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Review in Vital Weekly, issue 1443, by Frans de Waard, of the Auditorium cd publication.

Releases by Canada’s Christof Migone are packed with ideas and concepts; summarising them in the space of a review is a sheer impossible task. Here’s what I got from this; I am sure I fail at my job. It’s all about a piece he started in 2002, “to present speaking at its degree zero – a kind of rendition of Cage’s famous quip, ‘I have nothing to say, and I am saying it’”, but it never finished to his satisfaction, and somehow Migone thought he failed. In 2005, he set up a recording session for a few people to hear this piece, along with beer and snacks; in 2006 another version with a smaller group and instructed them to be quiet. On this CD are recordings of both listening sessions and two reworked pieces from 2022 and 2023, plus the original. That one is at the end of the CD. Each one is about fifteen minutes long and is a strange CD altogether. The failed original is a piece for computer processing, and I gather he processes voice material (I got this from the extended text). One of the remixes is very, very quiet, as if Migone tries to remove all frequencies and events from the original, while the other rework is a very lively one, almost very musical for his standards, with repeating bass-like sounds, but also with randomised elements. The ‘Chaos’ version starts with fairly regular sounds but quickly erupts in a party atmosphere, with people laughing and burping. The quiet version of this piece is indeed what it is, quiet but not without the presence of sound, such as these things go. Five quite different pieces of music, and should one not have read the booklet, one would have difficulty hearing the connection between these pieces. That is the downside of such conceptual approaches, even when the results are pretty interesting. At the same time I also admit I wouldn’t return to such a thing very soon. The point is clear (more or less). (FdW)
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Review in Bad Alchemy Magazine, issue 124, of the Auditorium cd publication.

Migone, in Toronto bestens in der kanadischen Szene (Set Fire to Flames, Alexandre St- Onge, Michel F. Côté…) vernetzt, hat sich zuletzt erst wieder bei „Wet Water (Let’s Dance)“ als Konzeptkünstler gezeigt, der Münder, Nasen und Ohren härtetestet, um damit das Bild, das der Mensch sich von sich und von Kunst macht, in Frage zu stellen. Einiges davon würde wohl, ‘unters Volk’ gebracht, Ist-das-Kunst- oder-kann-das-weg-Spott auf sich ziehen oder sogar als elitärer Kunst-Scheiß Steinwürfe und Misthaufen von Trucker-, Gelbwesten- und Bauern-Protestlern. 2002 hat Migone versucht, John Cages „I have nothing to say, and I am saying it“ beim Wort zu nehmen, als Verstummen, oder als Gebabbel. ‘Lake of Coherence’ und ‘an idiot who utters thoughts…’, wo er Leif Elggren nahekam, waren 2003 erste Ansätze dazu. Den Versuch, da- raus was Überzeugendes zu machen als Mix aus brodelig dröhnendem, bersten- dem, womöglich von verhuschten Stimm- lauten durchsetztem Noise, legte er als gescheitert auf Eis – hier ist es ange- hängt als ‘Auditorium (Fail)’. 2005 orga- nisierte er dennoch im Hotel2Tango mit ‘Fail’ als Ausgangsanstoß eine zwanglose Party-Session mit 16 Teilnehmern, die damit in vier Durchläufen babbelnd, la- chend, rülpsend und mit Klingklang in- teragieren sollten – zu hören als ‘Audito- rium (Chaos)’. Und 2006 eine stille Ses- sion mit fünf Leuten, die nur lauschen sollten – präsentiert als ‘Auditorium (Quiet)’ und quasi viertelstündiges ‘4:33’. Von beidem fertigte er 2022-23 Reworks, die als ‘Auditorium (Q)’ & ‘…(C)’ dem An- gestrebten so nahe wie möglich kom- men. Das eine als sanftes, sonores Dröh- nen und monoton repetiertes Gurren, das andere knarrend und mit überra- schend rhythmischem Klopfen.
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Review in Chain D.L.K. by Vito Camarretta of the Auditorium cd publication.

Imagine you’re at an art installation, but instead of admiring what’s on the wall, you’re there to listen to someone failing spectacularly at an audio piece. It’s less a concert and more an existential exercise in “not” listening while listening. That’s what Christof Migone’s “Auditorium (Chaos, Quiet, Fail)” feels like: a meticulous, controlled, and possibly absurd exploration of the sound of silence, failure, and collective confusion.
It’s like being invited to a dinner party where no one says anything, yet you can’t stop hearing everything.

The album begins with “Auditorium (Q)”, a nearly 15-minute meditation that’s more about the anticipation of sound than sound itself. We’re plunged into a space that feels haunted by echoes of past failures, but the real genius lies in the fact that “nothing much happens”. There’s a kind of Cagean brilliance in this — a modern nod to “I have nothing to say, and I am saying it”, except here, you’re waiting for that moment when Migone finally delivers… but instead, you hear the squeak of a chair, the subtle rustle of a shirt sleeve, or maybe someone exhaling loudly because they’re also wondering, “Is this it?”.

It’s the sound of “audience” rather than “performance”. Migone takes the concept of ambient noise and runs with it – no, sprints with it – until it’s an art form all its own. It’s like being trapped inside a John Cage symposium where everyone forgot to play the instruments, and all that’s left is the rustling of programs.

