Shaping In-Between Spaces / Shapeshifting Mediums

Un texte sur la pratique artistique de l’autrice et artiste sonore Oana Avasilichioaei, fellow chez Rhizome durant l’année 2023-2024.

Shaping In-Between Spaces / Shapeshifting Mediums

par Oana Avasilichioaei

Some formative beginnings: My father reading me the poetry of Mihai Eminescu (preeminent Romanian Romantic poet) instead of bedtime stories, particularly his legendary long-poem Luceafarul (The Evening Star).

Fascinated by the piano in my paternal grandparents’ house, one day I asked my grandmother—who had a beautiful lyrical voice and would sometimes sing ballads at family dinner parties—about learning to play the piano and she told me that I couldn’t learn because I didn’t have a musical ear.

Summers spent at my maternal grandmother’s house in the village, listening to the sounds of the forest, river, and animals. A contrast to our seventh-floor apartment in the city, from whose balconies I could hear the urban sounds of traffic, children playing in the streets, the drone and whistle signaling the shift change of the nearby steel factory, the chatter and clatter of other lives existing in close proximity.

Moving from one continent to another across the ocean and encountering English, which at first was like a wall against which my body collided, and realizing that language, at its most fundamental level, is sound, a sound that can be absorbed, remade, generated.

     Years spent learning and practising modern and contemporary dance. If I couldn’t make sound, I would put it into my body.

Getting up one night because I felt compelled to write down the words in my mind, which had no relation to anything else in my life and which I somehow quite quickly recognized as the music of poetry.

Many late nights falling asleep listening to Patti Schmidt’s iconic Brave New Waves show on CBC, featuring alternative and indie music, noise and sound art, and all types of works that don’t fit in categories. 

 Starting to participate in open mics (in cafés and bars around Vancouver) as a very young writer and beginning to grasp that the live stage is very different from the static page. 

Performing multi-voice readings, after co-writing Expeditions of a Chimaera (2009) with Erín Moure, and understanding the vast potential of the non-singular voice. Soon after acquiring my first pedal (a BOSS VE-20 vocal processor) and starting to experiment with layering and multiplying my voice. 

I attempt to speak, to push breath upwards and out through the core of my body, form vowels at the back of the throat, articulate consonants at the front of the mouth, moving tongue and teeth. I attempt to speak, to create a fluid, fluent movement, to traverse from one syllable to the next, from one part of speech to the next, smoothly, “naturally,” systematically. Yet this smooth attempt at speech disturbs me. Precisely because the consonants are too articulate, the vowels too fluid, the entire endeavour too systematic and mimetic. So I attempt again, that is to say, I let go and welcome cracks and fissures in the untextured surface, tune into a listening that attends to dissonances, passe ou fuit dans une autre syntaxe, learn to unlearn and thus learn anew, vire en filigrane entre les règles de discours. Slip. Stumble. Reach a wall and walk alongside it or get walled in and look up, to the ceiling, to the roof, to the sky, to the atmosphere for a way out or through. I attempt again. I attempt again. I break down or apart. I mix. Codes, cues, oral components. Like a chemistry experiment. Though I know almost nothing about chemistry, I am game for the experiment. I attempt to speak to the coefficient of a moment that is constantly in the making, fading, transforming, vanishing. 

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My instrument might be an amplified object. Or an interaction between amplified objects. Or an interaction between amplified objects and effects devices (pedals, mics, mixers, etc.). An amplified voice. Or an interaction between an amplified voice, amplified objects, and effects devices. A bodily gesture that triggers a sound. A sound that triggers a bodily gesture. The ears.

When making or playing a work, my subjective I is simultaneously the creator/composer, generator/interpreter, and listener/audience of the work. Though at times I may be seeking to bring out a particular element or form a specific sound through this process, inevitably I also end up discovering something else. This something else is often surprising, unpredictable, possibly even outside of what I might have been able to previously imagine. This something else is a gift, an exciting glimpse or hint of the possible. 

Work is created through the physical acts of making, experimenting, listening, playing, contemplating over time. The process is integral to the composition, to the writing. I do not compose in abstraction; I compose by doing. 

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When playing a work live, my attention is always multifocal, divided among several actions and states: generating, triggering, manipulating various sounds, using my voice as an instrument, attending to the text, its diction, speed, volume, and timing, concentrating on how various microphones are capturing my actions and sounds, listening, responding, reacting to how it all comes together in a specific space with its specific parameters at a specific time. 

