Joy Ngenda’s Morning Episode (2021) takes the listener on a commute through consciousness; rising slowly with what we perceive is daylight, into a brighter, but still drowsy morning ritual. Ngenda guides us into this experience of waking while also retreating into narratives of dreams, of traveling, pitstops, and passing trees. In the overlapping narratives of voices that speak of memories and dreams, we hear the shifting pangs of yearning, of independence, of the weight of family in wakefulness as in sleep. How we dream about the banality of interactions, small gestures, and the smells and flavours of memories.
“Are you ready to wake up yet? It's ok if you’re not.”
yawn.
‘It’s ok if you’re still tired.”
This commuting through consciousness meanders deeply, without pause for waking fully, and asks us how sleep drifts out of the body, or lingers.
If we cannot share the journeys of everyday commuting anymore, where do we find a sense of sharing a to-and-from, a here-to-there, of moving from place to place? In waking, we find ourselves leaving what can still exist in the Before Times; maskless, traveling, sharing tea with family in our homes. 
Perhaps there’s also a contemplation on the shift in consciousness that is happening now, into a hopeful and long-awaited After. The ease of sleep, yet one that is plagued with dreams and dis-ease, gives way to a morning that comes with a static, the sound of a boiling kettle, the mechanical sound that pricks wakefulness behind our eyes. 


Listening instructions:
this piece is not tied to specific land or territories. listen to it as you wake up, when you find yourself lost in your own mind, when contemplating dreams. let it bring you through a resting place, a waking place, and into the day ahead.

the commute 2021

Morning Episode

Inter-uption

Year Time

In Helena Krobath’s Ghost Story Commute (2020) we ride the West Coast Express, a commuter train that typically brings workers into Vancouver in the morning, and back to the Fraser Valley, to the suburbs, in the evening. The WCE is not for inner-city travellers, and its schedule very clearly dictates that those who use it are not ‘from’ Vancouver, but travel into it only to work, before leaving again. It is neither welcoming nor accommodating outside of a nine-to-five schedule, and it does not encourage Vancouver residents to use the train to journey outside the city. Krobath articulates this from-elsewhere suburban experience and introduces the train’s migratory characters through the view of a travelling ghost who observes the passengers, their idiosyncrasies, their commuter habits. How are we when we travel? What ghosts do we ride with on these commutes? Do we know their histories as we ride the rails across the valley?

Listening instructions: Can be accessed anywhere, but imagined on the train itself or from vantage points along that route where the train can be observed. The West Coast Express departs at Waterfront and follows the CPR tracks along the inlet/river. Headphones recommended.

Credits: 
Sample from “Strange Consolation”, courtesy of Neck of the Woods 
Samples from "Stanley Cup Riots in Vancouver 2011, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly," courtesy of Tetsuro Shigematsu

Helena Krobath "Ghost Story Commute"

In Guts, Ho invites listeners on a guided experience as a body and mind in a state of illness during a time of quarantined isolation. Parodying the framework of a guided meditation, Ho narrates our journey through corporeal sensations and psychological reflections, easing us into “the elemental conditions of the body.” Their narrative contracts and bends, turning from descriptions of our immediate, imaginary surroundings to the functions of a body living with illness. Our disembodiment is twofold; we are removed from our own current state of isolation into the narrative space of the piece, and simultaneously, we are displaced from a sense of bodily normalcy. The narrator takes us on a journey with no destination, exploring the meditative movements that are still possible when physical mobility is rendered either unsanctioned or impossible. Coalesced with the current circumstances of a global pandemic, Ho’s work touches on the forces, external or internal, which often dictate one’s sense of bodily autonomy, and our ability to move ‘freely’ through or within the world.

S F Ho is a 90% chill 10% not artist living on the unceded Coast Salish territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ peoples. They are into community building, books, and being sort of boring. They just finished writing a short novella about aliens, love, and boundaries called George the Parasite.


Content warning: ‘Fake’ and deliberately intense guided meditation grounded in the perspective of a sick body. Some strong language.

Guts

S F Ho "Guts"

jaye simpson "Migrational Memories"

Arts Assembly is a not for profit community-centric arts organization that emphasizes artistic collaboration. With a focus on social practices and research, we aim to foster relationships between the community and professional artists. We hope to expand the notion of what art can be and do, and provide a high calibre of diverse and inclusive arts programming.

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