The second track, “Auditorium (C)”, builds on this concept of tension and release, but here’s where it gets more chaotic. You start to hear the bodies in the room as much as the room itself. Is that laughter? Is someone burping? Or maybe it’s a collective sigh of relief that we’re finally getting some human noise amidst the void. What Migone captures here is “the performance of being present” — a shared experience where the people in the room are both performers and audience members, and we, the distant listeners, are invited to voyeuristically listen to them listen.
As for “Auditorium (Chaos)”, this is where the train fully derails – but in the most delightful way possible. If “Quiet” was about subtlety, “Chaos” is the loud, unruly sibling that knocks over your drink at a family reunion. People are talking, instruments are being played seemingly at random, and there’s a sense of gleeful disorder that’s infectious. It’s the sound of people giving up on decorum and just enjoying the act of making noise, whether it was intended. The best part? None of this was supposed to happen. It’s like Migone set the stage for high art and instead got a soundscape of wine-fueled improvisation.

But let’s talk about the pièce de résistance: “Auditorium (Fail)”. The original failed piece, a sonic artifact that Migone consciously sabotaged, is the heart of this project. It’s here, wrapped in layers of irony and intention, that we get to experience the failure that was never meant to be heard. It’s both fascinating and, well, a little frustrating. This track embodies the ultimate anti-climax: the sound of someone trying to create something profound and deciding, halfway through, to let it rot. There’s something both endearing and exasperating about this. It’s like Migone is saying, “Here’s my failure. Enjoy it”, and you kind of “do”, because the absurdity is captivating.

Yet beneath all this irony and conceptual play, there’s something deeply emotional in “Auditorium (Chaos, Quiet, Fail)”. The idea of listening to others listen-of being present in their presence without ever being there-taps into something human. It’s an exploration of shared experience, of collective vulnerability, and ultimately, of failure as a form of art. Migone succeeds where he wanted to fail, and in doing so, he draws us into a sonic world where the boundaries between success and failure blur.

Fans of sound art will find this album a masterclass in conceptual audio. For those who want a tune, a melody, or even a hint of rhythm, look elsewhere. This is music at its most abstract, a refusal of form and an embrace of everything left in its wake. It’s not about what’s played; it’s about what’s not played, what’s barely heard, and what we imagine in the gaps. It’s Cage’s ghost laughing somewhere in the background, while the rest of us sit in uncomfortable silence.
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Review in Music Map by Gilberto Ongaro of the Auditorium cd publication.

Non credo d’aver capito cos’ho ascoltato, ed ora devo scriverne. Un po’come John Cage che dice: “Non ho niente da dire, e lo sto dicendo”. Ma sono intrigato da quello che non capisco, che sfida le mie poche rotelle rimaste. Vediamo se dalle mie parole, riuscite a capire quel che non ho capito io.

Avete presente quando siete accanto a uno che ascolta musica in cuffia ad alto volume, quindi voi non sentite quello che sta ascoltando, se non
qualche fruscio, e l’ambiente circostante che condividete? Ecco, “Auditorium (chaos, quiet fail)” (uscito per The Dim Coast Label) è qualcosa del genere. Forse.

Avevamo già incontrato Christof Migone su Music Map, intento a registrare i suoni prodotti da un pomodoro ghiacciato tenuto in bocca
(http://www.musicmap.it/recdischi/ordinaperr.asp?id=10503). Questa volta, il sound artist canadese ci propone il risultato di… un fallimento, di
un errore. Era un esperimento del 2002, che non lo soddisfaceva. E allora, cos’ha fatto? L’ha volutamente peggiorato, aggiungendo strati su strati di suoni, fino a che diventasse “a mess” (parole sue).

Dopodiché, l’ha fatto ascoltare due volte a degli amici in studio in cuffia, ma in due modi diversi. Nel primo, ha portato cibo e bevande, e tutti mangiano, bevono, ruttano, chiacchierano, ridono, e camminano nella stanza, sempre ascoltando il “mess” in cuffia. Nel secondo, li ha fatti sedere su un sofà, chiedendo di rimanere il più possibile in silenzio. E noi, cosa ascoltiamo?

Noi ascoltiamo gli ascoltatori che ascoltano! “Auditorium (chaos, quiet fail)” ci propone i rumori, rielaborati e non, che i corpi degli ascoltatori producono, nell’atto di ascoltare. Siamo invitati all’ascolto attivo, a tenere presente che stiamo ascoltando ascoltatori che ascoltano. Sono cinque tracce. La prima è la rielaborazione dei rumori della situazione in silenzio, “Q”. La seconda traccia “C” rielabora i rumori della situazione caotica. Ed è curiosamente disturbante, perché sembra di ascoltare i corpi degli ascoltatori dall’interno.

Come faccio a saperlo? Perché la terza traccia e la quarta traccia rivelano l’audio di partenza. “Chaos”, è la situazione di chiacchiere, risate, vettovaglie e rutti, mentre la quarta, forse la più affascinante, è quella dove gli ascoltatori ascoltano in silenzio. Noi ascoltiamo l’ambente in cui tacciono: questo ci permette di sentire il traffico, al di fuori dello studio. Un quarto d’ora a Montréal, nello studio Hotel2Tango. Ciò mi ricorda veramente John Cage, che una volta, dichiarando il suo amore per il suono di per sé, faceva riferimento proprio al traffico. Per lui tutto ciò che è ascoltabile è musica. Musica è ciò che ascoltiamo attivamente, suono o rumore non fa differenza: diventa musica se noi gli prestiamo attenzione volontariamente.

