thanks: all the participants,all the original funders and presenters, Joel Stern, Frederic Van de Velde.
I have been listening to Christof Migone’s collection Wet Water (Let’s Dance) on loop for several days straight, the tracks playing alternatingly from my laptop, a bluetooth speaker in the bedroom, and the hi-fi in the lounge, following me around the house. I’m enjoying living with these sounds, and the feeling of ingesting them day-by-day in small gulps and sips, a constant drip-feed. This collection suits a domestic, everyday listening environment, poised in the liminal space of not-quite, or not-yet, music, but with an unhurried and strange intentionality that separates it from noise. Each time Éternuité (Forever Sneeze) begins I startle. It may be muscle memory; the sneeze as vector of contagion in pandemic-times. Twelve seconds; three sniffs, a sneeze, a vague exhaled sigh. Like many of the body-noises assembled here, these ones feel more semiotic than physical. An indexical grammar of sneezing. Then we’re in an Empty (Bucket); the distinctive tone of turbulent water in hollow metal, interrupted by high-frequency microphone feedback and interference—two recurring motifs of these pieces, electronic-noise and watery flows. The repetitive slosh of heads dunking again and again, disoriented and dissociated, in the electronic squelch of the bucket, water flowing in and out of eyes, mouths, ears. Migone says ‘we are bodies of water and therefore performative and relational orality is slippery.’
Like much of the artist’s work, across diverse media, these pieces reflexively thematise, compose, and perform rituals of inarticulation, impedediment, incapacity to speak and communicate. What is a text trapped in a mouth full of water, with the words choked and half-swallowed, spat and dribbling out? Language steaming-up, glitching, almost-comprehensible, like morse code in static at sea. In Vegass a single word is elongated and streched over minutes, becoming a syntactic drone, interrupted by the occasional resonant clattering of what I imagine as teeth falling from a gaping visage. The stretched-word feels like monument to ‘dumb’ materiality, words as always noise before signification. This piece, like many, is laced with feedback; fluctuating and often gentle, sounds recording and re-recording themselves, accumulating layers, and self-amplifying at the threshold of control. In Langue Distance a phone dials and rings, and sounds of licking flow down the line, wet signals with the charge of fetish. Telephones connect that which they dislocate: bodies, voices, breath, mouths, ears. The medium of the telephone is both distance and proximity. Dialtones and code-buttons punching out a secret message, distorted by the tele—distance—between sender and receiver. Later, when Éternuité (Forever Sneeze) returns for an extended redux, a voice says ‘I’m not feeling it, you need to get a bag of dust’. Another says, ‘like a torture chamber’, and giggles.
The four pieces constituting The Release (Into Motion), which take up the entirety of disc two, are different, more conventionally ‘musical’ in structure and style, but still sharing, as with all of Migone’s work, a conceptual sensibility and feeling of underlying logics at work. In each piece, layers of roughly pitched electronics tones flow into and around each other, as if mirroring the dynamic surfaces, continuous motion, interference patterns, and interacting currents of ocean waves. These sounds derive from a performance work in which Migone held a tomato frozen in a block of ice in his mouth while it slowly melted over more than thirty minutes—a painful looking exercise, based on the documentation images. How such an endurance ritual produced these sounds is mysterious and oblique, but at the same time highly suggestive. Like so much of the work captured and documented in this collection, the relation between elements is abstract, entangled, puzzle-like in its weirdness, and all the more rewarding for that.
First published on the La Chute compilation DVD. Commissioned by Avatar. Recorded at the Banff Centre for the Arts by Don Pyle in 2007. Participants: Sally Baydala, Erica Brisson, Eryn Foster, Stephanie Khoury, Angus Leech, Wm Leler, Demian Petryshyn, Naomi Potter, Don Pyle, Duncan Speakman, Barbara Sutherland, Pandora Syperek, Janice Wu.
02. Empty (Bucket) 1 12:31 (1997) link to project here I drown myself in a shallow bucket as opposed to an endless ocean. I am inundated by a few drops. Asphyxiated, I learn not to breathe. Suffocated, I learn to answer the question: is a wound with no trace really a wound or is it simply thirsty?
Soundtrack to a video shot at the Western Front, Vancouver, 1997. Images included in this publication are from a performance of the piece at Studio 303, Montréal, 1996. Photos by Peter Conlin.
03. Vegass 6:16 (2003) link to project here
Commissioned by Fortner Anderson to accompany his poem titled “Vegas”. First published on his Six Silk Purses CD in 2005.
04. Fado 04:35 link to project here
Recording of a domestic dispute on rue St. Dominique in Montréal, 2001. My Portuguese neighbours often fought, it seemed that their relati- onship was on a permanent state of breakdown, with episodic flares announcing and confirming it to the neighbourhood. As this particular fight got louder, I got my camera out in the kitchen, the best aural vantage point, the video focused on an aloe vera plant on the table, the microphone eavesdropping on the commotion downstairs. The visuals are stilled, peaceful, and oblivious to the sound. This incident ended with the police taking him away.
First published on the Syntax Error CD that accompanied the Failure Issue (No.7) of Cabinet, Brooklyn, Summer 2002.
05. anse acabre 02:52 link to project here
Commissioned by Allen S. Weiss for Danse Macabre II, an installation featuring dolls by Michel Nedjar. Part of In Transit 09 – Resistance of the Object festival at HKW (Haus der Kulturen der Welt), Berlin.
06. Langue Distance 01:36 link to project here He calls her long distance with his tongue.
Recorded simultaneously in Montréal and Toronto. First published on the Mercersound 09 compilation CD, Mercer Union, Toronto. For MJH.
07. Malebouche 06:00
Transatlantic telephone performance featuring unrehearsed live (mis)translations of F. Malebouche’s Précis sur les causes du bégaiement, et sur les moyens de le guérir (1841), and a Morse Code Instructograph. For Stucco Echoes Mouth, event organized by Chris Timms, PEER Gallery, London.
08. un jeudi téléphonique 01:06 link to project here
First published on compilation CD DO(K)S no.3, Ajaccio, 1999 as part of La semaine avatarienne. Voice: Katie Bethune-Leamen.
09. Fill (Bottle) 03:19 link to project here Here, saliva becomes active, becomes spit. It comes out of one body in order to fill an other. The bottle archives the secretions. The secretions remain inaudible, almost.
Soundtrack to a video shot at the Western Front, Vancouver, 1997.
01. The Release (Into Motion) 1 20:54 link to project here A mouth holding a tomato frozen in a block of ice until both ice and tomato thaw and fall down.
One component of Lake of Coherence, performance presented at Mutek, Montréal, 2003.
