This work features the voices of Juro Kim Feliz, Sandeep Bhagwati, and Bänoo Zan, with Tagalog haiku poetry by Juro Kim Feliz.

Responding to soundscapes of the Pacific Ocean led me back to a short blog/podcast series (Nomadic Sound Worlds) that I currently produce at the Canadian Music Centre Ontario. Sparked by a compilation of essays named “Letters of Transit: Reflections on Exile, Identity, Language, and Loss” (ed. André Aciman, 1999), this series probed into the paradoxes of artist narratives under the phenomenon of global migration. Interviews with selected Canadian artists, including Montreal-based composer Sandeep Bhagwati and Toronto-based poet Bänoo Zan, unraveled reflections of homelands, cultural flows, displacement, and citizenship. In simulating an audio documentary for a dance project, the curiosity of creating electronic fixed media under the pretext of journalistic practice became a channel to create meanings not only in positioning one’s temporality in a world surrounded by oceanic bodies, but also with how humans drift through the tides of globalization within geopolitical spaces. Destabilizing the rigid lines of “otherness” and privileged spaces provoke negotiations even between boundaries within artistic practices, as one (including myself as a composer) confronts shadows among the rugged terrain between dance and poetry, between physical gesture and recorded interviews, between the physical body and its simulation through video projection, between sound art and journalism, between ephemerality and archived knowledge, between recollecting memories and losing them as a direct result of it. Where does one draw the lines; or rather, why draw them on massive oceans that erase all traces of them?

Source: 2019