E la quinta traccia? Beh, è il “mess”, lo ascoltiamo pure noi alla fine. Un quarto d’ora intitolato “Fail”. L’idea di Migone partiva dalla battuta di Cage riportata qui all’inizio, sul niente da dire. Doveva ispirarsi al mutismo e al balbettio. Infatti, sotto i vari strati di atmosfere e suoni liquidi, possiamo percepire un fondo balbettante e instabile (c’è anche una batteria, molto nascosta).

Il fascino che Cage aveva per il suono è un corroborante per la mai affermatasi “cultura dell’ascolto”. Christof Migone porta avanti questa filosofia, cercando di rendere “l’ascolto attivo” qualcosa di concreto e tangibile. Questo mi ricorda, per concludere, un’altra cosa che non capisco e che mi affascina: la fisica quantistica. A livello subatomico, spiegano gli esperti, ci sono delle particelle che se non le osservi hanno una qualità, e se le osservi cambiano qualità!!! Come sia possibile non so, ma vuol dire che il nostro sguardo influenza ciò che osserva (o fraintendo?). La stessa cosa probabilmente vale per l’ascolto. L’ascolto è un contatto, una sorta di “tocco”. Per dirla con Bennato: allora, avete capito o no? (Gilberto Ongaro)
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Review in Neural of the Wet Water (Let’s Dance) 2xcd publication.

Accompanied by a stylish 16-page green booklet comes the latest effort from Christof Migone, a sound artist, professor, curator and writer of Swiss origin who now resides in Toronto. Wet Water (Let’s Dance) immediately grabs the listener’s attention with a series of unusual sounds – electroacoustic, hisses, strange interferences, and field recordings that are often difficult to distinguish from digitally manipulated sounds. Are they flocks of birds or just well-calibrated buzzes? Or modified recordings of natural events? Do we really care what the nature of these sounds are? Isn’t it perhaps more interesting that a certain amount of mystery prevails in this regard? The reality is that throughout the project lines are always blurred and the relationships between the different elements are complex and unpredictable, aimed at an almost improvisational relational occurrence that is slippery in its performativity. Slippery and numb like a tomato frozen in a block of ice held in the performer’s mouth until both melt and fall. This sounds like a surrealist sketch but is the story of The Release (Into Motion), a piece released in four different versions whose video was used as one of the three sources for the piece Lake of Coherence, a composition not on this release and which dates back to 2003. Migone is accustomed to using different media, moving between the suggestions of language and voice, of the body and intimacy, between sound and silence, play and pathos, reiterating a series of obsessions that include destroying microphones, handling books and pages, hybridizing multiple languages and releasing records, to name just a few of the recurring motifs of his artistic practice. The works presented are modulated in the manner of atypical canons for which the impediment, the disconnection, and the inability to communicate are prevalent, with a certain degree of uncertainty and jumps in registers, accumulating audio layers and repeating to the point of exhaustion. This musician is then a kind of medium, a catalyst of alien energies for all of us to appreciate.

2023
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Review in Vital Weekly, issue 1411, by Frans de Waard, of the Wet Water (Let’s Dance) 2xcd publication.

Work by Canada’s Christof Migone isn’t easily described in a few words. Joel Stern wrote the ‘press text’, which took on a more poetic, descriptive personal stance but did not necessarily write an informative text about the release. Much of Migone’s work is very conceptual, and some of this is ‘explained’ in the booklet, from which I took that many of the works deal with water and sounds generated with the human mouth. It’s more something that I read than what I heard, as these pieces are rather abstract and out there on an electronic level. There are more field recording-like works, with splashes of water (still including the body), such as ‘Empty (Bucket) 1’, drone-based voice pieces (‘Vegass’) and Portuguese neighbours fighting in ‘Fado’, along with feedback created during the recording. Disc one is quite diverse, with eleven pieces, ranging from a sneeze that is twelve seconds long and the aforementioned ‘Empty (Bucket) 1’, which is over twelve minutes.

The second disc contains four parts of ‘The Release (Into Motion)’, described as “a mouth holding a tomato frozen in a block of ice until both ice and tomato thaw and fall down”. If you know that, you may recognize some ‘mouth’ sounds, and I can’t unhear those now, but on the surface, the first part is a pleasant computer-based drone piece, full of lively action, and the second is a minimalist piece of bouncing computer sounds. The fourth part is the meaner version of the first, more chaotic and strange, lighter drones but disruptive. The third one is the darkest of the four, with an ongoing, more rhythmic approach.

As always with work by Christof Migone, I don’t always get what it is about, and I am unsure if a complete understanding is necessary to enjoy the music. I do a lot, most of the time, and wonder with some amazement. The music by Christof Migone is better off with an art critic, I suppose.
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Review in Neural of the Swan Song 2xcd publication.