This multifocal attention is not unrelated to my interest in creating multivalent works. Whether on the page or on the stage or in the ear. I do not wish to generate passive spaces but active ones, in which any participant (listener, reader, viewer) has to decide (at least to some extent) how they take in the work, what they give more or less attention to in any one moment, what and how they absorb, what and how they ignore.  

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My listening is different when I’m writing than when I’m making or performing live. In writing, my listening is more interior—I turn inwards and concentrate on my metabolism of the ideas, sensations, actions, impressions that I am trying to address. In live composing and performing, my listening is largely exterior—I am alert and attending with all my senses to how the sounds are behaving in the space, to what the room itself is shaping, to changes that are occurring in the very moment of their changing and reacting to these changes, making, producing from instant to instant in accordance with what my listening is telling me. 

Listening is a relationship between the self and what is outside the self, between the interior and exterior self. Listening might even be our most important relationship. It forms and informs our connection to the world. It enables empathy for what is separate from the self, what is distinct, what is other. Thereby listening offers or invents possible ways of relating, of connecting, but also reveals impasse, incomprehension, chasm, discord, divergence, difference. 

Listening requires intention and attention, resonance and synthesis, sensation and meaning. Intention because in order to truly pay attention to something, we need to actively listen, to focus on the action of listening. Discover where there is resonance with and where there is not and synthesize the flow between self and other. Give meaning (or not) to the sensations in our bodies when we tune into this process. 

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For every performance I have made so far, which involves my written texts, I have never taken a text tel quel, exactly as it was written for the page and then simply added sound to it or amplified it through sound and voice. Instead I always extract, remake, rewrite, recompose, resonify any text that I am attempting to make performative. I re-envision it into a sort of score, one that in a sense no longer works on the page but only works in its new sonic medium. This transformation, this recomposition, is fundamental and absolutely necessary to breathing sonic life into the paginated text. 

While the inscribed, page-composed text has its own spatial architecture and musicality (which may even be inspiring for the performed text), these are related directly to an internal and private reading position, an intimacy and interiority created in the reader’s mind between the page and reader in the act of reading. This is a very different relationship than the one happening live between performer and listener/viewer, which is constantly in the act of becoming and disappearing, as sound enters bodies physically and just as quickly exits them, leaving behind only a faint memory, an impressionistic trace, a somatic aftereffect. 

Furthermore, the sonorousness and musicality of the words on the page are created silently in the reader’s mind through the words themselves (or parts of them), their spatial arrangement, and potentially the silence of the blank or negative space. The sonorousness and musicality of a performance are created volumetrically through voices, additional sounds, volumes, pitches, tempos, types of loudspeakers, the space of the room itself, the reverberation against and absorption by all the surfaces and bodies in the room (people, walls, objects, furnishings, etc.), which need to be taken into account when composing a sono-poetico performance. 

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At the same time, for the performance works that are based on or grow out of a written text, I am interested in exploring some relationship, however tenuous, to the written text. This might mean, for example, that I use an element or some subject matter of the written text as a structuring device or formal generator of sonic vocabulary for the performance. Or it might mean that I translate the form of the text into the form of the performance. 

For instance, before I made the sound and video performance MOUTHNOTES (2016), I wrote a poetic text called “Mouthnotes” (published in Limbinal, Talonbooks, 2015), a text grounded in ideas about the mouth and speech that also played with the different registers of main text and footnote, essentially reversing their status (footnotes read more like a main text, while the main text reads more like footnotes). For the performance piece, I explored the physical mouth as a generative source of sound and language, experimenting with ideas of reverberation, trace, and transformation. Almost all the sonic material is created by the voice, which is also processed through pedals and electronics, shifting the registers of raw voice vs. processed voice. Grounded in the mouth, yet exceeding the mouth, the sound varies between being melodic, whispered, said, pitched, unpitched, transformed, echoed, and so on. 

For the sound and video performance OPERATOR (2019), which grew out of two texts about military drone operators (published in Eight Track, Talonbooks, 2019)—one based on a transcription of a drone strike and the other, an exploration of the disembodied/embodied subject positions of drone operators)—I wanted the sonic and visual material to echo the notions of embodiment and disembodiment, therefore have a strong materiality and be based on sound objects. As such, I made present the voices of soldiers in the field, the sounds made by drones and missiles, as well as the sounds made by a series of mundane objects that an operator may have access to in their cubicles, such as a plastic fork or keyboard brush or paper clips, which I captured through contact mics. To evoke the various doublings in the text, I created various sonic and video doublings. In addition, the video material was either captured by a drone camera or matched the perspective and aesthetic of a drone camera. 

