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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.

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.

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