There is a whole line of field recordings that are not “found” at all; that is, they are not the result of psychogeographic wanderings, but, on the contrary, are carefully prepared and have well-defined places and situations as their object. During a three-month artistic residency in the summer of 2019 in Glenfiddich (Dufftown, Scotland), Marla Hlady and Christof Migone chose to record the sounds of a whiskey distillery, starting with two large copper stills that were recently removed. The operation to remove the stills was not the simplest, given the decidedly large dimensions of the two containers, which required the use of a crane to extract them from the roof. The swan-neck portions of the old stills were then cut by a master coppersmith and used as the main components in a kinetic sound sculpture. When moving into the spaces adjacent to the sculpture, sensors activate a series of electronic mechanisms that rotate thin metal rods on circular axes. Through these two swan-neck components, the recordings made throughout the distillery are reproduced: the water flowing through mounds, the noise emissions arising from the barrels during normal work sessions, the bottling noises and those of the liquids being moved from one part of the warehouse to another. The two ends of the tubes act like a pair of giant gramophones that amplify each of the recordings made. Some of these recordings are also superimposed and mixed. The sounds obtained by a choir composed of the distillery staff are particularly important, voices grouped according to the years of service of each of the participants. Each member of this improvised choir was asked to produce two sounds, one as loud as possible and the other extremely quiet, maintaining the vocal emission for as long as possible. The overall effect is truly impressive and the ultimate indecipherability of the sounds makes us reflect on the work and materials that come together in often surprising and inscrutable ways, distilled with great care, skill and passion. From this ingenious project all the materials, sound and physical objects were subsequently used for an installation at the Christie Contemporary in Toronto.
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Review in Revue & Corrigée (Septembre 2023) of the Swan Song 2xcd publication, by Pierre Durr.

L’association entre l’artiste sonore Christof Migone et sa compatriote Marla Hlady, sculptrice cinétique, nous propose un curieux chant du cygne. Parce que ces cygnes, ce sont les restes des tuvauteries, en forme de col-de-cygne, de vieux alambics d’une distillerie de whisky provenant de Glenfiddich, à Dufftown en Écosse. Le lieu a dailleurs son importance, puisque ce matériau est justement mis en situation à l’intérieur de la distillerie, en usant d’autres sources sonores : la captation des eaux du Fiddich, le cours d’eau local, le passage de l’orge à travers ses différentes phases de fermentation, le remplissage des bouteilles, l’atelier de réparation des fûts, et même un chœur de 16 employés de la distillerie, du DRH au directeur de marketing en passant par des techniciens, chacun offrant deux courts enregistrements le plus aigu et le plus grave possibles), voix utilisées ensuite selon leurs années d’ancienneté dans l’entreprise (?). La mise en œuvre de ce travail résultant d’une résidence de trois mois, elle donne lieu à un rendu sonore en trois parties. Un premier CD, davantage centré sur le son des cols-de-cygne, munis de fines tiges de cuivre tournoyant dont les sonorités sont contrôlées par des interrupteurs motorisés, couches complétées par les voix humaines plus ou moins perceptibles. Des sonorités plus variées sont introduites dans le deuxième volet. Il est vrai que chacun des titres se réfère à diverses captations sonores, retra-vaillées, s’intéressant tantôt au brassage, à la captation de l’eau ou à d’autres activités de la distillerie. Accumulation de couches sonores, effet de bourdonnement (« Process/ Mechanic »), effets plus bruitistes, parcourus de rythmes (« Beat »), maelstrom répétitif (« Mash1 », « Mash2 »), écoulement des sons (« Source »). Le troisième volet, uniquement disponible à travers lachat numérique*, ajoute d’autres propositions : une autre version de « Swan Song » plus dense et d’une trentaine de minutes, l’exploitation de sons issus des fûts (« Cask »), et un « Spirit II » plus onirique (les vapeurs du whisky ?), en finissant avec une pièce vocale (utilisation de la voix de la personne chargée des visites ?). À écouter avec modération ?
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Review in Foxy Digitalis‘ The Capsule Garden (Vol 2.11: March 29, 2023) of the Swan Song 2xcd publication, by Brad Rose.

