speak a little bit more, maybe just about listening generally? It could also be the role of listening in what you pick, choose to record, pick up, and how you plan to revisit it or your research.\n28:22\tErica Isomura:\tYeah. Well, it’s interesting ’cause I don’t really, it’s interesting being at this conference ’cause I don’t really consider myself a sound artist. So I haven’t considered myself in that way before. Although I did this, this sound project that, you know, we brought to the conference this week. But then when I stopped to think about it, there’s such a sonic, important sonic quality to poetry and to writing and storytelling. Which is much more, you know, I do identify with those things as a writer, and I’ve been thinking a lot about non-visual ways of engaging with stories this past semester, I was TA-ing [Working as a “teacher assistant”] an “Intro to Storytelling,” “Intro to Creative Writing” class for first-year students. And a lot of new writers are really focused on visual cues in their work. [Overlap from Kate: Interesting.]\nLike, “so-and-so” sees this, it’s green, it’s round, you know like they’re not, there’s like a textural element that sometimes it’s a bit flat. [Overlap from Kate: Wow.] And so that was a big part of revising with students who were learning how to engage with creative writing was bringing in sonic qualities, bringing in texture and touch, and you know, feeling–\n29:40\tKate Moffatt:\tThat there’s more than just looking–\n29:41\tErica Isomura:\tThere’s more than just looking. I was thinking about that while I was listening to this sound and trying to think about what sound I’d want to share because I’m trying to work on a project that engages with drawings and writing.\nSo it’s a graphic project that follows the road trip that my sibling and I took and engaged with a lot of the land-based history. And I was thinking, “Okay, how will I, how will sound be part of this visual project, in a book?”\nA book is so, it’s just, it’s just different, you know? Like, people sometimes will include “SoundCloud” links to listen to “spoken word” in their books or, you know, “QR codes.” But sometimes I find myself not, it’s not necessarily the most organic of processes to pull your phone and scan it or a hundred percent. You know, even if you go on a CD with the book, sometimes you just kind of ignore it. Right–\n30:35\tKate Moffatt:\tEspecially now you’re like, where’s the closest CD player?\n30:37\tErica Isomura:\tTotally. Right. So I’m not an audiobook person. I do listen to podcasts, but yeah. So it’s interesting to think about it. Like just different qualities that bring us into place and space and that interests me.\nSo most of my sound recordings in my phone are probably more nature-based, though I do find the intersections of, like urban landscape noises really interesting. Just the mixture of things that you’ll hear on the street. [Overlap from Kate: Absolutely.] Or even, you know, the crunching of footsteps when you’re out in the forest. There is, you know, thinking about our relationship like I guess the Anthropocene or our imprint on the land. And, you know, the sounds that we make, too.\n31:27\tKate Moffatt:\tYeah. A hundred percent. And it’s so interesting, as you were talking about that, it started to make me think about like, how we capture things. Because yeah, I guess my question is kind of like having that recording from that trip, like how does that take you back as opposed to a picture of you or like a picture of those birds under that underpass. Yeah. Anything there that you would like to respond to? Please Go ahead.\n31:50\tMiranda Eastwood:\tActually, could I jump in? [Overlap: Yeah. Oh yeah.]\nJust because you’re talking about, you know, you get a CD in a book, and you’re not, you’re not probably gonna listen to that or a link or a QR code. It disrupts the relationship that you have with reading because that’s what people agree to when they open a piece they’re reading.\nSo the, even the idea of bringing in a different form of media is almost not, well, you break that relationship, I think, and the idea of sound and going to listen to something like specifically for sound, you’re engaging in a different relationship to whatever text you’re exploring. Right. Which I feel like that kind of pulled into your question about materiality and how like, I guess what your, what your general thoughts on those different types of relationships are.\n32:37\tErica Isomura:\tYeah. Well, I think that what I was thinking about when we, when I, when you made that comment, Kate, and this relates to this too, is thinking about how do you represent sound on the page. Right. You know, like I think in poetry, there’s such interesting things you can do with white space, like… [Overlap: oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.]\nWriters and poets just talk about staring at a blank page. Just the possibilities of form and prose are typically like nonfiction prose, and fiction prose. It’s very blocky and chunky and there isn’t a lot of space for that creativity necessarily. Maybe there is, and maybe I’m not thinking about it. We did have a presentation with Jordan Abel a few nights ago, and I think he’s doing some interesting work with novels and space on the page for sure.\n33:28\tErica Isomura:\tLike disrupting the genre. But yeah, I think there’s so much opportunity for that in poetry. And I think as I’m drawing more and thinking about graphic forms there is the opportunities to visually kind of represent sounds and sound effects on the page, through shapes and through visual cues and kind of blending things in a way that’s really interesting.\nThere’s a comic artist I love on Instagram who actually lives in Montreal. I’m not really, I’m blanking on his handle, but he draws a lot of birds and like, they’re very funny comics. And bird, I think–\n34:11\tMiranda Eastwood:\tI know who you’re talking about ’cause I think I’ve seen these bird comics before of these birds just kind of doing their own thing–\n34:18\tErica Isomura:\tDo you know their name?\n34:19\tMiranda Eastwood:\tHis name? No, I don’t.\n34:19\tErica Isomura:\tHe was just at TCAF [Toronto Comic Arts Festival], but I didn’t make it to his table. But they’re funny, they’re hilarious. They’re great conversations. Like the birds are talking about us.\n34:28\tKate Moffatt:\tOh, I have seen this. Oh. And I can’t remember the handle either. Oh, wow. How many grad students does it take?\n34:33\tErica Isomura:\t[Overlap] End of the, end of the–\n34:35\tKate Moffatt:\tWe’ll put it in the blog post for the episode.\n34:37\tErica Isomura:\tYeah. But yeah, thinking about representations of sound on a page, you know, and Yeah. The non-human kind of elements. And it’s just so funny to think about what the birds are; the birds are watching us too, you know? Right. We’re not just watching them.\n34:50\tKate Moffatt:\tRight, right. Yeah. Which even I think absolutely a hundred percent goes all the way back to Spy’s keynote on the first day. Right. Like, talking about that kind of like awareness of what’s around you, and not just your awareness of it, but it’s awareness of you, and how that’s informed and what it’s been informed by. Incredible.\n35:05\tErica Isomura:\tSo I think that the first sound that I actually accidentally played was, it was water from up north, from probably from the Skeena River ’cause I was, I think the previous audio was a clip from a cannery that I had visited.\nI was trying to record some sounds from a tour I did at the North Pacific Cannery, but also, I can’t remember if they had turned on the machine, of the canning machine that was supposed to be on display there, but wow. I didn’t want it to go into the spoken-like tour part [Laughs] for the audio.\nI’m actually really glad that I have some of those clips and I forgot about them until you prompted me to bring a sound clip. Amazing. So it was cool. And I’ll have to definitely re-listen to all those.\n35:46\tKate Moffatt:\tI love that. Okay. Speaking of listening, I think a last little question here to wrap up this amazing conversation is: what are you listening to right now? Like in your research or just more generally, what are you, what are you listening to?\n36:00\tErica Isomura:\tI’m listening to, like, kind of these like non, like a lot of music without vocals as I’m writing. [Overlap: Ooh.] I call them my “coworking,” like my “writing working” playlists. [Overlap: Yeah.]\nI was listening to Kishi Bashi earlier today in my hotel room, and he’s a violinist, kind of like a pop violin. So he loops his violin and sings, and he has a band, and he’s an amazing live performer. Thinking about sound–\n36:34\t[Sound of Kishi Bashi’s song “Manchester” starts to play]\t[Vocals]\nI wrote me a book. I hid the last page. I didn’t look. I think I locked it in a cage. I wrote a novel because everybody likes to read a novel…\n36:54\tKate Moffatt:\tErica, thank you so much for sitting and chatting with us today outside in this insanely warm weather. Thank you again.\n37:01\tErica Isomura:\tThank you, for, to both of you for hosting me.\n37:05\tKate Moffatt:\tPerfect. Yeah, we got a little windy. [Overlap] I liked our little what was going on there.\n37:11\tErica Isomura:\t[Voices fading] Do you think it’ll be okay?\n37:13\tMusic:\t[Musical Interlude]\n37:17\tKate Moffatt:\tReally just gonna be a conversation where we chat about what we listen to. Did you have any questions before we start?\n37:25\tRémy Bocquillon:\tNo, I think I just go with it.\n37:28\tKate Moffatt:\tOkay. Amazing. Has it been recording this whole time?\n37:31\tMiranda Eastwood:\tYeah.\n37:31\tKate Moffatt:\tOkay. I love that because, at one point, we need to capture that little recording where I’m like, “Here’s like a quick and dirty version of what Shortcuts is. I’m gonna say hello, and I’m gonna be like, Hey, I Kate, it’s gonna be, it’s gonna be great…\n[Voice fades]\n37:49\tKate Moffatt:\t[Music fades]\nHello, and welcome to an episode of Shortcuts Live. We are at the University of Alberta for the 2023 SpokenWeb symposium, which we’re at the, we’re on the last day. And it’s been super incredible. We are very excited to have been here. But this is Kate Moffatt, the supervising producer and project manager for the SpokenWeb podcast, stepping in for our usual host and producer, Katherine McLeod. And today, we’re sitting down with Rémy Bocquillon. That’s right. Yeah, that’s right. Beautiful. can you tell us a little bit about yourself, Rémy?\n38:19\tRémy Bocquillon:\tYeah. Well, thank you for this podcast. And I mean, the whole symposium has been amazing. So that’s, that’s a great experience. I’m so tired, but [Laughter] yeah. So, I am not in sound studies at all. I’m in sociology and sociology theory based in Germany. I work with sound quite a bit as kind of how to use sound, and sound art in my methods of how to do research. So not an analysis of sound, but more like how to do it. And for the SpokenWeb, I have been the artist in residence. So I’ve been very fortunate to prepare a sound installation, which is just across here.\n39:01\tKate Moffatt:\tSo, yeah. Yeah. We’re currently sitting in a big room in the, I think it’s the Cameron Library. We’re right beside the Digital Scholarship Center where the institute is taking place.\nAmazing. Thank you so much. We’re so excited to chat. We’re gonna listen to something. Did you wanna, did you wanna play that for us? Do you wanna say anything about it first?\n39:17\tRémy Bocquillon:\tYeah, so just pay it, and then we can chat about it.\n39:21\tKate Moffatt:\tPerfect.\n39:24\tAudio of Êliane Radigue\t[Audio of Êliane Radigue speaking in an interview: Il est tiré le temps prolongé, le temps ralenti, pour étirer le temps, il faut le ralentir. Et c’est sans doute ce qui permet de mieux saisir ce qu’il contient dans le présent. En fait, la grande vérité du temps, je crois, est celle de s ‘inscrire aussi totalement que possible dans le présent.\nEt la meilleure façon de bien pénétrer le présent, c’est de s’y installer. Et forcément une autre durée intérieure à ce moment -là s’établit, une durée qui est presque sans limite. Et on tente de faire cela avec les sons, c’est un petit peu un artific, parce que le son a son discours, son mode de déroulement temporel.\nMais là, effectivement, je triche sans doute un peu en étirant les choses. En fait, une pièce ou une œuvre, quelle que ce soit le nom que vous lui donniez, peut -être une mesure serait peut -être une seule mesure, mais une mesure en l ‘occurrence de 80 minutes, puisque c’est la durée de Psi 847.\nLe refus de l’anecdotique, je crois que c’est très simple, ça ne m’amuse pas. L’anecdote ne m’amuse pas. Et en fait, je fais des choses pour mon plaisir. Merci d ‘avoir regardé cette vidéo.]\n40:51\tRémy Bocquillon:\tYeah.\n40:51\tKate Moffatt:\tWonderful. Tell us like, what was that, what were we, what were we just hearing?