Sounds
Feel the Sky
May – June 2020
Feel the Sky is a duo of sound works in conversation produced by Jaye Kranz (Australia) and Myra Al-Rahim (USA). Both extend from the same starting point – a recording from 1992 made by a news reporter unfamiliar with field recording, but entranced by a chance encounter with trumpeter swans on an icy lake.
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Are We There Yet?
““Are We There Yet?” is a strange, recurring road-trip towards home. A home we can never really find or retrieve; while at the same time, being a home we have already found: the one that is already ours.”
Jaye Kranz
May 29, 2020
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The Burdened Land
“I wanted the work to have a distinct feeling of space and scale. I sought to explore the thematic interconnectedness between the migratory paths of birds and the sprawling supply chains of capital.”
Myra Al-Rahim
May 29, 2020
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2020 Season
2020 was Constellations’ most ambitious season to date, and featured work from over twenty artists, mostly made for our podcast feed. The predominant new element of this season was gathering multiple works together in single episodes. In episodes like Missed Connections and Inner Geographies, and Extraction, the pieces trip over each other, harmonize, and build upon each other, either or both thematically and structurally.
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Semiotic Shift
“Language is inextricably linked to land. In this episode, we explore how the shifts in the landscape have impacted language across generations and cultures.”
John Hill, Bartosz Panek
November 3, 2020
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Missed Connections
“What happens when you're not quite getting it?”
Natalie Kestecher, Mike Williams, Yardain Amron
August 14, 2020
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Listen to more sounds from the 2020 podcast season here →
Resonant Bodies
August – December 2020
Resonant Bodies is an online exhibition about the sonic reflections between bodies and their environments, and an extension of a physical exhibition which took place at the Toronto Media Arts Centre from August 11-17th, 2019. The online exhibition consists of 6 new Constellations episodes, featuring new works by participating artists Aliya Pabani, Chandra Melting Tallow, Cheldon Paterson, Kaija Siirala, Jon Tjhia, and Phoebe Wang.
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2019 Season
By 2019, Constellations had established itself in a weird little corner of the audio world, leading to more artists and producers making original works for us. Our third season is comprised primarily of new works made especially for Constellations. Working alongside these artists in a curatorial capacity, we continued to craft our in-between space: not quite narrative audio, not quite sound art, but solidly somewhere that people wanted to be with us.
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H:O:M:E
“I explored themes of death, displacement, collective memory, and personal stories.”
A Hanley
June 7, 2019
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Whisper Study
“Except for the distant horns, all sounds were derived from my own voice, whispering the sentence, 'when there is no sound, hearing is most alert' and the word "silence".”
Hildegard Westerkamp
July 12, 2019
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I/a Recording
“What happens when the experience you want to record is another person? How does this interrupt the relationship, or improve it?”
Aidan McMahon
May 10, 2019
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Listen to more sounds from the 2019 podcast season here →
2018 Season
Our second year of Constellations contains some of our most inspired original pieces, alongside an excellent back catalogue of established sound artists’ works. We started reaching out to artists around the world to gain insights into sound and audio works outside of North America, and to cultivate a community of artists listening to each other across borders and sonic traditions.
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Heavy Summer
“I had a baby last February. I wanted to make something that reflects some of my feelings about what that means, without necessarily too many words.”
Rachel Ní Chuinn
December 7, 2018
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Air Can Break Your Heart
“The piece is about exploring the element of air and thinking about how communication and connection are longed for but sometimes missed or sometimes impossible.”
Anna Friz
March 23, 2018
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Ode to the Salish Sea
“I like to think of the Ode as a dream-state balancing the reality of what these waterways sound like today with imagined past and future sounds of the Salish Sea.”
Paolo Pietropaolo
October 26, 2018
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Listen to more sounds from the 2018 podcast season here →
2017 Season
Constellations began as a small collaboration between us, Michelle Macklem and Jess Shane, in the first half of 2017. We were working at a public broadcaster at the time, surrounded by tight deadlines and fast paced workflows. There was intense pressure to keep up with podcasting and radio culture in our industry, and even though we loved working with sound, we were left wondering, were we really listening?
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We Are The Transcribers
“The idea was to really hammer home through the hammering of the keys, the brutal non-stop feeling being a conduit of human language...”
Andrew Bateman, Veronica Simmonds
December 1, 2017
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Coarse and Janky
“Art soothes pain. Art is like good bread.”
Aleksandra Bragoszewska
December 27, 2017
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Ode to my Last 10 Years of Dating
“What can be found by listening to – and sitting with – our internal landscapes?”
Michelle Macklem
September 22, 2017
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