The concept behind Swan Song initially drew me in, but the sonic entanglements, beyond any concept, are the real show. Click through and read the full description for the full story, but the ‘swan neck’ portions of two old whisky stills were turned into sound sculptures, and that’s the general basis for Swan Song. Musically, an incredible range veers from hauntological by nature but is also infused with a transient, searching spirit. Shaded resonance blooms into full-blown sonic ecstasy, where voices are stretched into gilded forms and vibrant shapes. Electronic pulses skitter across the surface, creating oddly hypnotic patterns. There are so many different elements to Swan Song. It’s overwhelming, and Hlady and Migone show no concern for boundaries. Liminal whispers feel pointed in one direction, sweeping across long distances while sprouting glacial, discordant tendrils spinning in a thousand directions. This is massive and highly recommended.
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Review of Swan Song 2xCD, with Marla Hlady, for Vital Weekly, number 1365, week 50, by Frans de Waard.
A swan song is a metaphorical phrase for a final gesture, effort or performance given just before death or retirement (thanks, wiki). In this case, the swan song is for two stills from a whisky distillery in Scotland. From these stills, two swan necks were cut, used to play the recordings made by Hlady and Migone during their three months residency in 2019. The whisky, glad you asked, is Glenfiddich and Balvenie, if I got this correct. The sounds are from the distillery, but also its surroundings, as water is an essential source, of course. Also recorded was a choir of the staff, from the highest to the lowest pitch they could produce, for as long as possible. The first disc contains three versions of ‘Swan Song’, and the second has eight pieces, which I believe could be source material. There is another version of ‘Swan Song’ in the digital extras and more source pieces. That is a lot of music. As usual with Migone’s work (which I know better than that from Hlady, even when they have worked together since 2015), there is a solid conceptual side to the music. Still, as usual, I found the music equally intriguing without a lengthy explanation. The choir is used extensively in the three (four) parts of ‘Swan Song’. The first part was unprocessed, but in the other two, some processes took place. Knowing this duo a bit, no doubt the sound is fed through pipes at the distillery, altering the sound more acoustically. This all leads to fascinating results. First, maybe fairly traditional humming but in the subsequent versions, mysterious and spooky. In what I think is source material, there is also a strong emphasis on the minimal side of the proceedings. The microphone’s position is significant, adding another dimension to the sounds instead of applying digital processing. Maybe the titles give away something about the origins (‘Mash’, ‘Spirit’, ‘Beat’, ‘Pump’ etc.), but none seemed very recognizable. That makes this a fascinating listening. I don’t know what it is, and I continue to be intrigued by it. Maybe there has been an additional layer of transformations, but somehow I doubt that was the case. It is, at times, mysterious and drone-like, which should appeal to any fan of the genre. Great music all around.

2022
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Exhibition review in FRIEZE of the Swan Song exhibition, “Marla Hlady and Christof Migone’s Whisky-Infused Resonances”, by Neil Price.

There is something uniquely irresistible in the way Marla Hlady and Christof Migone’s exhibition, Swan Song, mashes the familiar with the strange, causing us to reflect upon our often-imperceptible relations with materiality. After its debut at the Artists at Glenfiddich Space in Dufftown, Scotland, in 2019, followed by an initial Canadian run at Christie Contemporary in March 2020 disrupted by the pandemic, the work has returned to the Toronto-based gallery in a slightly different format to give viewers another opportunity to linger in its sonic interplay.

Made from two ‘swan necks’ – sections of metal piping used in the whisky-distillation process, before being retired after 12 years – the titular kinetic sculpture Swan Song (all works 2019) consists of tubular forms placed on a table, with their open ends facing opposite walls. When viewers walk near the sculpture, sensors trigger a set of electronic motors that cause thin metal rods to swivel on circular axes. The movement is smooth but occasionally suspended when the metal rods quietly meet. The mechanics then become enveloped in a massive wave of sound: the two ends of the tubes act as a pair of giant gramophones, filling the entire gallery with tones loud, ominous and intriguing.

The works in Swan Song were created as part of a residency that both artists attended at the Glenfiddich Distillery. They include a series of overlaid and mixed recordings that feature water sluicing through cairns, coopers working and repairing casks, substances moving through vats and noises of bottling. A choir, composed of distillery staff whose voices were arranged according to their years of service, adds a human texture to the show’s cacophony.
Inside a rusted round brass-appearing container, round metal pieces and wires are affixed, like a stethoscope

Apart from its sophisticated engineering, the power of the exhibition lies in how it questions what we may take for granted when we observe or use everyday materials, challenging us to see simple objects as containers – literally and figuratively – of complex ideas, histories and experiences. A seemingly singular sound, for example, actually derives from temporally fragmented and collective ones; the apparent unchangingness of distillery labour and movement, paradoxically, creates new matter. We see how the often-obscured inner workings of things are of no less importance. As if to reinforce this point, the web of wires and circuits that forms the sculpture’s brain centre are concealed beneath the table.

Part of the work’s intrigue is the indecipherability of its recorded sounds. There are moments when they carry the strain of a blaring siren; at other times, we hear the mechanical grinding and screeching of metal. Caught in an enjoyable state of curiosity, the viewer lingers with the work to discern its various sonic textures, to make sense of what has been upended or repurposed.

On a nearby wall, and within an upper gallery space, objects from the residency form an accompanying work titled Sampler. Among the items on display is Sampler (Single Blend), which shows a conjoined bottle containing one single malt from the Highlands and one from the Lowlands, slowly mixing into each other. Another object, Sampler (Tilt Level), is composed of two conjoined sample bottles: each contains water from different but linked bodies of water. It all amounts to a playful extension of the show’s overarching concern for interconnection, aural imprint and materiality. In their accompanying artists’ statement, Hlady and Migone revel in the ideas that these baffling items provoke. ‘They cannot be proven or disproven,’ the artists write. ‘They teeter, they unfold, they puzzle.’ Swan Song, with its thoughtful exploration of sonic and physical resonances, invites us to think about labour, sound and material coming together in often surprising and inscrutable ways, delighting while it bemuses.