\n40:54\tRémy Bocquillon:\tSo, it’s an interview from Êliane Radigue who was, she’s still active, is a composer, an electronic musician. She’s one of the pioneers in electronic music and drone music. She’s done a lot of music with synthesizers.\nThis recording is from the 70s, 76, 77. It was broadcast on French radio back then, and today it came out as a record. So that’s, that’s actually–\n41:27\tKate Moffatt:\tLike today, today? [Overlap from Rémy: Today, today. Yeah.]\nLike May 5th, 2023, today. [Overlap from Rémy: Exactly. Yes.] Wonderful. That’s so cool\n41:32\tRémy Bocquillon:\tThat was perfect. Like on point for this kind of event. And in this particular recording, she’s talking about time and her perception of time and how, in the stretching of sound, in drone music and electronic music, she has the feeling to manipulate time or to be in time to be in the present. So that’s, that was, yeah. Yeah. It’s, and I love her voice. I love how, how she, she talks about sounds. That’s fascinating. Yeah.\n42:00\tKate Moffatt:\tYeah. I’ve kind of got goosebumps from that. That’s, that’s amazing. That sounds so cool.\nCan you give us a bit of, is that kind of what she’s talking about in the interview? I was gonna ask like, is she very much discussing kind of like this, that idea of like stretching time, this is that what’s in the interview?\n42:16\tRémy Bocquillon:\tYeah, exactly. So she starts out by saying like, that to stretch out time and to play with time, you have to slow it down. And this idea of “slow down” and like that’s at the heart of what we do drone music, for instance.\nBut she did it in the seventies. She was really working with a synthesizer and very meticulously and had this kind of hard work and technique of trying out and having the pieces go on for hours. And a bit later in the interview, she even says, well, one piece can, it’s like one measure, one meter, but it’s like one that lasts 80 minutes. And so that’s, so that’s how long she takes to unfold the sounds.\n43:01\tKate Moffatt:\tThat’s so wonderful. For the listeners, you can’t see, but Rémy likes using his hands just to stretch, to stretch out time, to stretch out the measures. It’s, it’s been, it’s very, it’s very wonderful.\n43:10\tRémy Bocquillon:\tYeah. Sorry, it’s not very radiophonic [Laughs].\n43:12\tKate Moffatt:\tNo, it’s fantastic. That’s so wonderful. And I guess I would love to hear more about how, I guess how this, maybe these ideas that you’re, that are in the interview are intersecting with like your own research and kind of your own work, but also maybe in particular like this interview and like listening to this interview.\nLike, does that intersect too kind of with, ’cause obviously you’re very excited about it, and that’s fantastic. I’d like to just kind of hear more about how it maybe intersects with your own work.\n43:40\tRémy Bocquillon:\tYeah. So that’s a very interesting question and very compelling on certainly many levels because there’s this personal – yeah, I mean, as I said, a lot of her voice –  and I think she because she’s such a pioneer in electronic music… I mean, she has been, in the fifties, working with people like Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henri, who were in France and beyond the first to do musique concrete and this kind of stuff, to integrate different sounds into music – and she was with them and then continued to work on longer forms. And then from the 2000s actually moving away from this synthesizer and doing more acoustic stuff. And that’s where probably it resonates more with my own work because she works a lot with this kind of connection between the instruments, the bodies, and how, in the unfolding of a piece of the music, you have this kind of network happening. A combination of different actors and bodies crafting the sound and crafting the music together how gives you a different sense of experience and of the feeling of space of time. That’s what she’s talking about actually, but really in the performance – how to do this on the spot.\n44:57\tRémy Bocquillon:\tAnd that’s what I found very interesting in how, through sound, you have this kind of connection between different bodies… And I call this as kinda modulating this kind of spacetimes through sound. You can just, yeah. Stretch it out and have this kind of very particular moment in time.\n45:24\tKate Moffatt:\tThat’s fantastic. And it’s so interesting to me too that you brought this interview where she’s talking about it rather than potentially bringing a piece like you were mentioning, like there’s that piece that’s 80 minutes long, but it’s one measure. Is that what you were saying? [Overlap: Yes, yes. Yeah.]\nObviously, we’re not going to play an 80-minute coupon shortcut, but yeah, I think it’s. I love that you brought this interview clip. So I guess, and you can take this kind of as metaphorically or as literally as you’d like, but when you listen to this clip, what do you hear?\n45:57\tRémy Bocquillon:\tOh, I hear a tremendous artist talking about the practice. And that’s something rich is very interesting because so often you don’t talk about the practice that much. And she’s doing that in such a way that you can see how she’s, or you can hear, how she’s working and how she’s very much like going into the material, really going into the synthesizer, into the sound. And, and I think that’s why these kinds of interviews are very interesting.\nBecause she – and I mean, that was on, so it’s in France culture, which is public radio, and this kind of experimental composer. So that’s interesting as well back in the seventies to have this kind of composer talk about their practice, and to have this person in a very maned world, like experimental music, like talk about her practice and having her practice also recognized and acknowledged. So that’s very important as well.\n46:54\tKate Moffatt:\tWow. And what do you think, like, would it be different to read about the process versus hear this interview where she’s talking about it? Like, is it different to listen to it than to read it?\n47:07\tRémy Bocquillon:\tThat’s probably where you could actually tell me that because you, you maybe don’t understand that much. You said you don’t speak French, but you hear a voice–\n47:18\tKate Moffatt:\tWhat did I hear? [Laughs] –\n47:20\tMiranda Eastwood:\tI could jump in on that actually ’cause I was thinking just the way, the way she was speaking slow, not “ma” [The speaker uses the sound “ma” as a vocal filler], that kind of… I haven’t listened to her music obviously, but like to me, it almost sounded like she was mirroring, echoing, paralleling the process of that music and the way she was speaking about it, which I thought was very like, now I wanna listen to that music because of the way she spoke about it. And the process was like in the way she was vocalizing the process almost that, sorry that was my thought–\n47:55\tKate Moffatt:\tNo, that’s lovely. And for, for listeners, that’s Miranda who’s been hopping in occasionally on these Shortcuts conversations, and I’m so, so, so glad they are. Miranda is our audio engineer and sound designer for the podcast. Yeah.\nAnd I guess for me too, like Miranda, you have some French, well, lots of French; you know French. Whereas, whereas I don’t, and I feel, but I feel like I, I did hear very much the same, the same thing, like it, I I don’t think I’d realized beforehand that, that they were a composer or a musician.\nBut you do kind of get that, that sense. It did also feel very – I’m trying to think of the right word – rich, but also almost very like, internalized. Like it was something that I could just felt. So almost intense I guess, about the way that she’s speaking and, and the way that, that she was describing, I guess her, her process. It did sound very musical somehow.\n48:51\tRémy Bocquillon:\tYes. The pace, I mean. as you said, intense. And towards the end of that clip she’s very opinionated. She says the anecdote doesn’t amuse me, so just don’t do it. So that’s why she’s focusing on this long form and taking the time and yeah, the way she has this kind of rhythm in her voice. That’s fascinating. Yeah. I mean, you can listen to her for hours.\n49:02\tKate Moffatt:\tJust don’t do it [Laughs].\n49:03\tRémy Bocquillon:\tInteresting. So that’s why she, she’s focusing on this long form and taking the time and yeah, the, the way she, she has this kind of, of rhythm in her voice. That’s fascinating. Yeah. I mean, you can listen to her for hours.\n49:16\tKate Moffatt:\tI could feel it in my mouth while she was talking. Yeah. Like I could feel it in my own mouth. Yeah. There’s like a, when she was speaking a musical quality. Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah. There was something very embodied about it.\n49:25\tRémy Bocquillon:\tAnd I don’t know if it’s, because back then in radio you had a different kind of rhythm in interviews as well. Oh, interesting. Yeah, because nowadays it’s very fast-paced and you have this kind of difference. So maybe it plays as well. But you see on YouTube you have this kind of documentary where she shows what she’s doing and that’s interesting because of this kind of modular synthesizer and she has this kind of stop clock. And so she’s very much in tune with this idea of time keeping time, but also letting time unfold. And that’s, so in a way that’s totally embodied in her practice, but also how she talks.\n50:02\tKate Moffatt:\tThat’s in the interview. Fascinating. I was gonna say, there’s this taking of space of time to, to give it that rhythm, which as you say might be radio conventions kind of changing and then shifting, but regardless that it’s, that it’s there and we hear it and respond to it. Right?\n50:16\tRémy Bocquillon:\tYeah, totally.\n50:17\tKate Moffatt:\tI’ve got two, two kind of final questions. And they’re very much related.\nOne of them is to just, I’d love to hear like a little bit more about how listening both to things like interviews, like process or this, but even in like your own work ’cause you were saying that you’re a sociologist more than like a sound study scholar, but that obviously sound is there. So like, I’d love to hear about the role of listening in your own, your own research, in your own work.\nAnd then maybe just finish off with like, you know, what you’re listening to right now, whether that’s research related or, or otherwise\n50:50\tRémy Bocquillon:\tOh yeah, [Laughs]. Okay. Yeah. So listening in the work is, I think, central in different kinds of different aspects. I mean, in this kind of symposium we have been listening to a lot of things, to a lot of people, to a lot of sounds. And that’s the main aspect of it. Just to listen to each other, I think. And, but in sociology, more directly, it’s also about how to listen and how to actually leave space again to different voices and to different actors and maybe actors we don’t actually hear. So how to work with that.\nAnd how to leave space to those voices, to work with them in different ways. And that bridges to a kind of different way of doing sociology, which is making those kinds of new associations through sound, and which is also a different relation to knowledge and how knowledge production and distribution which is political, which is critical, which is ethical, I think, as well in how to bring this kind of multiplicity of actors, whatever you want to call them, in sounds, and having them like inhabit and then like move, move around.\n52:05\tRémy Bocquillon:\tAnd what I’ve been listening to, oh, that’s a hard question–\n52:08\tKate Moffatt:\t[Laughs].\n52:09\tRémy Bocquillon:\tYeah. I mean, on my way here, I’ve been listening to a very well renowned French rapper called Orelsan, it’s one of his albums, like last year, two years ago, is very popular, so it’s not like “underground dark things,” [Laughs], but there’s this one song, I don’t know, it just like lift my mood and I love it. So [Laughs], yeah. Taking the bus. That’s what I was listening to.\n52:34\tKate Moffatt:\tIncredible. I love it so much. We’ve, we’ve collected quite the little, little almost like a little playlist as we’ve been asking folks what they’ve been listening to. I think we’re gonna have to try and put something together at some point here. This has been so wonderful, Rémy. Thank you so much for bringing, bringing this wonderful clip that I love that it got released today. That feels very serendipitous.\n52:53\tRémy Bocquillon:\tThank you. [Overlappinhg] Thank you very much for having and for coming to chat with us. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you.\n52:56\tMiranda Eastwood:\tYay.\n52:57\tMusic\t[Opera music starts playing]\n53:02\tKatherine McLeod:\t[Low electronic music plays] You’ve been listening to Shortcuts on the SpokenWeb podcast. This episode featured conversations with Moynan King, Erica Isomura, and Rémy Bocquillon. Thank you for all of your sounds and your time. Thank you to Kate Moffatt and Miranda Eastwood for putting such care and energy into recording these interviews onsite at the 2023 SpokenWeb Symposium.