Q&A (2021, voice, electronics, contact mic, objects)stages a dialogue about street surveillance. Text from EIGHT TRACK (Talonbooks, 2019).

QandA

A work commissioned by Rhizome (Quebec City, 2020) for their sound and video installation project Chœur(s). The work responds in sound to a text written by poet Kaie Kellough on indenture, migration, and the gaps and fractures of familial history.

Longitude

Chambersonic: Voice Scree (2020) is an ode to the voice, to its material self, to its possibilities and limitations, to its rebellious and disobedient composition. The voice stumbles, stutters, the voice backtracks and slows down, the voice serenades, the voice whispers and reveals. The voice has no substitute and thus speaks itself into a living score. Text published in CHAMBERSONIC (Talonbooks, 2024).

Chambersonic: Voice Scree

Chambersonic: Episodes for an Absent Film (2021–23) is an 8-channel audio installation of 27:30 min, of which this is a short excerpt in stereo. The work is based on Chambersonic: A Graphic Score (reproduced in CHAMBERSONIC, Talonbooks, 2024) and was begun in a residency at OBORO (Montreal, 2021). Made with electronics, processed theremin, prepared piano, zither, various objects captured with contact mics, and the vocal spectre of the breath, the work spatializes acoustic movements and textures, blurring the boundaries between organic physicality and electronic sonic figuration.

Chambersonic: Episodes for an Absent Film Excerpt

A choral poetry performance with Martine Audet, Renée Gagnon and Annie Lafleur, recorded live at Port de tête in Montreal on February 10, 2023.

Poèmes & Choeur

Chambersonic: Let Form Be Aural (2024) is a sound performance that juxtaposes the mechanical drones of motors of obsolete technologies once used for recording sound with melodic vocal monotones, exploring the physicality and material capture of audio through various types of microphones (contact, voice, and throat mics). Words based on “Movement I” of the poem score “Let Form Be Oral” from CHAMBERSONIC (Talonbooks, 2024).

Chambersonic: Let Form Be Aural

Chambersonic: Electroechoes (2024) is a sound performance that reverberates and speaks through a multitude of electronic voices and layered oscillations of electricity, captured with an electromagnetic microphone. Attending to the resonant frequencies that surround us yet are below our threshold of hearing, “Electroechoes” listens to voices that are often ignored, unheard, or made invisible. Word material is based on “Echoes” from CHAMBERSONIC (Talonbooks, 2024).

Chambersonic: Electroechoes

Môn_Mesh_Tréal is a collaborative performance created with Wales-based poet and performer Zoë Skoulding. First performed in Bangor, Wales in 2022, as part of the Transatlantic Translation: Poetry in Circulation and Practice Across Languages conference, this is a live recording of the performance  at OBORO in Montreal in 2022. The work explores listening and being in languages in our plurilingual, island settings, featuring text in English, French and Welsh and sounds made with electronics, contact mics and detritus found on our respective coasts.

Môn_Mesh_Tréal

SPELLES (2010) is inspired by a French medieval text and an English medieval translation of that work, which embodies the first instance when oral stories begun being written down. SPELLES voices and mispronounces, re-translating the inscribed page into an oral and aural performance, investigating the porous boundaries between those two spaces by using an English that makes audible its French Latinate and Germanic roots.

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SPELLES

In MOUTHTUNED (2013, voice, prepared piano), the voice is treated as a musical instrument and combined with audio recorded with contact microphones on piano chords to create a composition that is spatial and circular.

MOUTHTUNED

THRESHOLDS (2015, voice, electronics, theremin) crosses the boundaries of my translations of Paul Celan’s Romanian poems, looking at them as a “territory” of vocabulary, to compose new lines and phrases, imagining various definitions of political, linguistic and bodily borders. The poems act as scores and are translated from the architectural spatial environment of the page into the aural and visual architecture of a space.

THRESHOLDS

IF (2020) explores the definition of "track" as a course of action or conduct, a way of proceeding.

MOUTHNOTES (2016, voice, electronics) explores the “mouth” as a generative source of sound/language, experimenting with ideas of reverberation, disintegration, trace, and transformation.

MOUTHNOTES

BOUND (2016, voice, theremin) explores porous borders in English, French and Romanian.

BOUND

OPERATOR (2019, electronics, contact mics, objects, voice, sampled sounds) explores the subject position(s) of military drone operators engaged in the act of tracking, identifying, and ultimately destroying.

OPERATOR

Voice experiments, unruly texts, electronics and sampled sounds arranged in  solo compositions, performances, phonotopes.

Oana Avasilichioaei

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