2021
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Brochure accompanying the Press Record exhibition at Oboro, Montréal, February 13 – March 20, 2021, by Chloë Lum

(memory isn’t magnetic tape, but it’s all we’ve got)

In the time that I’ve been writing and thinking about Christof Migone’s latest show Press Record for this text, I’ve also been parsing my record collection as I prepare to move from my apartment of the last 18 years into a significantly smaller one. Since I spent most of those 18 years playing in touring bands and doing music-related design, it’s no minor task.

Most longstanding musicians, including a retired one like myself, have a hoarder’s trove of related ephemera. Instruments and recording equipment that have survived several attempts at downsizing, all tucked into whatever available space there is, waiting for the rainy day that one suspects may not come. One’s own albums, of course, in various formats, along with their associated master recordings and test pressings. The requisite unwieldy record collection, one’s influences and peers as a focal point of one’s home, and also scattered throughout. It’s a sprawling personal archive. These things all fill the space without a sound, seemly growing, and self-cultivating as if through spores. Look away for a moment, and 7inch records and cassettes will have sprouted up.

As a bookend to his 2016-17 exhibition Press Play presented at Zalucky Contemporary in Toronto, Migone offers Press Record which, with both its title and its focus on the substrates and utensils of sound recording, gives each viewer (listener?) a space to fill in the silences through personal histories with sound and recording. It’s a strange coincidence that suddenly, all sorts of people have to grapple with things like room tone, sound capture, and noise much more directly.

Mirroring the layout of a record store, Press Record is a distilled representation that becomes almost uncanny when compared to how even the most curated record store seems to be bursting at the seams with music and ephemera. Instead of overstuffed bins and a loud ever-changing soundtrack, Migone offers several series of sound works that, for the most part, occupy the space with their varied silences. Many of the sounds are implied.

He sees silence as sound, often overlooked within the disciplinary structure of sound art where intentional, rather than incidental, sounds are the expectation. My own “silent” apartment is practically vibrating with the sound of the refrigerator, the air purifier, the desk lamp, my cat’s water fountain. Silence is noisy, and is also an amplification device, as these background and incidental noises become louder and more insistent as one tries to block them. Anyone who has ever suffered insomnia knows. The cacophony of silence travels on the same waves like any other sound, reverberating in space, bouncing off surfaces, and subtly pushing against the body.

It was the noisiness and varied textures of silence that Cage was harnessing in 4’33”, he explained, “There’s no such thing as silence. What they thought was silence, because they didn’t know how to listen, was full of accidental sounds.” (Kostelanetz, 2003, 70) In Migone’s 4 feet and 33 inches series (2014 – 2017), a trio of neon signs can be said to ‘play’ each movement of Cage’s piece by being lit in intervals of the requisite timing. They are described as silent but I sill wonder if the neon ever hums or buzzes.

Micro (2014) is a body of work made from photographing the microphone remnants of his performance piece Hit Parade (2007 – 2017). Once percussion devices, these microphones now live their retirement in photographs. I see their barbed surfaces and immediately think about the tonal qualities of a microphone placed inside a mouth rather than in front of it at a polite distance. How the resonance inside one’s mouth can bring forth the loudest, most high-pitched sounds. It was something I saw the first time I saw Christof perform 20 years ago; I later copied the gesture for my own musical performances. A mic being smashed screams at the impact, the rough edges can snag on skin and fabric alike.

Record Release (12-inch) (2012 – 2019) and Record Release (7-inch) (2014 – 2019) and their associated documents and materials are the projects that Migone has been enacting for the better part of the past decade. The raw pellets, full of potential, are presented in different ways and configurations, yet always remain in their state of becoming. We are presented with the material of records as their content, as the artist re-codes sound itself in ways that are simultaneously critical of the object fetishization inherent in record collecting but also seem playfully ambivalent about his position within. The raw pellets of a 12” LP (black) and a 7” single (white) are sorted, achieved, systematized, performed, and sounded in various ways. They do not, could not contain sound recordings on their surfaces. They are then documented and are re-archived in their emergent forms. Each documentation an absurd object performance.

Collecting in reverse he spreads, or releases, these pieces into the world in series of giving and leaving behind that, to the recipient, can elicit the same dopamine rush of a new record in its fresh plastic outer sleeve. It’s not-yet media, yet is already layered in narrative through the parameters of the performance. It’s the type of micro-gesture that is associated with performance derived from everyday life, the leaving and giving of these pellets, that puts me most in the domestic space of record collection management as I box up my own records that no longer fit in my home to release them to Renaissance and a second life. The pellets live again and again through their varied performances and re-deployments. They perform on turntables playing the noise of silent surfaces, beam in their documentation, swoon in their cradles of acoustic foam. As if the fetish object had become self-aware, they play, (like a record baby.)
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Review by Frans de Waard of Record Release 2xCD for Vital Weekly, number 1280, week 15.
The work of Christof Migone has found its way to these pages quite a lot over a very long period and in almost all of them, there is a conceptual edge. There is also a whole body of work that didn’t make it to these pages, such as a series of seven 7inch records that he released between 2015 and 2019. This double CD contains a selection of those records, twenty-two tracks in total, out of thirty-five to be found on the original records. A quick look at the times for some of these pieces, going way over eight minutes, which is what normally fits on a 7″ record, struck me as rather odd. These pieces, eleven in total, are re-edited for this compilation. On the website of Squint Press (Migone’s label), you can find a description for this project: “Normally, a record release celebrates the culmination of a recording project. Like a book launch, it marks the moment where a work leaves the artist’s hands and seeks an audience. Record Release is a project that reverses that process and includes the act of releasing as part of the recording process itself. Record Release involves using the raw material used to manufacture vinyl records which comes in small pellets. These lentil-sized bits of petroleum product come in this form because they are easily transportable and manipulable before they get melted and stamped with grooves of sound. This is a sound project which focuses on one of the standard physical support materials of sound and utilizes these tiny units of potential sound in a gestural manner to produce not only audio material but also images, video content and a slew of data related to the process of dissemination involved.” The blank record becomes the sound material and looking for a description of each of the seven records, you can read and see how it all worked; Migone’s website is pretty extensive in that respect. And two CDs filled with music to the maximum length is also something extensive. Migone works a lot with loops and repetitions of his sound material, which aren’t always to trace; at least, not from just playing them. His take on the whole notion of improvisation, musique concrète and electro-acoustics. While I found some of these pieces very good, or perhaps, the majority of them, I must admit that at one point I was pretty loaded with this kind of sonic information, with pieces becoming a blur; shorter pieces or one CD would have been sufficient for me, no matter how much I enjoy the music.