\n \nIf you’re at this year’s SpokenWeb symposium, there will be a live recording of an episode coming up as part of the symposium events. So if you’re there, do attend and be part of the audience. Either way, stay tuned, and we’ll look forward to hearing that episode on this feed next month.\nThe SpokenWeb Podcast is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada.\nThe SpokenWeb podcast team is: supervising producer Maya Harris, sound designer James Healy, transcriber Yara Ajeeb, and co-hosts Hannah McGregor and me, Katherine McLeod.\nTo find out more about SpokenWeb, visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say “hi” on social media. Stay tuned to your podcast feed, and as always, thanks for listening.\n[SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music fades and ends]\n "],"score":3.7048998},{"id":"9672","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S6 Trailer, Welcome to Season 6!, 16 September 2024, Harris, McLeod, McGregor, Healy, and Ajeeb"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/welcome-to-season-6/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 6"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Maia Harris","Katherine McLeod","Hannah McGregor","James Healy","Yara Ajeeb"],"creator_names_search":["Maia Harris","Katherine McLeod","Hannah McGregor","James Healy","Yara Ajeeb"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Maia Harris\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/20153713810358661443\",\"name\":\"Hannah McGregor\",\"dates\":\"1984-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"James Healy\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Yara Ajeeb\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2024],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/3849923d-330b-4a2b-8e36-2347aca1e839/audio/1fac0b3b-c40e-4950-8e0f-966db64790a2/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"v1-master-season-6-trailer.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:04:44\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"4,544,931 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"v1-master-season-6-trailer\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/welcome-to-season-6/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2024-09-16\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549795897346,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["Hold onto your hats, because the SpokenWeb Podcast is back!\n\nThis season, we’ll continue to bring you contemporary treatments of the archive and the ever-changing landscape of literary sounds with all new stories from researchers across the SpokenWeb network.\n\nSubscribe to The SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you find your podcasts. And don’t forget to rate us and send us a shout.\n\nCheers to Season 6 ~\n\n\n(00:00)\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music\t[Instrumental overlapped with feminine voice]\nCan you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n(00:14)\tHannah McGregor\tWhat does the SpokenWeb Podcast sound like? Or should I say — when?\n[Theme music fades]\n(00:21)\tMusic\t[Futuristic, electronic music starts playing]\n(00:26)\tHannah McGregor\tBecause in season 5 of the SpokenWeb Podcast, we travelled through time–\n(00:32)\tKatherine McLeod\tFirst, we paid a visit to the medieval period [choral music starts playing] where we attempted to textually and orally translate the old English poem “The Ruin.”\n(00:42)\tAudio clip from episode 1 of SpokenWeb Podcast, Ghislaine Comeau reciting “The Ruin”\t[Sound effect of fire crackling begins]\nnum geheapen felon/\ngrimly ground/\nIt shone/\n(00:52)\tMusic\t[Upbeat pop music starts playing]\n(00:54)\tKatherine McLeod\tThen we jumped to the 1950s, where we revisited the fascinating early history of Caedmon records.\n(01:02)\tAudio clip from episode 4 of SpokenWeb Podcast, Barbara Holdridge, Writers & Company Interview, 2002\tThe idea was that we were not supplanting the printed book; we were augmenting it and giving it a depth, a third-dimensional depth.\n(01:13)\tMusic\t[Grunge guitar music starts playing]\n(01:16)\tKatherine McLeod\tWe travelled to the 1980s and listened to recovered recordings from the boundary-breaking Ultimatum Festival.\n(01:24)\tAudio clip from episode 6 of SpokenWeb Podcast, Frances Grace Fyfe\tThe question: How did this experimental poetry festival come to be in the first place? And why has there been nothing like it since?\n(01:32)\tMusic\t[Pop-esque, upbeat music starts playing]\n(01:35)\tHannah McGregor\tWe “crossed over” to 2021 and checked in with Linda Morra to hear about Kaie Kellough’s “Magnetic Equator.”\n(01:43)\tAudio clip from episode 3 of SpokenWeb Podcast, Linda Morra\tKellough was the point toward which they were all magnetically drawn. I’ve never seen anything like it.\n(01:53)\tKatherine McLeod\t[Pop-esque upbeat music continues] And we revisited the 2023 SpokenWeb Symposium to ask academics and artists big questions.\n(02:02)\tAudio clip from episode 7 of SpokenWeb Podcast, Kate Moffat\tWhat are you listening to?\n(02:03)\tAudio clip from episode 7 of SpokenWeb Podcast, Rémy Bocquillon\t“What are you listening to?” Ho, that’s a hard question.\n(02:07)\tMusic\t[Eerie echo music starts playing]\n(02:10)\tHannah McGregor\tWe also explored how our bodies experience time, by asking how “not-knowing” feels and how it sounds.\n(02:20)\tAudio clip from episode 2 of SpokenWeb Podcast, Nadège Paquette\tDoes the sound you hear interrupt your breathing? [Music fades, sinister sound from Pulse’s soundtrack rises and falls]\nDoes the voice you reach toward make you move your gaze? [Crickets singing and sound of footsteps]\n(02:29)\tKatherine McLeod\tAnd then, [Sci-fi music starts] we looked to the [echo] “future.”\n(02:36)\tHannah McGregor\tWe heard from the artists harnessing algorithmic processes to generate poetry, music, and dance in a live episode.\n(02:45)\tAudio clip from episode 8 of SpokenWeb Podcast\n– Audio From “A Vocabulary for Sharon Belle Mattlin” By Jackson Mac Low; Performance by Susan Musgrave, George Macbeth, Sean O’Huigin, BpNichol, and Jackson Mac Low, 1974.\t[Overlapping voices] nation share name, nation share name, belly Battle, battle Bay, west Marsh, marble Linen, melon, melon, noble, bitter liberal meat bite, bite meat.\n(02:52)\tKatherine McLeod\tWe also asked computers to help us decide which oral performers are the best at “doing” the voices in the Waste Land.\n(03:01)\tAudio clip from episode 5 of SpokenWeb Podcast, MacOS text-to-speech voice, “Fred,” reading The Wasteland\tTwit twit twit\nJug jug jug jug jug jug\nSo rudely forc’d.\n(03:07)\tHannah McGregor\tAnd we looked ahead to a future without our mini-series Shortcuts, bidding it a fond farewell.\n(03:13)\tAudio clip from SpokenWeb Shortcuts Season 5, Episode 6, Katherine McLeod\tAs always, thank you for listening.\n(03:18)\tHannah McGregor\tThe SpokenWeb Podcast is a monthly podcast that showcases audio from archival literary recordings across Canada.\n[Theme music starts playing] But while we’re fascinated with how audio archives can help us understand the history of literature in Canada, we’re not just a history podcast.\n(03:37)\tKatherine McLeod\tThe SpokenWeb Podcast covers the “then,” the “when,” and the “now” – contemporary treatments of the archive and the ever-changing landscape of literary sounds.\n(03:49)\tHannah McGregor\tThis season, we’ll continue to look back at the past and explore the future with new stories from researchers across the SpokenWeb network.\n(03:58)\tKatherine McLeod\tSeason 6 will be our last season, at least in this current form. The podcast will evolve into a new series, on this very same podcast feed, so don’t go anywhere!\n(04:10)\tHannah McGregor\tIn the meantime, as always–\n(04:13)\tKatherine McLeod\t–My name is Katherine McLeod–\n(04:14)\tHannah McGregor\t–And I’m Hannah McGregor. And we are back as your co-hosts.\n(04:19)\tKatherine McLeod\tThe podcast production team is supervising producer Maia Harris, sound designer James Healy, and transcriber Yara Ajeeb.\n(04:27)\tHannah McGregor\tSubscribe to The SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you find your podcasts.\nAnd welcome to season 6!\n(04:37)\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music\t[Electronic music fades away]"],"score":3.7048998},{"id":"9995","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 5.3, ShortCuts Live! Listening to Wide-Screen Radio with Brian Fauteux, 18 March 2024, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/shortcuts-live-listening-to-wide-screen-radio-with-brian-fauteux/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2024],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/ee46116d-d019-4f1d-abad-4f2d80ec7d83/audio/c0dedf34-0b8f-4f5f-bb09-eca79069ca45/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"v1-shortcuts-5-3.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:15:02\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"14,433,010 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"v1-shortcuts-5-3\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/shortcuts-live-listening-to-wide-screen-radio-with-brian-fauteux/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2024-03-18\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Fauteux, Brian. Music in Range: The Culture of Canadian Campus Radio. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2015.\\n\\ndeWaard, Andrew, Fauteux, Brian, and Selman, Brianne. “Independent Canadian Music in the Streaming Age: The Sound from above (Critical Political Economy) and below (Ethnography of Musicians).” Popular Music and Society 45.3 (2022): 251 – 278. [open access]\\n\\n\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549821063168,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["This ShortCuts presents one of the ShortCuts Live! conversations recorded at the University of Alberta as part of the 2023 SpokenWeb Symposium. Recorded on site by SpokenWeb’s Kate Moffatt and Miranda Eastwood, the conversations often took place in spaces where the sonic environment of the symposium is audibly present. As always on ShortCuts, we begin with an audio clip from the archives, but this time the interviewees are the ones bringing an archival sound to the table. What will we hear? And where will these sounds take us?\n\n(00:03)\tShortCuts Theme Music\t[Soft piano music interspersed with electronic sound begins]\n(00:16)\tMiranda Eastwood (Recording)\tI’m like, maybe I should get sound effects from [overlap]\nThis is fun. Like maybe footsteps or something. Get whatever the name of this building is and like where we are located since we will be hearing the space and people will naturally –\n(00:17)\tKate Moffatt\tIs it the old arts building?\n(00:23)\tBrian Fauteux\tYeah, that’s kind of the Arts and Convocation Hall. But because we have a fine arts building, a lot of people call this the old arts building.\n(00:27)\tKate Moffatt\tOkay. [laughs] I might let you say that, actually. [laughs]\n(00:46)\tKatherine McLeod\t[Voiceover] Welcome to Shortcuts. This month, we’re back with another shortcut live, talking with researchers in person and starting those conversations with a short-cut of audio. Many of these conversations were recorded on-site at the 2023 SpokenWeb Symposium held at the University of Alberta.\n(01:08)\tKate Moffatt\t[Back to audio recorded on-site.] Uh, hello and welcome to Shortcuts Live. We are live at the 2023 SpokenWeb Symposium at the University of Alberta. My name is Kate Moffitt, and I am the supervising producer for the SpokenWeb Podcast. Stepping in for our usual host and producer, Katherine McLeod. I’m sitting here with Brian Fauteux today.\n(01:16)\tBrian Fauteux\tYeah. My name is Brian Fauteux. I’m an associate professor of Popular Music and Media Studies here at the University of Alberta, and I work in this building.\n(01:24)\tKate Moffatt\tAmazing. Yeah. That echo that the listeners, that you’re hearing right now. It is because we are sitting in the arts and convocation hall building –\n(01:49)\tBrian Fauteux\tIn the lobby, just outside Convocation Hall where we have a big old pipe organ, and we have music that takes place and sometimes I teach, back in the day, I used to teach, not that long ago, [Kate laughs], a couple years ago, I would teach big intro to popular music classes there before the upper balcony was deemed unsafe. So I’ve been moved elsewhere, and I think they want to renovate it and make it a little bit more “state of the art” in there. It’s very beautiful.\n(01:56)\tKate Moffatt\tInteresting. It is. It’s absolutely stunning. Okay, amazing. Well, we’re gonna listen to something. Do you wanna play that for us?\n(01:57)\tBrian Fauteux\tSure. Let’s play.\n(03:11)\tAudio Recording\t[Distorted Audio Of Paul Mccartney’s mid-nineties radio show called “Oobu Joobu” plays in the background.]\n(03:12)\tBrian Fauteux\t[Audio ends.] That’s probably enough.