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A generative radio piece that follows the rhythms of tidal waters at the river’s edge.  
 
At the mouth of a river, salty meets sweet water. Tides fluctuate under lunar and solar influences, while the river floods and shrinks with the seasons, the delta shifting position over centuries. At the tideline, life persists and experiences dynamic shifts, existing both in and out of the water. A sand spit rises once a day and disappears again - a home for clams, oysters and other molluscs, anemones, sand dollars, shore birds and seals. A rock shelf full of tidal pools is filled with tiny fish and crabs, urchins, starfish, bivalves, and seaweed. Fish swim down the river to the sea and return to spawn. Plants and trees are engulfed or left high and dry. As a consequence of (over)use by modern cities and societies, extractive industries dominate a major river and its ecologies, then atrophy and decay, replaced by new modes of global commerce, tourism, and shipping. As ice packs diminish and seas warm, water levels rise and rain patterns change, and the spaces between high and low water become more and more exaggerated. The dynamics of change seesaw across the year, creating dangerous patterns in this time of climate crisis. Water Line is a generative audio piece that imagines the space between the tides and between the salt and the muddy waters. Depending on the height of the tide, listeners are oriented below or above the surface, from deep sea to thousands of meters in the air. Combining field recordings (acoustic and electro-magnetic) with poetic composition, Water Line works with both documentary and imaginary riverspace, the creatures and organisms that live there, the human and the more-than-human. The dynamics range from the roar of engines and turbines to the very subtle sounds of clams, the scuttle and high pitched hisses of crabs, or the scattering of sand fleas. Environmental sounds meet electronic compositions to express the many perceptions of being above or below water. From the undersea kelp forests and high tide zones across the mud flats and swampy areas; from the industrialized river to nearby rocky coves; the artists incorporate field recordings mixed with imaginings and playful interpretations of the river spilling silt and water to craft a composition that oscillates across the day, the month and the year. The piece is centered on the muddy, shifting delta of the river that is called stal̕əw̓ by indigenous hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓-speaking Musqueam people, or stó:lō by indigenous halq’eméylem speakers, Coast Salish peoples who still inhabit the river valley of what is also known as the Fraser, which winds through the greater metropolitan area of the city of Vancouver. The Fraser's colonial legacy is one connected to extractivist enterprises such as fur trade, logging and pulp mills, mining, fishing and farming; eventually the suburbs of Vancouver encroached across the river delta displacing farms with houses, parking lots, and an international airport. But the river is still its own, a place that the salmon have defined ecologically in many ways, and currently stó:lō still has the largest salmon run of any river in Canada. Water Line is not only a generative audio piece unfolding for 365 days with the help of generative software custom-created by absolute value of noise, it is also a piece that accumulates sounds across the year, as the artists continue to record and compose. The piece stages fictional confluences of stó:lō with distant rivers, as though a river could receive a transmission or dream of the life of other rivers like the Elbe and the Danube, similarly long waterways with silty deltas spilling out into the sea, such that the compositional accumulation includes the clangor of the port of Hamburg, the boats and canals of the Danube, and the distant delta where the Elbe empties into the North Sea. By the end of the year, the piece will become Estuary Almanac, a compilation of rivertimes, documented and imagined, with our ears attuned to the waterline. Though the river banks are built more and more concretely, though the waters hold ghosts of the past that the summer drought brings into view, these are vital rivers whose life spans have and will surely outlast empire. |