2020
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Article by Chi Po Hao featuring my 2006 work Microhole published in the September 2020 issue of the Performing Arts Review from Taiwan.
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squint.press profile,“Squint Press: Twenty Years of Wayward Aesthetics” by Nick Storring in the fall 2020 issue (#137), pp. 56-58, of Musicworks.

Depending upon your entry point into its unique world, Squint Press’s self-designation as “an audio-centric publisher” might seem like a detour around more familiar terms like record label or publishing house. Yet, considering its output, it’s clear that the phrase aptly describes Squint’s peculiar spirit and activities.

Squintfucker Press (the profanity was later dropped) was founded in 1999 by Christof Migone and Alexandre St-Onge, then both Montreal residents whose collaborative bond was based on a mutual fascination with the corporeal end of performance art, conceptualism, punk- and Dada-inflected mischief, and the subliminal minimalism of so-called lowercase sound. They had cultivated fruitful relationships within electroacoustic, musique actuelle, noise, and experimental-rock scenes, but had discovered that their distinctive proclivities necessitated a separate vehicle, and a decidedly transdisciplinary one at that.

“We paid attention to the fact that we were making objects-each of them had a manual intervention,” Migone says of their early vision. “Some of the more recent releases don’t abide by that anymore. Twenty years later, there’s room to grow and to change and diverge from those starting points.” The imprint has remained “a nice constant, percolating on a very low fire” for him and St-Onge, both of whom maintain busy artistic practices encompassing recordings, print publications, gallery exhibitions, performances, and collaborations. Squint’s catalogue echoes this diversity, divided as it is into parallelaudio,literary, and art-object series. While new additions to each have arrived in fits and starts, Squint’s community orientation and wayward aesthetics have proven remarkably durable, surviving shifts in focus, career, and geography, all without any external funding.

In 2000 St-Onge and Migone released their first duo undo CD, Un sperme qui meurt de froid en agitant faiblement sa petite queue dans les draps d’un gamin (squint 00A). Housed in a conventional jewel case, the blank-faced CD comes flanked with faint hand-silkscreened inserts and is wrapped in metal wire-a suitably elusive enclosure for the soft, pendulous vocal sounds it documents. Its successor, Luteness by Sam Shalabi, wryly nods toward Bernard Günter’s watershed reductionist disc Un peu de neige salie, its sleeve literally stained with dirty Montreal snow. With the titular instrument nowhere to be heard, the album serves up electronic stridulations dressed in titles spanning the cryptic to the smuttily irreverent.

Waterways: Four Saliva Studies (squint 00D) extracts the sound from Vito Acconci’s performance film of the same name, in which the artist manipulates spit in his mouth in various ways. Removing the visual context shifts the film’s uneasy intimacy into an abstract yet palpable realm, a distance compounded by Undo’s accompanying remix. The album’s sleeve consists of stills from the film, covered in silver paint and dried spit. Elsewhere, Squint’s audio series swerves down even less predictable avenues. Bearing the disclaimer “playable at your own risk,” Migone’s 2008 Rimmed Record (squint 00M) consists of the outer rims of used LPs. His later Record Release (squint 00W) is a diptych that impishly pairs limited-edition blank vinyl with digital downloads for its seven-inch iteration, and for the twelve-inch, dispenses with music and records altogether, each unit consisting instead of 180 grams of vinyl pellets (equivalent to an LP) distributed in a variety of documented circumstances.

Migone vividly recalls encountering a copy of Christian Marclay’s Record Without A Cover floating listlessly in a cord bin (as intended) sometime in the 1980s. Witnessing its precise intentionality and “disdain for the cleanliness of the vinyl” left a strong impression. Squint’s object series, subtitled Cover Without A Record, collects work by the likes of Martin Tétreault, Jonathan Parant,Travis Obrigavitch, crys cole, Kim Dawn, Billy Mavreas, Cal Crawford, and of course Migone and St-Onge themselves.Migone’s In Sink (For Justin Timberlake) (squint B) features jewel cases that were left in bathroom and kitchen sinks to collect detritus for different durations.