\n(03:23)\tKate Moffatt\tIncredible [Brian laughs]. Thank you so much. Yeah. Miranda is also here, and we’re both sitting here and our heads just started [laughs].\nPlease tell us what we just listened to.\n(04:25)\tBrian Fauteux\tThis is a radio program that Paul McCartney did in the mid-nineties called “Oobu Joobu.” That was kind of a weird sort of experimental radio program that, I think aired on an American network for about 15 shows. And it’s a collection of, as you heard, different songs, audio clips.\nI think he was sort of playing around on a guitar there as well as he introduced it. And I think in 97 parts of this, 1997, parts of this was packaged with his “Flaming Pie” CD release. I think it mainly circulates as sort of bootlegs now or as this recorded version that was kind of sold at Best Buy. It was like a compendium of some of the shows, but I don’t know if the full complete package has ever resurfaced. But what I find interesting about it is it sometimes airs on the Beatles channel on Sirius XM Radio, which is sort of subscriber-based radio.\n(05:16)\tBrian Fauteux\tAnd it’s something I’ve been researching for the last little while, and I’m writing a book on now, and I’ve kind of been drawn to these places where celebrity clash with kind of weirdness and experimentation, but in a very kind of gated commercial subscription setting.\nSo it’s like people kind of paying for access to a radio service that kind of digs around and finds these oddities and packages them on these channels that are all about bands like “The Beatles” or “Tom Petty” or “Bruce Springsteen.” I also like in this clip, and the reason I chose this one, it was probably hard to hear from the laptop into the recorder, but early on, it emphasizes that it’s widescreen radio. And I think that the development of satellite radio kind of piggybacks on satellite television.\n(05:18)\tKate Moffatt\tI was gonna ask, widescreen TVs [laughs].\n(05:25)\tBrian Fauteux\tExactly. So it’s this idea of, we aren’t just your, you know, grandpa’s old radio. This is sort of –\n(05:25)\tKate Moffatt\tOh wow [laughs].\n(05:51)\tBrian Fauteux\tYou know what I mean? It’s like; it’s trying to introduce radio as being new, even though it’s still embedded in longermhistories of institutions like commercial radio broadcasting has used satellites for long periods of time. So it gives it a sheen of newness. Some things are kind of new about it, but I think it’s an interesting way of thinking or complicating ideas around new media, particularly around the turn of the millennium.\n(06:30)\tKate Moffatt\tWell, I’m really fascinated by how, I would love to talk about the listening, like the actual sound, sound of what we just listened to, ’cause that was so delightful.\nThe first thing I thought was mid-nineties television that I grew up with. It was kind of like the sound that I got from that.\nBut I’m really, I have to ask, as like a book historian myself, about the materiality that you’re kind of engaging with as you’re following its trajectory and thinking about how people are engaging with it.\nI don’t know. Can you speak to that at all? Thinking about the ways in which it’s becoming available, or how, I guess literally, the material of the media is informing it.\nIsn’t there a famous quote about that? The media is the –\n(06:30)\tBrian Fauteux\tMessage.\n(06:33)\tKate Moffatt\tYeah. That’s the one [laughs].\n(07:53)\tBrian Fauteux\tI mean, to even talk about McLuhan a little bit too, I think, thinking through about finding these oddities or these sonic traces of satellite broadcasting from the earlier days and this isn’t being played earlier. The Beatles channel comes in, I think, around 2015, if I’m not mistaken, but it’s very limited when something airs. Some of it is archived, some of it is kept online for maybe four weeks.\nYou can access it on demand, but then it goes away, or it’s kept in this place, this company, this publicly traded, massive media conglomerate now SiriusXM is owned by Liberty Media, which has stakes in like Live Nation and Ticketmaster and all these things. So researching that is different from some of my work on campus radio history where you can track stuff down. It’s still kind of scattered, but people are willing to give it to you. And now they’re not.\nSo, McLuhan also writes a bit about acoustic space and cyberspace coming together and how it’s like all around and you sort of dig around and look for these things. So that’s kind of where I end up finding a lot of this stuff is through spending time on the internet and seeing who’s put something somewhere online that you can listen to.\n(08:26)\tKate Moffatt\tRight. I was gonna ask next about listening. The role of listening in both, I guess, how you were finding it and listening to it, but also how you see this kind of… not elite, that’s not the right word.\nExclusive, exclusivity that’s applied to something that was experimental and odd. Yeah, I don’t know. Something about the, yeah I guess just a bigger kind of broader question about the role of listening in the work that you’re doing and what that, how that interacts with what you, what you do and how you do it.\n(09:36)\tBrian Fauteux\tThat’s a good question because part of what I’m looking at is the reasons why media institutions develop in the ways they do. And you can read annual reports and a lot of it is going through tons of trade press stuff over the years and seeing who’s talking about these companies as they develop. But then you wanna find stuff to listen to as well. And it’s not all perfectly available.\nEven most research paths people take, that’s never the case. But part of it ends up being, like listening a lot of the time to different satellite stations, satellite radio stations, or channels.\nThere’s only one station now I guess, but they have a variety of channels. And then trying to find things like this and thinking about is this available elsewhere? And in the cases where it’s maybe the work of a major celebrity, like I’ve written a bit on Bob Dylan’s theme time radio hour, which is kind of like this, where it’s, you know, somebody using their time on the radio who has like the star power but wants to use that time to showcase all these old quote unquote forgotten songs or songs that haven’t really entered the canon, so to speak, but have been massively influential.\n(10:16)\tBrian Fauteux\tThat’s a big part of what that radio, that radio show is doing. When you have people like that, you do have hardcore fans, too, who have recorded all of this and put it online. So stuff like that you can find. And then when you find that, I just listen to as much of it as I can. So there were about a hundred and so a hundred plus episodes of theme time, radio hour, and for, you know, a month or so, I just listened to every single episode to see what is not only what is he playing but how is he talking about it? What’s he introducing, what’s it like, and how does his voice seem to connect with these subscription radio listeners? And, you know, really spending time with the stuff I can find.\n(10:35)\tKate Moffatt\tAnd do you almost get a sense of his listening?\nIn terms of thinking about what they’re finding and putting together, and there’s a curatorial aspect to it.\nDo you kind of start to get a sense you can start to become familiar with yourself?\nOh, I bet so and so, put this one together.\n(11:18)\tBrian Fauteux\tYou also, I mean, you kind of become like held captive slash hostage to this sort of weird way of doing radio. Like, especially with the Dylan voice, and I’m gonna play a bit of it on the Friday morning radio panel that we’re doing as part of the SpokenWeb Institute.\nBut you do get a sense of his own relationship to these songs. But then, through digging a little bit as well, you find that he’s crafted as the curator or the person who has all these shows. It turns out it was a major TV producer responsible for massive commercial television productions. Oh, wow. Over the years, that has the music collection that Dylan’s kind of borrowing from. So you have these other connections –\n(11:21)\tKate Moffatt\tThere’s layers of curations.\n(12:07)\tBrian Fauteux\tYeah, there’s layers, totally.\nThat they’re working in. And he makes it sound like he’s, you know, he constructs this whole world where he is broadcasting out of this historical Abernathy building, but really he does a lot of it on tour and from his house and, you know, it creates this radio world, but it is kind of an entryway into a different side of these massive celebrities and their personalities that people will pay for.\nAnd these satellite radio companies kind of know that. So, you know, know, part of what I’m interested in is before we even get to your Spotifys and Apple musics, this radio company was kind of setting the stage for that idea of exclusivity or, you know, giving big name performers, big talent contracts to then entice subscribers to say, I’m gonna pay like $16 or $20 a month to have access to this stuff –\n(12:12)\tKate Moffatt\tWhich we’re now so familiar with. Like, it’s just so all the time that’s everything.\n(12:15)\tBrian Fauteux\tEverything’s a subscription.\n(12:33)\tKate Moffatt\tWow. Yeah. Wild. Okay. Well I think one last question which is, I’d love to know what you’re listening to now. Like you know, either in your research currently, like maybe something like this, but anything else that’s fun or even just more generally, like what are you listening to right now that really excites you?\n(13:10)\tBrian Fauteux\tSure. I am listening to a lot of music from around the early two thousands when Sirius XM came out for the purpose of this research, but also kind of unrelated but also sort of related to this.\nA colleague of mine and myself just started a campus radio show here. So every week we’re kind of listening a lot to a radio show based on a theme or a topic each week. So I’m kind of constantly thinking about what would be good to put on this week’s show. And a lot of that is Canadian. We have, you know, Canadian content regulations and these sorts of things. So that’s been a lot of fun and that, I know that’s not really answering anything specific, but –\n(13:11)\tKate Moffatt\tNo, I think that’s great actually [laughs].\n(13:41)\tBrian Fauteux\tAnd then, at the same time I’m among the jury for the Polaris Music Prize here in Canada. And the long list voting for that just opened. So I’m just listening to a ton of Canadian music right now that’s been recommended on Google Group listserv. Things that I haven’t listened to. A new album that I quite like a lot out of Edmonton is by a band called Home Front, and that’s been an album I’ve been playing a lot to give sort of one precise thing.\n(13:52)\tKate Moffatt\tI’m actually really curious, you were talking about the campus radio stuff that you’re doing. Do you feel like a little bit like you’re kind of doing the stuff that you research? Like are you Yeah, for sure. You’re taking that curatorial role almost –\n(14:16)\tBrian Fauteux\tA little bit like that, but also before this I wrote a book on campus radio and stepped back from, like when I was an undergrad, I did a little bit of, of campus radio production work, but then when I was researching it, I stepped back and wanted to have more of an arm’s length relationship to it. And I’ve been meeting since I’ve, I moved here and came here to get back into it.\nAnd I kind of just took, you know, another person to be here too and be like, let’s do it together. And that it makes it more social and more fun. And it has been a lot of fun.\n(14:26)\tKate Moffatt\tFantastic connection to the conversation we just had with Jennifer. Waits. Jennifer was talking about how important community is to campus radio, that it’s so inherent to kind of getting it going and keeping it going–\n(14:34)\tBrian Fauteux\tYeah. We were both just on a panel in Washington DC a few days ago talking about campus college radio. Incredible. So we, we have a lot of overlaps in what we are interested in.\n(14:34)\tMusic\t[Music begins playing in the background].\n(14:40)\tKate Moffatt\tThat’s so fantastic. Okay. Was there anything else that you wanted to share? Should we call it there?\n(14:41)\tBrian Fauteux\tThat sounds good.\n(14:50)\tKate Moffatt\tOkay. Thank you so much for sitting down and chatting with us at the end of a very long day and a very long couple of days.\nBut this was just such a fun way for us to wrap this day up.\n(14:50)\tBrian Fauteux\tThat’s great. Thank you for having me.\n(14:52)\tKate Moffatt\tAmazing. Thanks.\n(14:52)\tMusic\t[Music ends]."],"score":3.7048998},{"id":"9996","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 5.4, Re-Listening to Improvisation in the Archives, 24 April 2024, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/re-listening-to-improvisation-in-the-archives/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2024],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/3507e689-cef7-4ff3-9c42-9593e0987fdd/audio/cf7c9da1-1404-41d3-9a60-11b4f653287d/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"master-v1-shortcuts-april-23.