A trans poetics of listening: an ambient unfolding of attention, layered like tideswept debris, shaped, fragmented and re-membered by water, held in continuity of relation. A slowly evolving soundscape built on two tones that mirror the motion of a wave cycle, inviting us to attune to the tidal rhythm of becoming. Like the ever-shifting shoreline—where accumulation and erosion coexist—harmonics emerge and dissolve. Each sonic repetition reshapes the original, like tides pulling sound away from and back toward its source.

Drum Voices transforms a single drumbeat into a timeless, mantra-like chorus, revealing the drum’s hidden voices as a portal to origins. “It started with a single drum beat. The resonance of deer hide pulled taut around the circle, stretched across time so that each vibration opened another throat of the chorus. What is spoken, sung or sounded here? How do these tones communicate? How do we perceive them?” — Tarah Hogue

On a remote island in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, the land drones a song of erosion. Transferring footsteps from the hills to a breathing organ, the artist offers their body as an instrument of witness—asking not how to reassemble or hold on, but whether they can be present with the process of erosion as fragments flow into the water cycle, through all awareness. Can they stay with the subtle emergence and dissolving? What is wholeness when nothing is ever complete?

We have many words for describing wind, yet most illustrate how wind moves us. To speak of wind is to speak of ourselves as we experience something ungraspable. The passage of air humbles and orients our attention to invisibility in motion, dispersing our words, voices, messages and matters like seeds through generations. Wind teaches the strength of transparency through its intimacy with the earth.

Throughout the planet, each shoreline has its own natural frequency or resonance, informed by the interaction of land and sea. Many of us are called to the intertidal zone, as the salt water that pulses over the earth is a place of collective emergence. Over three hundred million years ago, the bodies of some fish began to transform, enabling them to walk on land. The bones in those earthbound fish fins resemble our human hands today. These are our distant ancestors, whose journey out of the water links our human bodies to the fluid world. When we meet water on land, our internal waters re-member this origin. 

Piano lullabies recorded to tape, suspended in saltwater where rivers meet the sea. Buried history emerges from the banks of the earth, eroding into smaller and smaller pieces due to the action of water. What is the knowledge hidden in this shoreline clay? What sounds emerge from fragmentation? What is wholeness? Where does trust emerge? What is found in this process of dissolving form? How can our awareness be like living water? Can we truly be with the subtle emergence and dissolving?

Crossing an ocean reconstituted me in animal forgiveness. Your eyes are joy speaking of holy wells, mysterious water places, lifetimes contained in a single drop. My heart’s in the Highlands: in the gaps of time, in generations and distances collapsed, then opened again. Shapeshifters, healers, holding each other in the signature of their voices, repeating these lines, feeling the sea’s mysterious draw, and the bodies that have come from, and returned to, this place. They cleared the crofts, the glens, our home. But the songs remain in the water, walking us to the edge of another world where we have lived for a moment, held; where we have risen and fallen, swelled. Timeless the pull toward land. Compelled, we move in the motion of passing and exchange, dwelling in generations as wind finds its place, landing. There is no fighting the call of blood, of salt, of memory, woven through red hair braided along another line. I long for the seventh sun, the beginning again, and whoever carries the will to shape the new myth.

Fishing line. A contact mic. A hydrophone. And a solar-powered FM transmitter. These technologies were brought to life in collaboration with UK-based sound artist Helmut Lemke and Halifax-based solar wizard Stephen Thomas to create a mobile, interactive sculpture that plays the tidal line. Witnesses were encouraged to participate by bringing radio receivers and walking the intertidal zone — interacting with the body of the radio transmission and contributing to the overall sonic experience.

Komqwejwi'kasikl, or Mi’kmaq (L’nuk) hieroglyphs, are part of a complex communication system sustained by L’nuk as long as they can remember. Translating roughly to suckerfish writings, which refers to the paths suckerfish leave on the river bottom as they move, Komqwejwi'kasikl is a symbolic language that was used by L’nuk for inscribing maps and tribal records—each character representing a concept that can be expressed through the the oral and written (phonetic) aspects of the language. Michelle Sylliboy approaches the L’nuk hieroglyphs as a “continuous hermeneutic discourse.” With music composed, arranged and improvised live in response to Michelle Sylliboy’s Komqwejwi'kasikl, or Mi’kmaq (L’nuk) hieroglyphic poetry, by Michelle Sylliboy (spoken word), Lindsay Dawn Dobbin (drums), Nicholas Dourado (piano) and Johnny Mrym Spence (synthesizer).