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.”
Bassel 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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Basic Ingredients
“What do eyes sound like? Does a spider’s abdomen sound furry or crunchy? How much sameness do I share with a cardinal? A mouse? Or the mold in the corners of my bathroom?... I should clean my bathroom?”
Clare Dolan, Nishant Singh, Kim Hiorthøy
August 28, 2020
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The Tortoise Carries its House on its Back
“Children of immigrants often separately compartmentalize these ideas. Home is a place we live but heritage is a space we occupy.”
Arif Mirbaghi
June 12, 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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Quiet Contemplations
“The relativity of quiet in relation to noise intrigued me and I wanted to explore the relativity of quiet in relation to other quiet moments.”
Ayesha Barmania
March 15, 2019
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The Space Between Stories
“I'm reading about the idea that personal traumas and feelings of disconnectedness might well be very much tied to the dominant civilization’s wider sense of separateness from, and superiority over, nature.”
Phil Smith
February 20, 2019
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H:O:M:E
“I explored themes of death, displacement, collective memory, and personal stories.”
Amias Hanley
June 7, 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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In Search of the Miraculous (Bas Jan Ader)
“I think of this piece as a painting and artist manifesto of sorts; it's about searching for something that you may never find, and the compulsion to make.”
Phoebe Wang
April 20, 2018
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Music to Wash Dishes By (This is of Course a Metaphor)
“I do everything by ear and I try to play around with and fiddle with different audio sources which move me and stick with me, and then I find meaning through that and see if it takes me anywhere new. ”
Olivia Bradley-Skill
August 10, 2018
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Swimming Through Butterflies
“I liked the idea of getting a biologist to “speak” in sound and not in words or facts. ”
Karen Werner
February 9, 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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06-32-24
“The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next.”
Craig Desson
December 15, 2017
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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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Migraines & Tsunamis
“I think anyone who experiences some kind of internal, invisible but frequently, reoccurring pain ends up using some kind of external imagery or analogy in order to both explain to others, but also to yourself, what exactly the pain is.”
Adriene Lilly
September 8, 2017
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