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:07:02\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"6,753,010 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"master-v1-shortcuts-april-23\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/re-listening-to-improvisation-in-the-archives/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2024-04-24\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549822111744,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["As April is the month of poetry, we’ve taken a pause in this year’s ShortCuts Live conversations to listen back to one of the first episodes of ShortCuts, “ShortCuts 1.2 / Audio of the Month: Improvising at a Poetry Reading.”\n\nIn the archival clip played in this episode, we hear Maxine Gadd pausing during a reading with Andreas Schroeder. She asks the host Richard Sommer if he would like to improvise with her for the poem, “Shore Animals.”\n\nListening now, we can ask: what does it feel like for archival listeners to encounter a moment of improvisation? It is a truly memorable moment of listening and worth returning to now in this fifth season of ShortCuts.\n\n00:00\tKatherine McLeod\tWelcome to ShortCuts.\n00:04\tTheme music\t[Electronic music plays]\n00:07\tKatherine McLeod\tThis month, it is April, the month of poetry, and I thought that we’d take a pause in this season’s ShortCuts Live conversations to listen back to an early episode of ShortCuts – to hear an early version of ShortCuts: thinking about what means to be an archival listener.\n00:28\tKatherine McLeod\tBy the way, this episode is such an early episode of ShortCuts that I hadn’t even come up with the name “ShortCuts” yet.\nYou’ll hear me refer to it at one point as “Audio of the Month,” that was what I was calling it in that first season.\n00:43\tTheme music\t[Theme music continues]\n00:45\tKatherine McLeod\tWhat was the archival clip of this episode? Well, you’ll hear Maxine Gadd pausing during a reading with Andreas Schroeder to ask–\n00:55\tMaxine Gadd, Audio Recording\tDo you want to try improvising?–\n00:58\tKatherine McLeod\tAfter reading for about 45 minutes, Maxine Gad invited the host of the evening, Richard Sommer, to improvise on the flute.\n01:05\tRecording\tI gotta find it first –\n01:09\tKatherine McLeod\tListening now, we can ask, what does it feel like for archival listeners to encounter a moment of improvisation? Improvisation is so rooted in the experience of being there. So, what does it feel like to hear improvisation again? To hear it in the archives and even in this replaying?\n01:31\tKatherine McLeod\tWell, considering these questions, we can also listen to the extent to which we can hear the audience’s excitement for this spontaneous moment amid the reading and Gadd’s invitation for the flute to listen.\n01:45\tSound Effect\t[Sound of pressing play on a tape player]\n01:50\tKatherine McLeod\tLet’s listen now together to Shortcuts 1.2,\nAudio of the Month: “Improvising at a poetry reading.”\n02:05\tMaxine Gadd, Audio Recording\tYeah. It’s just going to be some sounds [inaudible].\n02:10\tKatherine McLeod [from ShortCuts 1.2]\tIn this “Audio of the Month,” we’re travelling back to February 1972, when poets Maxine Gad and Andreas Schroeder read in Montreal. They read at Sir George Williams University, or what is now Concordia.\nThey read on February 18th in the Hall Building in room H651. The reading started at 9 pm.\nYes, readings started late and went on for a long time. After reading for about 45 minutes, Maxine Gad invited the host of the evening, Richard Sommer, to improvise on the flute. He improvised along with her, reading the poem Shore Animals. Before starting to improvise, we can hear a negotiation between Gad and Sommer about what to read and how to perform together. A process that is its own audible improvisation.\n03:02\tMaxine Gadd, Audio Recording\tOh, here it is.\nNow, how it goes, you have to keep quiet until…\n[Random Flute Notes]\nSee now,  [laughs] he’s never done this one before.\n03:15\tRichard Sommer, Audio Recording\tWhat, what, yeah, what do you want me to do then?\n03:18\tMaxine Gadd, Audio Recording\tOkay, this is called “Shore Animals.”\nIt’s a speech piece with a flute, and the flute has to listen. And it can speak, too.\n03:30\tKatherine McLeod [from ShortCuts 1.2]\tThe audio clip that you’ll hear includes the first two minutes of a six-minute improvisation. Their improvisation is a singular moment when an audience member, in this case Richard Sommer, formally performs in the Sir George Williams poetry series. At the same time, this recording reminds listeners that the audience is always present, ready to improvise, interject, and even interrupt. And that the audience is also what we are listening to as archival listeners.\n04:03\tMaxine Gadd, Audio Recording\tThe flute, I think it’s over there.\nFor fun.\nThe same message?\nI’m asking; Richard’s going to make some noise with my flute.\n04:19\tRichard Sommer, Audio Recording\tI’ll make some noise if you give me a microphone.\n04:21\tMaxine Gadd, Audio Recording\tOkay. Which one you want? Let’s share it. Is–\n04:25\tRichard Sommer, Audio Recording\tIt doesn’t make any difference.\n04:26\tMaxine Gadd, Audio Recording\tIt goes with the poem [inaudible].\n04:28\tRichard Sommer, Audio Recording\tHow’d you do that?\n04:29\tMaxine Gadd, Audio Recording\tWhat?\n04:31\tRichard Sommer, Audio Recording\tThis, this knot.\n04:32\tMaxine Gadd, Audio Recording\tI’ve tied myself in there.\n04:32\tRichard Sommer, Audio Recording\tHere we go.\n04:33\tMaxine Gadd, Audio Recording\tI don’t know where I can find it—[Long pause] pieces, pieces. Oh, here it is.\nNow, how it goes. You have to keep quiet until… [Random Flute Notes] See, now… [Laugh] He’s never done this one before.\n05:04\tRichard Sommer, Audio Recording\tWhat, what, yeah, what do you want me to do then?\n05:06\tMaxine Gadd, Audio Recording\tOkay, this is called “Shore Animals,” and it says, “speech feas—piece with flute,” and the flute has to listen.\nAnd it can pl–, it can speak, too. You have to listen to it. Yeah, you never heard it before.\n05:21\tRichard Sommer, Audio Recording\tI think it’s learning how to speak.\n05:26\tMaxine Gadd, Audio Recording\tIt’s called “Shore Animals,” a speech piece with a flute.\n[Maxine begins to recite, Richard plays the flute]\n“So hearing where the poppy stopped me,\nsmall chance to star spiel, all you have told me,\ngone, false and beautiful gods and groves.\nPeople truth. Put it into song when the traffic is gone, gone, gone.\nI’ll fling it in the air—my debt to your tongue, Saturn.\nIn your minds, I’ve split a spleen, lust my lust.\nCome along, fawn. Oh! So, I have to whistle to you.”\n[Audience laughs] [Whistling]\n06:23\tKatherine McLeod [from ShortCuts 1.2]\tThat was Maxine Gadd reading “Shore Animals” with Richard Sommer improvising the flute at a reading that took place in Montreal on February 18, 1972.\n06:34\tTheme music\t[Theme music fades in]\n06:38\tKatherine McLeod\tHead to SpokenWeb.ca to find out more about the audio of the month and how to listen to the entire recording. My name is Katherine McLeod. Tune in next month for another deep dive into the sounds of the SpokenWeb archives.\n07:00\tTheme music\t[Theme music ends]\n \n\n"],"score":3.7048998},{"id":"9997","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 5.5, ShortCuts Live! Turning Our Bodies Toward Sound with Xiaoxuan Huang, 20 May 2024"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/shortcuts-live-hybrid-poetics/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2024],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/7870778a-a9bf-49d8-a85e-431dd4a12705/audio/b6cd0426-b37e-451f-8416-8453d559a884/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"shortcuts-may-17-mix-v1.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:25:58\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"24,935,487 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"shortcuts-may-17-mix-v1\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/shortcuts-live-hybrid-poetics/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2024-05-20\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"AUDIO\\n\\nHuang, Xiaoxuan.  “the way we hold our hands with nothing in them.”\\n\\nSinister Flower, the radio show curated by Lucía Meliá and what Xiaoxuan talks about listening to recently.\\n\\n*\\n\\nRESOURCES\\n\\nRead “Vibrate in Sympathy,” a poetic reflection on the 2022 SpokenWeb Symposium written by Xiaoxuan Huang,\\n\\n\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549822111745,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["This month, we’re back with another Shortcuts Live, talking with researchers in person and starting those conversations with a short ‘cut’ of audio. These ShortCuts Live conversations were recorded on-site at the 2023 SpokenWeb Symposium held at the University of Alberta.\n\nIn this conversation, Xiaoxuan Huang talks about hybrid poetics (and more) with then-supervising producer Kate Moffatt. The audio that informs this conversation is a clip from an audio-visual poetry collage by Huang called “the way we hold our hands with nothing in them.”  The audio of this collage beautifully sets the sonic environment for this conversation. Listen, and find yourself turning towards the sound.\n\n\n00:00\tKate Moffatt:\tKatherine will write a little host, or she has a little host intro that goes in. I don’t know if she writes new ones for each one. Sometimes, she does, but we can also introduce it a little.\n00:08\tMiranda Eastwood:\tShe does. No, she will do it, especially for the live Shortcuts. She does. It’s just to be like, “That’s what’s going on,” because they’re special.\nRight.\n00:13\tKate Moffatt:\tThe live ones are the best ones.\n00:14\tMiranda Eastwood:\tThey’re very good.\n00:16\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tLive things tend to be–\n00:18\tKate Moffatt:\t[Kate and Miranda laugh] Yeah. Yeah. They’re very good. And is it recording right now already?\n00:21\tMiranda Eastwood:\tIt is recording right now.\n00:22\tKate Moffatt:\tI love this little behind-the-scenes, where it’s like [Laughter] “What the heck are we doing?”\nThat’s so perfect. Did we decide how we wanted to start the episode?\n00:29\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tCould I have a […] I mean, I’m just gonna drink some water. [Laughter]\n00:31\tKate Moffatt:\tPlease go for it. Yeah. Yeah.\n00:34\tMiranda Eastwood:\tNope, we can do whatever we want. We can just go for it. Whatever feels right. Okay. [Laughter]\n00:39\tKate Moffatt:\tUm, I will wait until you’re done with your water bottle.\n00:41\tMiranda Eastwood:\tYou can say, “This is Shortcuts with Kate Moffatt.”\n00:44\tKate Moffatt:\t“Welcome to Shortcuts Live.”\nDo I need to introduce myself? No.\n00:46\tMiranda Eastwood:\tYou should. It would–\n00:47\tKate Moffatt:\tDoes Katherine introduce herself?\n00:49\tMiranda Eastwood:\tWell, no, but she’s the producer. We–\n00:51\tKate Moffatt:\tShe’s always the person who does it. Oh my gosh. Okay.\n00:54\tMiranda Eastwood:\tBut she does say, “I’m Katherine.”\nShe does say, “I am Katherine McLeod.” I think. Now my brain’s just zoning it out ’cause I’m like, “Oh, I know, I know. It’s Katherine McLeod” [Laughs]\n01:03\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tI think it’s always nice as a listener, [overlap: “to know who you’re listening to.”] even if you’re a long-time listener.\n01:07\tKate Moffatt:\tWorst case, we can cut it out.\n01:11\tKatherine McLeod:\t[SpokenWeb Shortcuts Theme Song Starts Playing]\nWelcome to Shortcuts. My name is Katherine McLeod, and I’m the producer for this Shortcut series on the podcast. Yes, they were right, I am introducing myself and telling you about what you’re going to hear.\nThis month, we’re back with another Shortcuts Live, talking with researchers in person and starting those conversations with a shortcut of audio. These Shortcuts Live conversations were recorded on-site at the 2023 SpokenWeb Symposium held at the University of Alberta. For this conversation, we’re sitting down with Xiaoxuan Wong to talk about sound, language, video, poetry, voice, making room for the indeterminate, and more, like playlist recommendations – listen to the end for that.\n02:01\tKatherine McLeod:\tThe conversation is led by Kate Moffatt, and you’ll occasionally hear Miranda Eastwood recording in the background and adding a few comments, including an enthusiastic applause that I have left in at the end. I love that applause because it really emphasizes that this was recorded live. Let’s jump back into that onsite conversation and let the conversation speak for itself.\n[Music fades]\n02:30\tKate Moffatt:\tHello and welcome to Shortcuts Live. My name is Kate Moffatt. I am the supervising producer for the SpokenWeb podcast, and I’m hopping in for Katherine McLeod on this particular episode of Shortcuts. We are so excited to sit down with Xiaoxuan Wong today, and actually, yeah. Xiaoxuan, would you mind introducing yourself?