The Limited Edition Compact Disc comes in an eco-sleeve jacket with original artwork and liner notes. The album is over 1 hour and 22 minutes in length, so the CD does not contain the piece "Once Upon a Time." When you buy the CD, you get a link to download all tracks on the album, including "Once Upon a Time" plus extensive PDF booklet. Please note that shipping is by letter mail and so is not tracked. This keeps costs down. If you want tracked shipping, please add the following amounts to your order: $12 for USA; $18 for Canada or $21 for International.
Includes unlimited streaming of Breaking News
via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
ships out within 2 days
edition of 20
$18CADor more
Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album
This special edition comes with the shrink wrap removed and the CD eco-sleeve is signed by Hildegard Westerkamp. We have only recently made this available for sale!
Includes unlimited streaming of Breaking News
via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
Subscribe
now to receive all the new
music
earsay music creates,
including
7 back-catalog releases,
delivered instantly to you via the Bandcamp app for iOS and Android.
Learn more.
The making of MotherVoiceTalk was a journey in search of resonance with the work and life of the Japanese Canadian artist Roy Kiyooka. My task as I perceived it, was to listen to Kiyooka’s artistic and personal voices on all possible levels and bring them into dialogue with the musical, sonic tools of my own compositional and personal voices. The final piece emerged out of this process of listening and was, to say the least, a bit of a surprise to me! Perhaps I could call it a “thought piece in sounds and words”.
It was created within the context of Marginalia, re-visioning Roy Kiyooka, a project by Vancouver New Music. Three other B.C. composers, Jocelyn Morlock, Stefan Smulovitz, Stefan Udell and I were commissioned to compose works that would emerge out of a process of researching, getting-to-know, grappling with, and creating an inner dialogue with Kiyooka’s diverse artistic output, which ranged from painting.to sculpture, photography, poetry and other writing, film, video, and music improvisation.
From the start I was curious about the relationship between Kiyooka’s Japanese-Canadian past—his coming of age during WWII and thus inside Canada’s so-called enemy-alien culture and language—and his strong position inside the contemporary English-Canadian cultural scene during his adult life. Like so many other Canadians, myself included, he carried within himself another language and culture and learnt to integrate it into the cultural environment of the Canadian world around him. This makes for a unique inner dialogue and is bound to find its expression in any artistic work, however conscious or subconscious it may be.
Kiyooka’s book Mothertalk (ed. Daphne Marlatt), created from interviews with his mother, accompanied me throughout the making of MotherVoiceTalk. Roy seemed to connect frequently and strongly with his mother in her old age, just as I did with mine as she grew to a very old age—connecting in other words, with their powerful female presence in us, their stories and thus the language of our childhoods.
Listening to some of the tapes that Roy Kiyooka had made himself or that were made of his readings, musical improvisations and presentations, I was struck by the multitude of moods and expressions in his speaking and sound making. Short excerpts of these became the sonic/musical materials for this piece, e.g. sounds from his zither, or ‘harp’ as he would call it, from a whistle, and his spoken voice. The Japanese voice of his mother Mary Kiyoshi Kiyooka, and the German voice of my own mother, Agnes Westerkamp, both found their way into the composition.
Many thanks go to Giorgio Magnanensi and Vancouver New Music for setting up this impossible challenge and to Matsuki Masutani and Fumiko Kiyooka for unearthing some of Roy’s recordings. And my special thanks go to Peter Grant, Margaret and Tom Taylor, Agnes Westerkamp with Renate Buck and Jolanta Penrak. They provided me with the places and times for retreat that I needed in order for this meeting between two artistic/personal languages to occur and MotherVoiceTalk to emerge!
credits
from Breaking News,
released March 25, 2022
MotherVoiceTalk features the voices of Roy Kiyooka, Hildegard Westerkamp, Agnes Westerkamp, Mary Kiyoshi Kiyooka.
Editing and mixing: Hildegard Westerkamp
Mastering: John Oliver
earsay music is a boutique music label based in Vancouver Canada specializing in gutsy new sounds for electronics, computers
and live instruments and voices. Established in 1998, we're glad to offer our entire catalogue, as well as high-quality downloads, as well original CD merch. Enjoy!
To learn more about the artists in our catalogue, please visit our main site, earsay.com...more
Hear Oliver's transformation of 6 great Vancouver soloists who recorded their short pieces in the isolation of their home or home studio. Oliver transports the listener to a dreamscape experience. earsay music
supported by 15 fans who also own “MotherVoiceTalk”
This goes crazy. Never heard something like this. What an experience and definitely opened and inspired my creative eyes, ears, body, and soul abstractshine
This stunning, beautiful project from Fujian duo Southeast of Rain 东南有雨 blends field recordings with rippling notes from the pipa. Bandcamp New & Notable Feb 8, 2021
Thoughtful ambient from Seattle has elements of drone, experimental, and healing sounds in its musical explorations. Bandcamp New & Notable Sep 5, 2019