Ears Have Eyes

MARGINALIA: sounds from the archives This month's program is a collage of sonic experiments, old sound sculptures, sketches for songs, archival materials, recordings from prolific audio engineers, and a few works from our own archives, including some sound art we couldn’t play on previous episodes. This month’s theme is NEW GREEN: shifting, sprouting, shy & splendorous. Tied to EARS HAVE EYES’ ong...

NEW GREEN: shifting, sprouting, shy & splendorous In celebration of the 2 year anniversary of our show, we recorded a special live-to-tape episode of EARS HAVE EYES with a live studio audience! Listeners brought pillows and a blanket, and sprawled on the floor for a dreamy Listening Party at the historic Eau Claire & Bow River Lumber Company. Sound artists, experimental musicians, and auditory exp...

EARS HAVE EYES - live! - RED HOT In celebration of the 2 year anniversary of our show, we recorded a special live-to-tape episode of EARS HAVE EYES with a live studio audience! Listeners brought pillows and a blanket, and sprawled on the floor for a dreamy Listening Party at the historic Eau Claire & Bow River Lumber Company. Sound artists, experimental musicians, and auditory explorers spun a tap...

DEEP DREAM, DARK WEB: auditory AI, computer compositions, and digital digressions DEEP DREAM, DARK WEB converges at the intersection of artistry and artificial intelligence, exploring the multifaceted landscape where machine-generated sounds echo the complex contours of our technological zeitgeist. In this auditory odyssey, we journey through a sonic realm where the binary boundaries between human...

RAPID EAR MOVEMENT: songs for sleeping, sounds for dreaming Late Autumn in Calgary is like a dream, floating in between the hard glittering whiteness of wintertime and grey, nebulous days of Fall. Nights grow longer towards the Hibernal Solstice, and mammals feel a natural pull towards sleep. Normally, as people, we balance our mammalian impulses against human responsibilities, but this month’s ep...

MOUTH SOUNDS: verbal, vocal, voiced, voracious As human beings, MOUTH SOUNDS are our main phonic interface for communicating through language. The works on this month's program navigate foreign tongues, deconstruct syntax, amplify verboten radio vocalizations, analyze the multiple meanings of singing to babies, and remix the essential sounds of words. Joyful, political, and curious, please join us...

PHONOSTALGIA: other times and places PHONOSTALGIA conjures memories of other times and places using sound as a sensory trigger. What happens when the sounds of another’s nostalgia summon new images in your own head? As Autumn sweeps across the landscape, pulling leaves from the trees and tucking the foothills into bed for the Winter ahead, we’re centring our show around the gentle telekinesis of o...

FOREST PERSPECTIVE: whispers, wildfires, and rewilding words (Part 2) This is FOREST PERSPECTIVE: Part 2. In North America, it’s been a Summer of smoke, evacuations, and loss – not just for people, but for entire ecosystems. Wildfires are a natural forest cleansing process, but the type of wildfires we’re seeing in our carbon-superheated world are faster, hotter, and more pervasive than ever befor...

FOREST PERSPECTIVE: whispers, wildfires, and rewilding words (Part 1) In Western Canada, like so many parts of the Northern Hemisphere, smoke from nearby wildfires intermittently fills the sky, painting the sun electric pink. In acknowledgement of the hottest July on record, this month’s radio program invited artists to reflect on the non-human perspectives of forests. What does it mean to think l...

SOUND DEATH: endangered, delicate, and increasingly rare (Part 2) SOUND DEATH // Part 2 draws from endangered, delicate, and increasingly rare sounds, soundscapes, and ideas. Some works on today’s program are related to human death and decomposition; others focus on overbreeding, extinction, fictional field recordings, and mythical explorations of sleep as a death-like (and yet, life-like) state o...

SOUND DEATH: endangered, delicate, and increasingly rare (Part 1) This month, we're featuring work from Fragments of Sonic Extinction (FOSE) a group exhibition in Munich, Germany and an interactive website. FOSE explores the extinction of natural sounds, focusing on the sonic character of the extinction process and its relationship with cultural histories and global catastrophes related to the ant...

RADIANT WAVES: resonating and shiny; too bright to see EARS HAVE EYES is a monthly program featuring sound art, spoken word, and experimental music submitted by local, national, and international artists. Today’s theme, RADIANT WAVES, comes from the invisible transmissions moving through our bodies at all times - washing over us and our environment, emitting outwards from inside us, passing throug...

