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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Accumulation Over Time
“I want to understand … what is this accumulation? Like, why is why is this? How is this? What is this?”
Adriene Lilly
August 7, 2020
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Inner Geographies
“We are wrong to look for uniformity and objectivity. We have all mapped associations to what our subjective experience is like.”
Axel Kacoutié, Kamikaze Jones
September 11, 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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Despojo (Dispossession)
“DESPOJO is a sound work which only uses sounds from an old vinyl record — clips and claps. I cut the big sound loop into fragments, creating small samples.”
Franco Falistoco Araya
February 15, 2019
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Point Pelee
“While making this piece, I thought a lot about where my urge to recreate this moment at Point Pelee really came from. What evolutionary need does it serve?”
Ayaz Kamani
June 21, 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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Black Beach
“As I worked with the tape of the waves, I began to see what I had been missing in own conflicted relationship with masculinity.”
Chris Connolly
July 13, 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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And If I Live A Thousand Lives I Hope to Remember One
“Over the course of several years of using the same cassette player and the same cassette tape, the record of the recording turns out to be this kind of palimpsested recording; multiple layers of different performances over several years.”
Bonnie Jones
April 6, 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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Is this an Exercise?
“Back in the 80's I sneak-watched a TV movie with highly disturbing content (about nuclear war) and it's been passively haunting me ever since.”
Julie Shapiro
October 20, 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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Lazaro's Dream
“Lazaro's Dream is an audio walk that mixes history and fiction into a surreal dreamscape and guides listeners through the Danforth area in Toronto, Ontario. Press play and enter a character's dream.”
Angela Shackel
August 11, 2017
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