Constellations

karen werner - swimming through butterflies

We love the interdisciplinary and collaborative approach that Karen took in this piece. The scoring of this piece feels raw and vivid - clearly the cello is a second narrator in this piece, seamlessly harmonizing with the speaking voice and pointing to both speech's and the narrative's musicality. This piece makes time slow right down, with musical interludes complex and abstract enough to bring the listener fully into this conjured fluttering space. On every listen, we're left with a potent sense of wonder.

rignam wangkhang - prairie wind

Rignam reached out to us about this piece after recently having moved to Winnipeg. He said it would be inspired by "the prairie wind - outside my apartment windows, you can hear it howl". His piece takes us to the prairies and beyond, sweeps us across a vast and melancholic landscape while kicking up the dust of the world under its heels. In this piece, the wind is an omniscient character whose powers seem matched only by the anxious pulls of technology. 

joan schuman - walking in bad circles

“When I read a story in the back of the newspaper about a young man who had wandered across the U.S./Mexico border, I became curious about what his experience must have been like. I imagined how he might wander through his mind, talking to no one in particular, remembering his town, his mother, and the things he heard and saw along the way—how he kept repeating that he was ‘walking in bad circles,’ as if any of us walk a linear, knowable journey.“

aleksandra bragoszewska - coarse & janky

As this roller coaster of a year comes to a close, we thought this sonic manifesto and portrait was the perfect toast for ushering in the new year: To taking artistic risks! To having the courage to struggle on stage!  This piece, and the collaborative, political and tactile world of Bread and Puppet that it conjures, embody the ethos of experimentalism, interdisciplinarity, and community that Constellations aspires to. And we can't think of a voice more suited to sewing this cardboard cacophony together than Aleks'. 

craig desson - 06-30-24

“I love the work of the 60s era NFB experimental filmmaker Arthur Lipsett and so I wanted to try and do what he does. The piece is also an exploration of the digital subconscious that exists on my MacBook.  It's made up of sounds on my hard drive that I recorded over the last year that just felt right together."

veronica simmonds + andrew bateman - we are the transcribers

“What's a transcriber, you ask? Well, it's a human who listens to words and then writes them down for other people. It's a dying art that we were trying to capture. In the making of this piece we were trying to cultivate the monotony, drudgery, brutality of transcription work which we were both doing a lot of at the time."

janet rogers - broken english

This piece distorts language in a way that feels simultaneously playful in its musicality, while also awkward and violent. It's so true to the way language and language barriers fail and frustrate us. We loved listening a couple times in a row, sinking into the jarring cadence of the reader's cropped syllables. 

ellie gordon-moershel - anatomy of the road

“I was driving down the 401 which I normally find to be very uninspiring, but then I was thinking about all the breakthrough moments I've had in cars, whether its been me alone thinking of something and coming to a conclusion, or being on a road trip with someone else and us having our first real bonding moment or big fight. And I was thinking about how that's kind of like therapy.”

julie shapiro - 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. I discovered a lot of my friends had the same experience with this movie, and are also still lightly traumatized, so asked them all about it.”

miyuki jokiranta - no event

“Time functions asymmetrically in a doctor's waiting room. Our bodies keep their own time, which is rarely calibrated to half hour appointments, and we feel we're often left waiting. The smallest procedure can stretch to fill a day, and a year on waiting list, a lifetime. No Event is a plastic moment in a waiting room.”