SLOW REVEAL: hidden beneath the Winter sheath, released by thaw of Spring The work on this month’s program arrive as an emergence - shaking off the cold and rust and loneliness of Wintertime, and flowering outwards into the sun. As we here in Calgary/Mohkinstsis emerge from a cold winter into the uncertain thaw of Spring, we share the residual creative output of that long, dark time. Today's compo...

ECHOLOGY: environments of sound Our theme today is a fusion of ECHO and ECOLOGY, drawing from the lush interspace between sound & environment. Today’s artworks span field recordings, political commentary, sounds from ecosystems in crisis, the voice of rivers, and experimental instrumentation responding to ECHOLOGY as a conceptual framework. ARTISTS: Akari Komura alëna korolëva Audrey Lane Cockett...

SYNAESTHETICS: do ears have eyes? This month, we're celebrating the One Year Anniversary of EARS HAVE EYES! We started imagining this radio show during The Hibernation Project (our annual collaborative wintertime art series) as a response to the global pandemic and subsequent social distancing. We were trying to figure out ways to share art spaces that don't require physical proximity between peop...

FUTURE CASTING: science fiction sounds and speculative stories For our first episode of 2023, we’re turning our ears towards science fiction sounds & speculative stories. The new year elicits speculation about the future. Where are we going? In a time marked by uncertainty and shadowed by pandemic, war, climate crisis, and social reckoning, how can sound pair with imagination to expand our sense o...

END TO BEGIN: feedback, looping, and prolonged transitions In our last program of 2022, we’re exploring the cyclical relationship between endings and beginnings. As one year draws to a close, another begins, in a rhythm that moves not in a line or a circle, but a slow spiral through time and space. This month's episode features an interview with Stephanie Loveless, Director of the Center for Deep...

DECAY: degradation, release, and melting away (Extended Version) This month, we're highlighting sound-based artworks exploring DECAY as an abstract or literal phenomenon. In the organic world, decay is tied to end-of-life cycles and decomposition through bacteria and fungi. In music, decay references the time it takes for a sound to ring out, for a note to disappear into silence. But decay is so m...

DECAY: degradation, release, and melting away (Radio Edit) This month, we're highlighting sound-based artworks exploring DECAY as an abstract or literal phenomenon. In the organic world, decay is tied to end-of-life cycles and decomposition through bacteria and fungi. In music, decay references the time it takes for a sound to ring out, for a note to disappear into silence. But decay is so much mo...

HAUNTING ME, HAUNTING YOU: ghostly, resonant, creepy, and echoing On All Hallows Eve, the threshold between one side of the veil and the other is purportedly thinnest - a time for ghostly visitations, resonant sounds, creepy feelings, and echoing experiments. The compositions on this month’s program range from theatrical to autobiographical, encompassing sounds from cemeteries and hospitals, wild...

STORMING: busy, noisy, dense, and maximal A storm can be literal or conceptual. In this Summer of profound environmental catastrophe, both interpretations held true at different moments. A storm is a breaking point, an eruptive moment of chaos, but it is usually long-brewing, perhaps even anticipated. Sometimes you can watch a storm come slide across the prairies all day long, see it forming in th...

IN THE CALM: open, spatial, gentle, and fleeting Our program this month features work from local, national, and international sound artists and musicians with a focus on tranquility and the expanse of each moment. This collection of sound artworks, poetry, and experimental music is intended to provide space to relax and bask in the hidden gentle flow of the Summer - a quiet place too often obscure...

Our program this month features work from local, national, and international sound artists across Turtle Island, Asia, and Western and Central Europe. Their work is challenging - rising in voices of dissent, instruments of revolution, calls for decolonization, field recordings from political protests, responses to anti-abortion legislation, and artworks shining light on everyday injustice. And yet...

RISING WATER: over, around, and through Rising water is personal and political, caught between the cold tinkle of ice in a glass on a hot summer day, and the slow rise of oceans brought about by carbon dioxide emissions melting polar ice caps. Water is a caress and a rush, essential and deadly. Here in Calgary/Mohkinstsis, located at the confluence of the Bow and Elbow Rivers, we are approaching t...

JOURNEY: sound walks, travel, and traversing the land From road trips to immigration, meditations on nationhood to outer space travel, the upcoming sound works meditate on the theme of JOURNEY through place-ness - the places we’ve been, the places we are, the places we move through, come from, escape, dwell in, get stuck, stick out, are displaced from, yearn for, and aim towards. The idea of 'plac...