Just as the audio series poses questions of consumer audio products, Squint’s print series, established in 2017, approaches publication conventions with similar defiance. “My publication is a book but it’s also a sound sculpture,” St-Onge states matter-of-factly of his forthcoming Jet du bas dit AA l’eau guet avec l’invisible. The sculpture, limited to an edition of eleven, will play an hour-long audio loop from underneath a plastic membrane adorned with colourful strands. The work and its less-limited textual counterpart draw material from St-Onge’s month-long residency at Montreal’s Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, where he performed inside its central wall. The book juxtaposes theoretical writings and experimental poetry. St-Onge explains that the latter is at times a product of his decade-plus research into voice-recognition software and text-processing via Max/MSPprogramming language.

At the opposite end of the spectrum is the recently redesigned and reprinted Voice of Hearing (squint 01A), a rare 1984 book by erstwhile Torontonian Vivian Darroch-Lozowski. Migone stumbled across the original in a London, Ontario, second-hand bookstore where its evocative, paradoxical title seized his imagination. The text’s finely woven strands of autobiographical and philosophical reflection only elicited further curiosity. Finding that few others knew it, he promptly tracked down its author with the intention of publishing it afresh. In her 2019 preface to the new edition, Darroch-Lozowski remarks “when I re-read Voice this past spring, I wondered if I had written it to be heard and not read. Heard-so that readers might discover echoes of its word-sounds within themselves.”

The 2020 entries in Squint’s audio series feel congruently aberrant with the imprint’s established trajectory. Poets Barrio TV (squint 00Z) by Toronto duo Private Robots (Seb Roberts and Juliana Pivato) is arguably Squint’s poppiest effort-not forgetting Migone’s mysterious 2004 collaboration with Vancouver songwriter Veda Hille, Escape Songs (squint 00H). Pivato’s vocals push blase tunefulness toward U.K.post-punk touchstones such as the Slits and the Raincoats, a resemblance that upstages her control and versatility, which lurk audibly in the album’s noisy periphery. The production’s analog-digital purgatory foists a jumble of programmed rhythm and instrumental scrawl on the listener, its indistinct electronics veering wildly into caustic spirals of dub-echo.

Meanwhile, Marla Hlady’s Playing Piano (squint 00P) carefully documents an installation piece that subverts and expands the functionality of a player piano. Playback speed is slowed drastically and hydraulic system amplified, the installation even mechanically interjects ad hoc preparations, altering the piano’s timbre. The recording unravels slowly, revealing a psychedelic state where queasy lyricism converges with the meditative.

Xuan Ye’s Universal Studio Bus (squint 00U) is perhaps toughest to define of Squint’s three 2020 releases. A sprawling multiple-hour-long release, it’s available via download or on a limited clay-USB stick sculpture. It feels as though Ye has made environmental recordings in public spaces and hand-colourized them, warming their hues with delicate electronic tones. Squint’s website relates these engrossing panels of retouched audio-verite to her concept of “useless music, a counterproductive twist to Muzak’stotal designof background music.” The final 2020 audio release, from Quebec’s Emilie Mouchous, will occupy the last remaining letter of the achronological series: Y. I’m told that this doesn’t preclude discographical expansion. While Squint has found a distinct identity somewhere between curated and curious, Migone seems eager to emphasize the openness of the latter: “It’s not as if we had yearly meetings to assess if we’re sticking to our guns with any kind of rigorous, directional mandate.”
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The Swan Song exhibition featured in the Toronto section of ARTFORUM Critics’ Picks, by Daniella Sanader.

The sound that emanates from Marla Hlady and Christof Migone’s exhibition Swan Song is a sustained jangling tone that gradually, sometimes imperceptibly, adjusts itself. The source of the music, audible before it is visible, is an eponymous kinetic sculpture, also titled Swan Song, featuring two curving tubes of worn copper that both widen at the mouth. They were originally functional parts at the Balvenie Distillery in Dufftown, Scotland, where Hlady and Migone were artists-in-residence last year through the neighboring and affiliated Glenfiddich Distillery. The audio was also “found” at the distilleries: It includes layered recordings of machinery, preparing casks, filling bottles, and, notably, a choir of workers who were each asked to alternately sing the highest and lowest notes they could reach.

The soundscapes that emerge from these metal forms—termed ‘swan necks’ by distillers for their distinct shape—are controlled by a series of motorized switches, thin copper rods that wobble tremulously in the air. The rods move on circular axes, occasionally making gentle contact with a fixed metal piece, turning on or off individual tracks with every slow rotation.

In a statement about this work, the artists referenced the act of toasting, that gentle clinking of glasses to celebrate the mundane and the monumental. A toast assigns social significance to things coming together—both the glasses and the individuals that hold them—yet the distance that surrounds the brief point of contact is equally important to its meaning. Similarly, the sustained tone of Swan Song belies the separations and gaps that govern the work: The hollows of the swan necks amplify the sound, the disconnected switches determine the notes’ length, and the spaces between the voices’ lowest and highest pitches vibrate with a dissonant hum. Resonating throughout the gallery, the work is both a record of a particular place and a meditation on our distance from it.