Shell by Troy Ouellette is part of an album pieces by Canadian musicians, sound artists and media artists Victoria Fenner, Yan St-Onge and Troy Ouellette.
Troy Ouellette also made a video version of this piece which can be viewed on NAISATube - https://youtube.com/naisatube
The initial concept for his piece "Shell" arose from an interest in how animals process aquatic acoustic environments and his fascination with minimal sound and deep listening. Ouellette explains further in the following statement:
"My first encounter with shells came from being at the beach when I held an empty shell to my ear to reflect on a distant, imagined ocean. In this work, I transplanted this as a ritual object, listening to the lake instead of calling out by positioning the same empty chamber of the spiral within the shell as I once did while hearing the same echo of my own body in the shell placed to my ear as a child. My grandparent's yearly travels to southern climes brought back this large conch shell they acquired in the Caribbean. During the 1950s, oil companies (began in earnest) to exploit ocean resources, and the urge to produce and consume oil resources was in full swing. With the merger of Dutch Petroleum and Shell Transport of the UK, Shell Oil was born to take on the name in a greenwashing campaign that continues today by classifying natural gas extraction as renewable. In this recent workshop/retreat at NAISA, I was torn by my symbolic, historical and biological interests and the ever-present ecological concerns that often paralyze cultural producers. In biology, for instance, shells from this phylum make temporary homes for other sea organisms once the shells are discarded or the host organism dies. A historical reading of the shell as an instrument is at least 18,000 years old, with one found in the Pyrenees mountains with the markings of being played. With my interest in sonic inhabitance, I cast my breath through the shell chamber (a relatively good approximation of a Pythagorean harmonic series). I recombined it with a software plugin called "jellyfish" to have it sound otherworldly as if to conjure a processed sound in some futile attempt at communication.
The pieces on this album were made during the weekend intensive workshop 48hr Sound Art Challenge that was produced by New Adventures in Sound Art. The workshop provided an environment for sound artists to create a short sound art piece during a short residency at Warbler's Roost in South River, Ontario, Canada.
Participating artists were encouraged to make a piece less than 5 minutes in duration that spoke to the 'here and now' to someone real or imagined, familiar or unfamiliar.
Album photo by Anton Pickard.
New Adventures in Sound Art (NAISA) is a non-profit media arts organization in South River, Ontario, Canada that presents exhibitions, performances and broadcasts spanning the entire spectrum of electroacoustic and experimental sound art. Explore NAISA's soundcloud page for more sound art and radio art.