The sound performance Chambersonic : Electroechoes (2024) is based on “Chambersonic : Echoes” (Chambersonic, Talonbooks, 2024), a text that accumulates a swarm of voices of different types, powers, potentials, activities. The sound performance translates the idea of human voices into electrical voices. It 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, the performance listens to “voices” that are often ignored, unheard, or made invisible. 

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In recent years, I have also begun to make sound works that do not involve any of my texts or any text at all. Chambersonic : Episodes for an Absent Film (2022) is an eight-channel audio installation based on a score of fifteen drawings, “Chambersonic : A Graphic Score” (Chambersonic, Talonbooks, 2024). The drawings are done in ink, pencil, and charcoal on graph paper and are based on the musical staff. Whereas in traditional music notation, the notes arranged on the staff are the markers of sound, these drawings transform the five lines of the staff into the markers of sound. The arrangement, spacing, length, thickness, shape, proximity, colour, and texture of the lines combine to suggest various gestures, qualities, volumes, tones, and frequencies of sound. 

The devices I used to compose the sonic material include 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, offering abstract traces of concrete sound sources that nevertheless remain indeterminate. It explores ideas of cinematic structure, spectral presence, disintegration, suspension, translation between a visual two-dimensionality, and a volumetric spatialization of sound. When standing in the middle of the room of speakers, I wanted to create a sense of standing in the middle of a drawing. Seeming to be out of time, the audio installation begins in a more intimate, contained space, then moves outwards, later returns to another more intimate space embodied through a rotating, almost centripetal breath, then moves ever more outwards.

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I see all this as a natural development of impulses that have already been present in my books in other ways, impulses to create between genres and mediums. For instance, writing a poem as though it was a graphic score (such as “Tracking Animal,” Eight Track, 2019 or “Chambersonic : Let Form Be Oral,” Chambersonic, 2024), which I hope encourages the reader to improvise, to interpret. Or creating series of photographs that are presented as visual poems (such as “Itinerant Sideline,” Limbinal, 2015 or “Chambersonic : Porous Seuil Possible Solo,” Chambersonic, 2024). Or exploring the forms, conditions, and concepts of theatre and performance in poetry (such as “On Origins (a radio drama with interference),” Eight Track, 2019 or “Chambersonic : Improbable Theatres,” Chambersonic, 2024). 

All of this work explores and endeavours to materialize and activate (in language, in the body, on the page, in an environment) an in-between space, something that is not of one genre, field, medium but exists between and is materially made out of two or more genres, fields, mediums. My impulse to do this is a kind of vocation, a kind of passion, a kind of necessity. This in-between space is tenuous, vulnerable, prone to disintegrate and even disappear, yet by the same token it is alive, in the making, thinking, becoming. In this sense, it is a place of agency. 

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I attempt to sound, to propel frequencies outwards and through the core of my instruments, form resonances at the back of the room, articulate noise at the edge of hearing, moving buttons and dials. I attempt to sound, to create a fluid, fluent movement, to traverse from one vibration to the next, from one pitch to the next, smoothly, “naturally,” systematically. Yet this smooth attempt at sound disturbs me. Precisely because the timbres are too articulate, the tones too fluid, the entire endeavour too systematic and mimetic. So I attempt again, that is to say, I let go and welcome cracks and fissures in the untextured surface, tune into a listening that attends to dissonances, passe ou fuit dans une autre syntaxe sonique, learn to unlearn and thus learn anew, vire en filigrane entre les règles d’atonalité. Slip. Stumble. Reach a wall and walk alongside it or get walled in and look up, to the ceiling, to the roof, to the sky, to the atmosphere for a way out or through. I attempt again. I attempt again. I break down or apart. I mix. Codes, cues, aural components. Like a chemistry experiment. Though I know almost nothing about chemistry, I am game for the experiment. I attempt to sound the coefficient of a moment that is constantly in the making, fading, transforming, vanishing.

À propos de l’autrice

Oana Avasilichioaei weaves poetry, sound, performance, and translation to expand and challenge notions of language, history, polyphonic structures, and boundaries of listening. She has published six collections of hybrid poetry, including Eight Track (Talonbooks, 2019, finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award and the AM Klein Prize for Poetry) andLimbinal (Talonbooks, 2015), numerous performance and sound works mixing electronics, ambient textures, noises, and vocal performance, and wrote a libretto for a one-act opera (Cells of Wind, FAWN Chamber Creative, 2022). She has also translated numerous poems and prose from French and Romanian. Avasilichioaei lives in Montreal with detours to New York and performs her work frequently in Canada, the United States, and Europe.