Sound Art is an unfamiliar term to most people ..
many artists make art using sounds, but we usually call it music, poetry, spoken word or documentary.
Victoria Fenner's definition of sound art is very broad -- it's any kind of art you can hear.
She describes herself as a documentary poet, drawing her source material from the “real” world,
infusing it with subjective thoughts and impressions in the way that a poet or writer of
literary fiction would express themselves. Some of her works are more rhythmic and tonal,
with the timbre, beat and texture of the sounds working together to create a new kind of music
(often called Electroacoustic or Acusmatic music).
Listen to more of Victoria's compositions here...
No Time for Silence
A meditation about losing our quiet places and getting back to them again,
both geographically and spiritually. Noise and quiet in this piece is about noise in the physical world,
and it's also a metaphor for the noise inside our minds. How easy it is to lose the clarity which is so
important to hear ourselves and our world. How noise causes us to lose our place on the earth when human noise
drowns out natural rhythms. Produced for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s radio program “Out of the Blue” (2000).
You Can't Miss It
An Audio Map. Victoria lived in the Appalachian mountains of southeast Kentucky
and southwestern Virginia for two years at the turn of this century. For this Canadian woman, it was a landscape
and cultural geography unlike anything she'd ever experienced. You Can't Miss it is about getting lost ...
both literally and figuratively. With thanks to friends current and past from
Appalshop
for helping her discover where she was. (sounds gathered in 2001/2002, composed in 2010).
After Exile
A personal history - Six years ago, Victoria Fenner discovered that her birthplace
of Ruscomb Ontario was also the birthplace of noted Canadian poet and writer Raymond Knister (1899-1932).
She found it surprising that she had never heard of his existence, even though both the Fenners and Knisters
were original German settlers of the village in the mid 1800s, and is still home to several branches of both families.
After Exile is a conversation on a train with the dead poet as they both make a mythic journey back to their home village.
Commissioned by CBC Radio's program
Living Out Loud
and
The Deep Wireless Radio Art Festival . 2011