\n02:55\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tOf course. I am so happy to be here. Thank you, Kate, for sitting down with me. Yeah. My name is Xiaoxuan Wong. I also go by just Xiao and sometimes publish under Sherry as well, Sherry Huang. But yeah, I am a poet, first and foremost. But I feel most at home, kind of playing around with different mediums and voicings and spaces. So, I kind of describe myself as working in “hybrid poetics.”\nThe piece that we’re gonna be maybe talking about and hearing a little bit from will sort of be a good example of how my practice converges a few different\nmediums.\n03:48\tKate Moffatt:\tWonderful. And I think we are, we’re gonna just start by\nlistening to this. Is that right? Okay. Let me pull it up. And here we go.\n03:58\tXiaoxuan Wong, Audio of Xiaoxuan Reading “The Way We Hold Our Hands With Nothing in Them” \t[Audio From A Video Poem Played. Ambient Music Plays And A Voice Reads The Words As A Poem.]\nI don’t know the names of trees, but I can tell what time it is from the way their shadows lean. It might feel sometimes like we are here just to run out of time. I want you to know, it hurts me, too. One day, we will drive through the mountains. The weather will be unusually hot. Actually, it will be your birthday again. You will pull over on the side of the road and say, “come here. I wanna show you something.” And it will be the tops of trees. I go to a lot of parties, hoping I’ll see you there. Often, what I remember the next day is all the people outside smoking. The air flares up in turns, like a circle of lightning bugs. Someone offers me a drag, I refuse, or no one does. And I ask for one, forgetting I was supposed to be leaving just like in previous years. This summer, too, is likely to leave us with its heat mixed into us. The trees are thinking of what I’m thinking of – your face next to mine in the absenting light due to atmosphere. Due to all the time we don’t have.\n06:07\tKate Moffatt:\tOkay. Amazing. Xiao, can you please–\n06:11\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tThank you–\n06:12\tKate Moffatt:\tTell me what we were just listening to.\n06:15\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tYeah. So, we’re recording this at the SpokenWeb Symposium hosted at U of A. And this piece was sort of, you know, made with existing […] the text was pre-existing, and the ambient guitar that you hear was improvised.\nBut this iteration of this project was made in response to the call of this year’s symposium “Reverb Echo.” So yeah, this piece is like around six minutes. It’s an audio-visual piece as well as a poetry collage of, I guess, fragments that I took from a longer project, which was my master’s thesis called “All the Time.”\nBut, this iteration of this project, the six-minute audio-visual poetry collage, is called “The Way We Hold Our Hands With Nothing in Them,” which itself is a fragment from “All the Time.” So, I think what I said before about multiple mediums and practices kind of informing me, my mode of practicing “hybrid poetics,” this is one version of how it sometimes shows up. Generally, I think about sound and musical sound and ambient sound or ambient musical sound, I guess, as a part of the voicings of my poem. But, it’s not necessarily the most authoritative one. I love my poems dearly when they’re just on the page as well. And also just, you know, read.\nAnd so there’s these multiple registers of voicings that I’m really interested in playing with. And kind of sensing through how certain ways of displaying the poem could, on some levels, create a different type of room that we can all enter together and that feels different from the room that is made through just a stanza, which itself also means room.\n08:55\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tYeah. [Laughter] It’s been one of those concepts that have long haunted me, and I’m sure long haunted many other thinkers and poets, as well. But, it feels really appropriate to me ’cause I think that’s part of what I wanna do with language, is to create an atmosphere as well as tell a story. I know that my relationship to language and poetic language has always been something I am gonna continue to grapple with. But I think I was having a conversation, earlier where I said that these remediations of poetry and poetic text through music and performance and video and image components as well. I’ve done some screen printing, as well, of my poetry.\n10:00\tKate Moffatt:\tThat’s so cool. [Laughs]\n10:02\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tAnd, yeah, these are all kind of ways to push back against languages, urge to close in on itself and signify too quickly, or kind of seal itself off from the indeterminate.\n10:22\tKate Moffatt:\tTo be contained–\n10:23\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tYeah, yeah.\n10:24\tKate Moffatt:\tWhich has some interesting kind of echoes of the idea of like the room that you were talking about, an atmosphere for, to resist that containment that a word has kind of inherently.\n10:34\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tPrecisely. And I think I wanna give the room – and also language itself like room – to come and go and alter. And I think that’s the kind of, when language is employed like that, it gets me really excited. And it sort of lives in my body differently. It lingers. It has longer staying power when there’s a kernel of indeterminacy to it. Because I find that it sort of becomes more rich with wider application–\n11:20\tKate Moffatt:\tThe possibility that comes with almost like the embodiment of it.\n11:24\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tAbsolutely. Yeah. And, so in this video piece what I guess our listeners can’t see is there are sort of bad subtitles on screen. So\nthe visual is just actually like an iPhone footage. One long shot of, I think a blood moon from last year that I took.\nAnd, the image of the moon has kind of accompanied my short, relatively short career as an artist. I’m only 30, so yeah. And, I’m sure it’ll stay with me. But, on top of the video are these like yellow kind of traditional, like yellow font?\n12:21\tKate Moffatt:\tI noticed that sometimes, there’s like the square brackets where there’s words missing or bits and pieces, and not everything is subtitled. Right?\n12:29\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tYeah. And that was kind of a decision that I made on a fly. And I think that aesthetically evoking this, the way I play with space on the page too, when it’s a textual, like a purely textual piece I use a lot, I consider a lot about the space on the page. I don’t really use traditional punctuation. I forgo conventional capitalization and punctuation for spacing. And I think spacing itself is like one of the main ways that I write with.\n13:09\tKate Moffatt:\tYeah. Our listeners aren’t gonna know this, and maybe you don’t either, but I absolutely had goosebumps while I was reading the sort of yet partial subtitles unfinished in a way. But, yeah, that very intentional kind of creating of space in the subtitles itself was, yeah. Anyways, I got goosebumps. So that’s kind of fun. [Laughs]\n13:29\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tThat’s beautiful. Thank you for telling me that. Thanks, Kate.\n13:34\tKate Moffatt:\tNo, of course. It was, it was stunning. I can’t wait to watch the whole thing. Actually. I feel like, I wish we could just have played the whole thing. It was so lovely. Those first couple of minutes.\n13:45\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tThank you. Yeah. The square brackets felt important to me over parenthetical, like curve brackets. There’s something about the square brackets aesthetically that I feel have less associations with an “aside” or, you know, a kind of “lower register of signification.” I didn’t necessarily want those connotations of like this is an “aside” or what is being redacted, totally being redacted is less important. Or rather, that what is unsaid is less important. I think that with the square brackets, my hope is to kind of invite in room for kind of, again, the indeterminate what is unsaid, what can’t be said, and what even sometimes the square brackets are on screen when the, the voice in the audio is actually completing the line.\nSo also, you know, putting those two intentions, like the visual of the square brackets, the text being withheld on screen while the voice is kind of speaking in utterance.\n15:10\tKate Moffatt:\tWhy is it something that can be voiced but not written down?\n[Overlapping: Right. Right.] What makes you kind of question the gap that’s maybe occurring?\n15:18\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tThat’s such an interesting reading of that. Yeah. I love that. And, I think one of the best parts of my conference experience, especially with SpokenWeb, is the conversations that I get to have with everyone else who loves thinking about sound and exalting the unspoken and silence and the fullness and the capability of silence, potentiality of silence.\n15:47\tKate Moffatt:\tI’d love to, if you don’t mind, just hop back quickly to[…]you were saying that you do get this kind of like multiple registers of voicing in the poem and thinking about different ways of engaging with like the room or the containment. And I’m just[…]you bringing up the conference and kind of what we’ve been discussing over the past couple of days. We’ve often brought up, you know, these ideas of echoes, particularly the ways that echoes are created or the way that reverberations sound in rooms, spaces, or architecture. And I just wanted to ask if to bring this around a little bit to listening and the role that maybe thinking about those spaces and how sound is created in those spaces, or how you think about creating sound in things like a room. If there’s a particular role that listening plays, if there are multiple registers of listening because you’ve got multiple registers of voicing, and how the space that this is happening in, or the space that you’re creating for it, how that impacts that.\nI don’t know. That’s a big, long, twisty question. Feel free to take anything from there that feels like it speaks to you.\n16:53\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tI love it when questions twist, ’cause then that allows my answers to twist.\n16:57\tKate Moffatt:\tWonderful. Give us a twisty answer.\n16:59\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tSo one part of this video that we didn’t get to hear later, the voice says, “some ways of listening, turn the whole body into an ear”–\n17:15\tKate Moffatt:\tOh, wow.\n17:16\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tAnd I –\n17:18\tKate Moffatt:\tI got more goosebumps. [Laughter]\n17:21\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tI mean, think in a way that[…]talk about a twisting, right? Like the body itself in turning becomes an apostrophe. Like, apostrophe is, means, to turn. And, I –\n17:40\tKate Moffatt:\tStunning. That’s so stunning. Sorry, I need a second. [Laughter]\nThat’s so lovely.\n17:45\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tYeah. I love that question because I think that[…]and I love that we’re recording this in a sound booth, which in a way is attempting to like erase the space or the contours. [Overlap: Oh, yeah.]\nI think with that line, the way I’m feeling it now in conversation with your question is like, I’m thinking about turning’s relationship to listening and like what it does to turn a body to face a certain way. And so, now I’m thinking about orientation, what we choose to focus on. And we all know that listening is as much about attention and focus as it is about volume. So, I think that ultimately, listening is an orientation that we get to choose. I mean, to a certain extent.\n18:46\tKate Moffatt:\tRight? No, but I know exactly what you mean. Yeah. That there is, that we should not feel like it’s something passive that’s only happening passively. There is so much intentionality, and that intentionality can shape that entirely.\n18:57\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tYeah. Yes. Yeah. [Laughter]. Yes. Yes. That’s it. [Laughter].\n19:02\tKate Moffatt:\tOh, that’s such a wonderful answer. And I feel like even as you were saying that about us being in the booth too that we have kind of prioritized, we are choosing to forgo the space, the larger space that we’re in. For the sake of like a clear voicing. In technical terms, like a clear particular voicing of our conversation.\n19:28\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tUhhuh [Affirmative]\n19:28\tKate Moffatt:\tAnd like, yeah.\n19:30\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tYeah. Um, like I love analog technology because of its grit. And it’s like the grain, like Barthes talks about, like the grain of the voice. And I just, um, yeah. Like incredible.