A John Carpenter style soundtrack for an installation of RGB and LED lighting on an abandoned villa in Braunschweig Germany.

1.Main Theme

8.Wandering

5.Ladders

4.Gartenhaus Häckel Radio Broadcast

6.Spreadsheets-Obstructed View

3.Voltage

2.Cave Canem

7.Production Line

9.Exit Theme

For the Presentation House Gallery installation of Fog, I wrote and performed this set of songs to function as an artist talk.

01 The Best Way to Start

02 Lament for the Avant Guarde

06 The Whistle Blowers Know

05 Artificial Supernatural

Four covers of singles from Bryan Adams 1984 album Reckless, used as the soundtrack for animations of Christmas lights installed on the Polygon gallery in North Vancouver from November 2018-May 2019. In the same manner that the Polygon gallery has been covered with a minimalist skin, I have voiced these songs with a sentiment of melancholy.

4.Summer of '69 (Polygon Installation Soundtrack)

1.Run to You (Polygon Installation Soundtrack)

2.One Night Love Affair (Polygon Installation Soundtrack)

3.Somebody ((Polygon Installation Soundtrack)

Each of these tracks are field recordings that are played on the reel-to-reel player in the DIY HIFI installation - an audiophile listening room that I built following DIY plans, intended for art museum display. The recordings are all of ecosystems, natural or creative, that are threatened by development: a bird nesting area along the Peace River that will be flooded by the Site C dam, a thunderstorm I recorded alongside Louis Creek in BC (where lighting has sparked forest fires in 2003 and 2023), and a music rehearsal space in Toronto threatened with closure from being bought by a megachurch. To play their own records in the DIY HIFI installation, viewers first had to switch off these recordings.

3.Geary Street Rehearsal Space Walkthrough and Bass Riff Generation Session

2.Thunder Storm beside Louis Creek, BC

1.Dawn Chorus, Peace River, BC prior to Site C construction

Lost and Found is a public art work involving ephemeral interventions along the Rouge River Trail in Unionville, Markham from June-October, 2023, translated into an exhibition at the Varley Art Gallery in January-May 2024.  Holly Ward and I built two musical carts, attaching ready-made and improvised instruments to modified dog strollers. We made a call for amateur musicians to play the carts, or to practice on their own musical instruments along the trail, using the project budget to pay them an hourly wage. This recording documents these musicians playing along the trail.

Lost and Found Soundwalk

The A-side of a 12" containing remixes of music I created for the installation/video "EDM House".  The music is based on what I remember from going to raves in the '90s.

For the project, I occupied an otherwise empty house - built in 1905 by Norwegian settlers - over the winter of 2012-13. I attached Christmas lights on the house and connected them to electronic controls. I wrote EDM and designed animations for the lights to accompany this. At night I displayed my work. Passersby could tune in on FM radio to hear the music while watching the flashing lights.  At the end of my time in the house, I shot a video of the display using a cinematic technique in which the camera rolled towards or away from the house, while the zoom counteracted.  

Track A - The Dark One Extended Mix Loud

The B-side of a 12" containing remixes of music from the installation/video project "EDM House".  The music is a recreation of what I remember from going to raves in the '90s.

For this work I occupied an otherwise empty house - built in 1905 by Norwegian settlers - over the winter of 2012-13. I attached Christmas lights on the house and connected them to electronic controls. I wrote EDM and designed animations for the lights to accompany this. At night I displayed my work. Passersby could tune in on FM radio to hear the music while watching the flashing lights.  At the end of my time in the house, I shot a video of the display using a cinematic technique in which the camera rolled towards or away from the house, while the zoom counteracted.

Kevin Schmidt

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