‘Curious kind of communion'

Winnipeg Free Press

3 days ago

To recruit vocalists for her interspecies choir, Jami Reimer slipped on a pair of hip waders and eased into the swampy waters of Brazil's Atlantic Forest.
Clutching three microphones and a flashlight, the bioacoustic artist masqueraded as a talent scout, eavesdropping on the 'erotic refrain' of an amphibian mating chorus.
What she heard changed the way she understood the possibilities of sound and the responsibilities of recording it.
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Jami Reimer's Soft Tongues features her amphibian recordings in Brazil mixed with her own voice and archived recordings of extinct frog species.
In Soft Tongues, Reimer's upcoming performance piece at the Cluster Festival of New Music and Integrated Arts, the humming, croaking and hammering rhythms her recording devices captured mesh with her own voice, along with archived recordings of extinct frog species dating to 1950.
Though the languages differed, the Winnipeg-raised Reimer was reminded by the warty chorus of formative experiences in Mennonite church choirs, where vocalization patterns are handed down between generations as acts of communal perseverance.
'In field-recording practices, you don't get to access connection unless you know when to quiet your own voice and become available as a listener,' says Reimer, who embedded with the University of Campinas' Amphibian Natural History lab to collect her earliest samples of frogsong.
'These choruses are imprints of how a habitat is doing. They sound out the health of a wetland.'
While completing her MFA at Simon Fraser University, Reimer, who still lives in Vancouver, was inspired to explore bioacoustics — the study of animal communication through sound — by her ecologist sister, whose ornithological research project coincided with an amphibian chorus event.
'I was pretty captivated how the same recording technologies used in music were being used to interface with other species,' says Reimer, who sang with Camerata Nova and in various choirs during her undergraduate studies at Canadian Mennonite University.
An obsession with amphibian soundscapes developed, informing Soft Tongues, which Reimer describes as 'a bioacoustic opera,' that fulfils a craving for collective vocalization, a practice the artist says serves as both a physical and spiritual reminder of interconnectivity.
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Jami Reimer's Soft Tongues will be performed at the Cluster Festival.
Reimer will perform Soft Tongues on June 6 at the West End Cultural Centre as part of Cluster's Oscillations program, a double concert also featuring Dirge, a collaboration between Franco-Manitoban beatmaker Rayannah, Chilean psych-rocker Los Dias Floreados and contemporary dancer Carol-Ann Bohrn.
'Field recording has really taught me how to quiet myself and become available to another species I will never understand, listening to it the way I would engage with music,' says Reimer, who will also perform a set of original music at Public Domain on June 14, opening with Toronto's Avalon Tassonyi for Winnipeg's Virgo Rising.
'It's a curious kind of communion.'
While Reimer's choral project centres on living harmonies, Eliot Britton and Patrick Hart's new work for Cluster is built around an impersonal voice that satirizes the growing influence of artificial intelligence and large language models as a replacement for genuine human interaction.
'Powered by relentlessly enthusiastic algorithms,' the Quigital Corporate Retreat (June 10 at the WECC) invites audience members to dress in their drabbest business-casual attire for a series of 'product launches, corporate loyalty tests and passive-aggressive email lounge ballads.'
It's all made up, but as a corporate collective, Quigital's overlords hope its work inspires laughter as much as it provokes tech-driven anxiety in a 'digital panic room' of their own design.
Though neither the Winnipeg-born Britton, a co-director of Cluster and a professor in the University of Toronto's Faculty of Music, nor Hart, who has scored commercials for McDonalds, Microsoft and Old Navy, has seen the series, their acquaintances have frequently compared the ongoing Quigital project to the TV series Severance, the Emmy-winning series that skewers office-culture soullessness and technocratic overreach.
Like Lumon, Severance's pseudo-religious, cult-like corporation driven by split personality, Quigital is both ambiguous and pointed.
'We strive to do the same thing, where Quigital is both our star and our villain, but the most sympathetic, wonderful, appealing villain,' says Britton.
Earlier projects by the collective include the fake launch, in 2020, of a series of home security devices powered by AI.
'Each product was designed to be incredibly appealing, which also makes them incredibly menacing,' says Britton.
'There's then this hilarious, awkward tension that emerges,' adds Hart.
That aura permeates the group's upcoming retreat, where vocalist Sara Albu and the Montreal-based Architek Percussion will use improvised sound, automated language and looping, robotic delivery to simultaneously mock the AI movement while also admitting humanity's initial defeat.
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Jami Reimer performing.
'It's a comedy of modern life that everyone very intuitively understands,' says Hart.
The Cluster Festival, founded in 2009, runs from June 3-10. A full schedule is available at clusterfestival.com. Full festival passes cost $60.
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Ben WaldmanReporter
Ben Waldman is a National Newspaper Award-nominated reporter on the Arts & Life desk at the Free Press. Born and raised in Winnipeg, Ben completed three internships with the Free Press while earning his degree at Ryerson University's (now Toronto Metropolitan University's) School of Journalism before joining the newsroom full-time in 2019. Read more about Ben.
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