\nMy friends make fun of me. This is off-topic now, but my friends – I love it – make fun of me for all my playlists. Like, my music taste is like boys who can’t sing and sad indie girls. And, um, [Laughs]–\n20:02\tKate Moffatt:\tI love it. I love it. You’re really selling your playlist, actually. I love it.\n20:07\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tAnd I like, I don’t know, there’s something about hearing flaws\nand, um, hearing texture when things aren’t super smoothed out and polished, that is so compelling to me. And so, when I take that as like a, um, I think that’s informed by like my, the way I grew up in small-town Ontario, music scenes and, um, Kingston, Ontario – shout out to Kingston [Laughs] – um, such a rich music scene for its like per capita in terms of its–\n20:47\tKate Moffatt:\tI love that–\n20:48\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tIt’s population. I think there are so many wonderful things, like collectives working together to bring and sustain God. We know, we all know how hard it is to sustain a scene; takes all of us. And yeah, like I think my embracing of the grittiness and not erasing certain contours or not blurring, I guess like cleaning up things too much is informed by experimentation and just doing it. Not being interested in being, I don’t know, an apprentice in [Laughs] for too long before actually picking up a guitar or picking up some drumsticks.\n21:41\tKate Moffatt:\tBut that imperfection is actually part of the, it’s part of the magic that’s happening in the first place.\n21:46\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tYeah. And it allows for you to put on a show then…Like, I don’t know why I love that–\n21:53\tKate Moffatt:\tThat’s more important than making it perfect first, right?\n21:56\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tYeah. Yeah.\n21:57\tKate Moffatt:\tOr making it perfect at all. Amazing.\nOkay. Well, I’d like to finish with one last quick question, which is: What are you listening to lately? Like in your research or at the conference–\n22:08\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tOh, gosh.\n22:09\tKate Moffatt:\tOr even just generally. This is kind of hopping off of that lovely little playlist tangent you sent us on. But we can end with this one, but yeah. What are you listening to?\n22:19\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tI, okay, so I am listening to…I love radio. I love the intimacy of radio, especially community radio, campus radio, you know, hearing myself being addressed. One-on-one. So it feels like, to me I’ve had, I’ve written about it. I’ve kind of, that’s a relationship to another’s voice that feels really special.\n22:57\tKate Moffatt:\tThat’s such a gorgeous way to think about it.\n23:00\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tThanks. So, I guess like radio shows, I don’t know. I workout to like\nNTS’s “Infinite” mixtape, [Laughs] that they have on there, and make some cool discoveries there. And yeah, I think I’ve, the internet has introduced me to a lot of connections too, like Lucía Meliáwho is based out of Mexico City. She is, yeah, she is a radio…she has a radio show called “Sinister Flowers.” That great name, right?\n23:42\tKate Moffatt:\tGreat name. [Laughs]\n23:43\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tThat is a, I think the most ideal. It’s everything I want in a radio show. It has critical theory. It has music and like field recordings. Poetry works its way in there. And Lucía’s taste is just like, right on. So I, yeah. And right now I’m listening to “Sinister Flowers.”\n24:13\tKate Moffatt:\tI’m gonna have to write that down. Well, I think we’ll stop there. Thank you so much. It was so lovely. It was so, words are not capturing this properly. It wasn’t lovely. It was so much more than lovely, but it was lovely. So thank you so much, so much for joining us and\n24:27\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tSee you at the conference.\n24:28\tKate Moffatt:\tSee you at the rest of the conference, yeah.\n24:29\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tThere’s a cabaret tonight.\n24:31\tKate Moffatt:\tThere’s a cabaret. We’re gonna go listen together at the cabaret.\n24:35\tXiaoxuan Wong:\tThank you so much, Kate.\n24:36\tKate Moffatt:\tThank you.\n24:36\tMiranda Eastwood:\tYay! [Miranda cheers]\n24:39\tMusic:\t[SpokenWeb theme song starts playing]\n24:42\tKatherine McLeod:\tYou’ve been listening to Shortcuts.\n24:46\tKatherine McLeod:\tThanks to Xiaoxuan Wong for talking with us in this episode. And a big thanks to Kate Moffatt and Miranda Eastwood for conducting and recording the conversation.\nShortcuts is part of the SpokenWeb podcast.\nThe SpokenWeb podcast is made up of supervising producer Maia Harris, sound designer, James Healy, transcriber, Yara Ajeeb, and co-host Hannah McGregor, and myself, Katherine McLeod. Like all of these Shortcuts live\nconversations from last year’s symposium, there really is a sense of being there. And, I thought that this conversation in particular was such a great way of thinking back to the feeling of being there last year and looking ahead to this year’s symposium. In fact, we’ll be rolling out the last of these Shortcuts Live conversations as a full episode in the very same week as this year’s SpokenWeb symposium takes place. Stay tuned for that in the first week of June, right here on the podcast feed. And, for now, thanks for listening."],"score":3.7048998},{"id":"9998","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 5.6, Open Door Listening, with Brandon LaBelle at Errant Bodies Press, 29 July 2024, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/open-door-listening-with-brandon-labelle-at-errant-bodies-press/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2024],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/291d921e-f868-4021-87cf-786ea58df875/audio/50ec4344-8b6b-4319-8f76-062ea1d7b47c/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"audio-sample-shortcuts-errant-bodies-press.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:21:34\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"20,770,108 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"ShortCuts - Errant Bodies Press\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/open-door-listening-with-brandon-labelle-at-errant-bodies-press/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2024-07-29\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572#map=16/45.49381/-73.58233\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"REFERENCES\\n\\nCopeland, Stacey, Hannah McGregor and Katherine McLeod. “The Kitchen Table is Always Where We Are: Podcasting as Feminist Self-Reflexive Practice.” Podcast Studies: Theory into Practice, eds. Dario Linares and Lori Beckstead, Wilfrid Laurier UP, forthcoming in December 2024.\\n\\nLaBelle, Brandon. “Poetics of Listening.” ESC: English Studies in Canada, vol. 46 no. 2, 2020, p. 273-277. Project MUSE, https://doi.org/10.1353/esc.2020.a903562.\\n\\nMcLeod, Katherine. “Archival Listening.” ESC: English Studies in Canada, vol. 46 no. 2, 2020, p. 325-331. Project MUSE, https://doi.org/10.1353/esc.2020.a903565.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549825257472,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["ShortCuts as a series on The SpokenWeb Podcast feed is coming to an end.\n\nFor the past five seasons, ShortCuts producer Katherine McLeod has been bringing you deep dives into the archives. Through this process, ShortCuts has asked the question of what it means to listen closely and carefully to short ‘cuts’ of audio. ShortCuts has become a sonic space to practice feminist listening and that listening has informed and continues to inform audio-based research, performances (including performances based on ShortCuts audio), and print publications (such as “Archival Listening” and “The Kitchen Table is Always Where We Are: Podcasting as Feminist Self-Reflexive Practice”).\n\nFor this final ShortCuts, we listen to a conversation with Brandon LaBelle recorded on-site at Errant Bodies Press in Berlin. Listen to hear a reading from LaBelle’s “Poetics of Listening” (as published in ESC “New Sonic Approaches in Literary Studies”), to hear about Errant Bodies Press and what it sounds like to be there, and to hear the open door as a way of listening. That open door listening will continue even after ShortCuts ends.\n\nStay tuned for what is next!\n\n[Sound of walking down stairs and door opening] (00:00)\n\nKatherine McLeod (00:22):\n\nWelcome to Shortcuts. \n\n[Door closes and theme music begins]\n\nKatherine McLeod:\n\nThis ShortCuts is recorded in Berlin. It is a conversation with Brandon LaBelle at Errant Bodies Press. The episode explores the sound of Errant Bodies Press as a space of listening. It just so happened that where I was staying in Berlin was within walking distance. We laughed about that when I arrived.\n\nMy conversation with Brandon LaBelle took place after his piece “Poetics of Listening” was published in the special issue of English studies in Canada that I edited with Jason Camlot. The special issue is called “New Sonic Approaches in Literary Studies.” And when I sat down with Brandon LaBelle at Errant Body’s Press, there was the journal issue on the table. It had made it to Berlin and it was ready to make itself heard in this space of listening.\n\n \nBrandon LaBelle (01:56):\n\nWould you like some tea, or water?\n\n \n[Music]\n\n \nKatherine McLeod:\nThis is such a, a beautiful space. I was –\n\n \nBrandon LaBelle (02:10):\n\nYeah. Yeah. No, we really enjoyed it. I’ve had it for a couple years now, and yeah. I’ve been kind of working here as a studio and, and then like having a home for the press. Yeah. And lately it’s become more, I’ve started to invite some friends to join me, so now we’re kind of creating a little bit of a collective more like a kind of a study group. \n\n \nKatherine McLeod\n\nMm-Hmm. <Affirmative> \n\n \nBrandon Labelle:\n\nWe’re all like focusing around listening and planetary. So yeah. We’re having kind of study sessions and making workshops and small events, so the space really is conducive to that. \n\n \nKatherine McLeod (02:53):\n\n‘Cause I was so interested in how the space is both a press and also a space of practice and developing methods and collaboration together. And so this combination of space adds again, the, both like the physical presence of books, but also a space of real performance and enactment that that clearly takes place in it too. So that’s, it’s a really fascinating combination. Even just as I look around, I see the books are so present, and yet it feels like at these tables, action takes place and listening takes place. So it feels like the kind of space that invites both.\n\n \nBrandon LaBelle (03:34):\n\nYeah.\n\n \nKatherine McLeod (03:35):\n\nYeah. And the Listening Biennal, does that take place here? Or is that,\n\n \nBrandon LaBelle (03:40):\n\nYes\n\n \nKatherine McLeod\n\nI mean, I see the poster.\n\n \nBrandon LaBelle (03:42):\n\nYeah. Yeah. This is actually our new poster. Oh, that was from last\n\n \nKatherine: \n\nYear. Oh, thank you. \n\n \nBrandon LaBelle (03:47):\n\nTwo years ago. Yeah. And yeah, so what we’re planning now is to actually Yeah. Install the biennial here. Okay. To make a listening lounge. So we’ll kind of get rid of the tables and just have some carpets and pillows and oh, nice. Yeah. And sort of have, be open on the weekend and, and sort of diffuse the audio works and yeah. Create a kind of cozy environment for people to be here and listen together. So that’s kind of the plan. Next week we have the Listening Academy, which is focusing on the somatic. And then we’ll have a performance on Saturday with Sixth Dancers that we’ve been developing called The Open Body.\n\nKatherine McLeod:\n\nOkay.\n\n \nBrandon LaBelle (04:32):\n\nWhich really takes listening as the basis for movement Right. And developing different strategies around that. So yeah. We’re, yeah, I’ve been rehearsing that the last month. \n\n \nKatherine: \n\nHave you been part of that as well? \n\n \nBrandon LaBelle (04:45):\n\nI’m sort of conceptualizing the project. \n\n \n\nKatherine: \n\nAmazing. \n\n \n\nBrandon LaBelle (04:48):\n\nAnd then yeah. Working with different performers. Yeah. But it’s coming along, and should be interesting to stage it. \n\n \n\nKatherine:\n\nWhere will that take place?\n\n \n\nBrandon LaBelle (04:58):\n\nIt’s at a performance venue just in the neighborhood here. It’s an old ballroom Oh, wow. With former East Berlin, and yeah. It’s been running as a venue for probably 20 years now, so it’s a wonderful space. \n\n \n\nKatherine:\n\nYeah. Yeah. I was reading a bit about the old ballrooms that are, maybe it’s even that same one that is in this neighborhood that oh, that sounds fantastic. Yeah. Yeah. And then the space can kind of become part of the Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative> the performance.\n\n \n\nBrandon LaBelle:\n\nYeah. It’s a wonderful environment. They have a, it’s sort of set in a park, which is partly a cemetery.\n\nThey have these large, very large windows in the space that we’re gonna uncover and just look out into the, into the trees, use the sunlight and the, the evening twilight as the, the lighting. Oh, beautiful.\n\n \n\nKatherine: \n\nBeautiful. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that’s, oh – \n\n \n\nBrandon LaBelle (05:46):\n\nThat’s nice. She should be lovely.\n\n \n\nKatherine (05:48):\n\nYeah. Sounds beautiful. Yeah. And then thinking of what I, what I do in shortcuts is almost like a, like, I call it like a deep dive into archival sound and where we can, you know, really listen to one clip or one sound. So I was thinking about this space itself that we’re in and thinking of almost like if this is a shortcuts episode, almost like a deep dive into the sound of err bodies press <laugh>, and a close listening to it. So I thought maybe if I ask you a sort of a more formal question of what are we listening to now?\n\n \n\nBrandon LaBelle (06:25):\n\nMm-Hmm. <Affirmative>  Well, let’s, let’s take a moment. Yeah. I mean, I guess for myself, what has always been really essential that I’ve tried to kind of find ways of developing is maybe what we could think of as the open door. \n\n \n\nKatherine: \n\nMm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. \n\n \n\nBrandon:\n\nSo, and maybe Berlin particularly sort of offers this opportunity for artists or for, as my friend always says idealists, to sort of really manifest the imagination. To find space for really playing out. Sort of ideas and imaginaries and creative explorations. And so I think being in Berlin for me has, you know, I really embraced that and really sort of feel like I thrive in that kind of cultural environment. And so having a space like this and locating oneself and, and in, in such a manner, which is like about a certain kind of privacy. But at the same time, having this relationship to the street. \n\n \n\nKatherine:\n\nMm-Hmm. <Affirmative> \n\n \n\nBrandon: \n\n– and having an address where others can enter. And so I think this open door, and this kind of threshold, public and private, is really also something I try to integrate or learn from through my practice. So maybe we are hearing that open door. \n\n \n\nKatherine McLeod:\n\nYeah. I’m very aware of both the sounds of our voices in the space. Like if I slightly move my foot, feeling like the texture of the floor and the sounds like going up to the high ceilings, but also, but I’m so aware in this sort of beautiful kind of echo of the space, the sounds from of outside coming in, that sound of the bird or the cars passing and voices. And so yeah, I think that the, the door is where we are listening to the door <laugh>, and and it’s doing something very powerful right there, a car is passing. And there’s also something too about even seeing, looking around and seeing the, the books now seeing CDs as well the books from the press behind you, it feels like we’re, we’re kind of listening to that too as well in simply sort of by their presence here.\n\n \n\nBrandon LaBelle (09:02):\n\nYeah, that’s true. I know that often people enter and also really enjoy that material – being sort of enveloped in that kind of material of books and, and documents and media. That becomes very immediately enticing, and evocative. And so I kind of also appreciate that as a, yeah. As also a creative expression in itself. So for instance, these binders over here are a set of, they came out of a, a project I developed called The Other Citizen, and they were part of like, almost like an archival installation I made at Transmediale a few years ago. And they’re really designed, they’re like, each one is referencing a certain discursive framework. But they try to kind of be quite creative with how you sort of house or categorize knowledge. So they’re intentionally quite enticing as well, you know, in terms of what they suggest. And they’re kind of topics that come out of my own readings and my own activities, but also picking up from what is present around us in, in sort of current, current discussions or issues. So they’re, they’re inherently stray from a particular disciplinary structure and try to be more transversal and playful. \n\n \n\nKatherine:\n\n<Affirmative>.\n\n \n\nBrandon LaBelle (10:41):\n\nSo I think this also is part of what is present in the room. Mm-Hmm.\n\nSpeaker 4 (10:46):\n\n<Affirmative>. Yeah.\n\nBrandon LaBelle (10:47):\n\nThis relationship to knowledge and discourse is also sort of enlivening\n\nKatherine: \n\nYeah.\n\nBrandon LaBelle (10:54):\n\nSuggestive. Imaginative.\n\n \n\nKatherine: \n\nYeah, that just made me think when you said that of sort of dis – in thinking of disciplinary listening you know… it is a space that it’s hard to say, oh, this, you couldn’t say, you could look say on one shelf and be like, oh, okay, I see the discipline. Maybe, you know, sound studies. I’ve seen some titles there. But then as soon as you move to the next shelf, there’s another sort of disciplinary approach that’s very present. But also thinking again, of what this space is, where we are, where we are at the table what kind of disciplinary listening takes place here, which would feel quite different than on the shelf. \n\n \n\nBrandon LaBelle (11:38):\n\nYeah. This is the top shelf. Is the CDs.\n\n \n\nKatherine:\n\nYeah, yeah.\n\nBrandon LaBelle (11:44):\n\nA sort of particular format we came up with. Yeah. Which, which sort of takes the shape of the book more. Oh, may. Okay. Yeah. And they always kind of have this Yeah. Like an elaborated booklet inside. \n\nSo it was very much about keeping the idea of, of sound and sonic practice close to kind of discursive reflection. Right. Or textual Right. Matter as well. So that one would kind of read and listen or listen and read. So these things, bringing them close together, it’s quite important in that series. ’cause Sometimes, yeah. I mean, I guess there’s, there’s some, on some level there’s a kind of often a sort of idea that, you know, you have like a kind of community of practitioners often coming from an experimental music sort of arena that, you know, doesn’t necessarily relate itself to more academic informed investigations. And I always, I try to make this sort disregard this separation Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative>. And so practice in theory being very integrated feels really, you know, part of the room.\n\n \n\nSpeaker 4 (12:55):\n\nRight. Yeah. Yeah. yeah. Yeah. Do you see that as, say the, the word, the words like research creation that get sort of talked about a lot these days? Is that something that you, you, do you think of research creation as a framework that you work in? Or is that, is it sort of maybe something that you do but don’t think of it in that way…\n\n \n\nBrandon LaBelle (13:19):\n\nNo, it’s, it’s a good question. I mean, the other day we were having a meeting sort of study session, and everyone around the table really, we kind of realized at a certain moment that we all occupy this kind of artistic research framework and that feel quite comfortable in that, or sort of supported by that term. And I think there is something to that. And, and even though I don’t necessarily really forefront that as defining of my work I think it’s somehow in the background Yeah. It’s around. And I’m sure that I’m, I’m very much participating in those communities. More and more, of course, as they get more alive and present, and maybe as you also suggested, how these separations are also becoming more or less important or less clear between sort of art and academic, or between the book and the cd. \n\n \n\nKatherine McLeod:\n\nAnd certainly that’s, it’s been something that I’ve thought more about what research creation does in that the way in which SpokenWeb as a research network it has been attempting to sort of like activate archival materials or like, make, make things with them as whether in the case of the, the sort of the listening and making that I was talking about, or other kinds of, of sort of performative kind of curations that make things with archival materials. And so I think about how research creation is so important as academic work, and that it is indeed like it’s, it’s getting recognized as valid scholarship. Or even the podcast, it’s kind of a form of research creation in some way that you’re, you are you’re making something new and you’re making something that is often more creative that might not necessarily be following the same pathways as whatever the academic pathway, which often somehow gets defined as uncreative, which at the same time, it is creative too.\n\n \n\nSo it’s it’s almost a, a false, a false separation there between the, the research and creation to begin with. But, but it does feel like the there’s more support for that kind of work than, than there had been, or even, so even these, some of these formal categories help with that in some way, but yeah, that’s true. Yeah. But yeah, the just looking at the <laugh>, the collection here I was thinking that it would be beautiful to hear you read the opening to your piece, if you would be open to that. Sure. Because Sure. It is thinking as poetics a poetics of listening. It is a very poetic opening. And I thought, oh, to, to actually hear how you would voice that would be, would be a real a gift to use a word that is over there on the archival boxes. Let me turn, turn to it here – \n\n \n\nBrandon LaBelle:\n\nOkay… [Begins reading]  It has already begun… the time … the time-space… of… speaking… of speaking that moves itself… toward knowing nothing… something you… the use that arrives from the particularities… as the basis for a giving… enacting a rhythmic… of breath… breathing toward… away\n\n \n\n[Pause – music begins]\n\n \n\nKatherine McLeod (17:28):\n\nYou’ve been listening to ShortCuts. ShortCuts has been a monthly feature on the SpokenWeb podcast. It is now in its fifth season, and this may be the end of shortcuts, but who knows, there may still be shortcuts inspired Mini sos as short bonus content on the podcast feed. It is fitting that this is or could be the last episode of shortcuts. Shortcuts started as me alone recording short audio pieces as close and careful listenings to audio cut from spoken webs, archival collections. The first three seasons were quite solitary listenings, though they did make some long lasting connections with their listeners. The fourth and fifth seasons have been more and more social and live featuring conversations with spoken web researchers about archival clips of their choice and about their sound-based research. So it seemed like it could not be more fitting to conclude with a conversation with Brandon LaBelle as an expert listener, and within a space like Err Bodies press as a space of listening and a making. And to be far from the closet where I recorded so many episodes of shortcuts to be in Berlin.\n\n \n\nI edit this conversation back home in Montreal, and I record this voiceover from SpokenWeb’s podcast studio at Concordia. And as I think back over what shortcuts has made and the conversations it has sparked, I can’t help but be moved to do something that I love doing so much in shortcuts to listen again and again, and to let the sound speak for itself. And so with that, let’s listen once more to LaBelle’s reading from “A Poetics of Listening.” As I edited the audio of him reading, I noticed how he makes audible, the pauses in the text, the dot, dot dot, the ellipses. And I thought about how he rendered them in such a way that they invite a response in between the pauses. What if we listen to it like this?\n\n \n\n[Music ends]\n\n \n\nBrandon LaBelle (19:55):\n\n[Audio replays of LaBelle reading with voice overlaping – transcribed as heard] It has already begun. It has already – the time begun. The time-space, the time of the time space of speaking, that speaking moves itself, itself. Speaking that moves. Knowing nothing toward something, knowing nothing. You something. The uses that arrive from the, use the particularities as the basis particularities. A giving as the basis for a giving a rhythm, enacting breath, a rhythm, breathing toward breath away, breathing toward, away.\n\n \n\nKatherine McLeod (20:43):\n\nYou’ve been listening to ShortCuts. Thanks to Brandon for talking with me, amid the books and sounds of errant bodies. Press check the show notes for links to the press and to the Listening Biennal. ShortCuts is part of the SpokenWeb podcast. The podcast team is made up of supervising producer Maia Harris, sound designer, James Healy transcriber, Yara Ajeeb podcast co-hosts Hannah McGregor and me, Katherine McLeod. ShortCuts has been designed and produced by me, Katherine McLeod, and thanks to all who have joined me on it along the way. As always, thanks to you for listening.\n\n "],"score":3.7048998}]