Tadpole: Moving Sounds

PLEASE REMAIN IN YOUR BODY.

ALLOW YOURSELF TO FEEL EVERYTHING YOU FEEL.

Tadpole welcomes you to the first show of our new season! MOVING SOUNDS is an evening of experimental film and music, curated by Jiajia Li, Krzysztof Sujata, and Isaac Szeto, co-curated by Trond Trondsen. 

Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) directed by Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid
Portland (1996) directed by Greta Snider
Faraway Window (2023) directed by Shiho Kano

Music by NUM, David Lavoie, and Whitney Kosuke Ota

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Maya Deren (1917-1961) and Alexander Hammid (1907-2004) are pivotal figures in the world of
experimental film. Deren was an Ukrainian-American filmmaker and theorist whose radical perspectives on editing, metaphorical superimposition, and multiple exposures positioned her as one of the most important voices in experimental film, whose work would bring new forms of expression and technique to the world of cinema. 

Hammid was a Czech-American cinematographer and photographer whose work in experimental Czech and American film, early Anti-Nazi documentaries and the inception of IMAX would be incredibly influential to the development of cinema as an artistic practice.

Their masterpiece Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) is one of the most important experimental films in the history of cinema. Its iconographic imagery, surreal non-linear narratives, and complex positions on gendered subjectivity have had a profound influence on experimental filmmaking for decades to come. 

Running Time: 14 Minutes

Greta Snider is an experimental nonfiction filmmaker who is currently the experimental advisor at San Francisco State University’s School of Cinema. Her films make use of documentary, montage techniques, photography and found footage to explore the intimate moments that coalesce into memory and politics.

Her short film Portland (1996) is the hilarious and disastrous story of a group of punks from San Francisco who take a trip to Portland that goes horribly awry. Interviews are interspersed with scenes from the trip itself, documenting their beer drinking, freight train hopping, mosh pits and break-ins in a shambolic ode to youth, friendship and cheap thrills. 

Running Time: 12 Minutes

Shiho Kano is a graduate of Musashino Art University and Tokyo’s Image Forum. Her acclaimed ambient experimental films are as graceful as they are patient, and her transcendent use of light, framing, and non-narrative storytelling evoke hope and horror in equal measure.                

Tadpole is incredibly excited to present the Canadian premiere of Shiho Kano’s latest film Faraway Window (2023), a tender ambient film that reorients a viewer’s gaze through focus and light.

Running Time: 24 Minutes

NUM is an interdisciplinary duo, consisting of Maryam Rezazadeh (aka Maryam Sirvan) and Milad Bagheri, founded in 2010 in northern Iran. NUM’s concentration is on electroacoustic music, sound art, and multimedia performance/installation, where they can create immersive audio (video) compositions with the help of digital signal processing and data manipulation. Throughout the years of their activity, NUM have participated in several festivals, art residencies, interdisciplinary projects, and exhibitions in west Asia, Europe, and Canada. The duo/couple moved to Calgary in 2021.

David Lavoie is a guitarist, trumpeter, composer, and educator in Calgary, AB. He is also in demand as a freelance musical collaborator for many artists. He spent several years in Vancouver after completing his BMus at Capilano University and led a group with noted Canadian jazz musician Brad Turner there. David is passionate about sharing his music through a variety of projects. From jazz to post-punk, he has led several groups which play his original compositions. David’s multi-faceted approach to his music allows him to create thoughtfully and expressively in many genres.

David will be debuting his solo practice live for the first time, and will be improvising with trumpet, computer looping, prepared guitar, percussion, sampling and Electronic Valve Instrument (EVI) to control a synthesizer.

Whitney Ota has been making music for many years under different names, both as a solo artist (Yankee Yankee, WKO, as well as under his own name Whitney Kosuke Ota). He has performed as a member of bands such as Burro and More Than Nothing, the latter, an ensemble that was spawned from the very first Tadpole show. In addition to his own music, he was also the music director at Calgary campus and community radio station CJSW, a writer and contributor for music publications, both online and print, co-ran a short-lived music venue and recording studio in Vancouver called Chez Nous Ballroom, and ran an adventurous music label and distribution company called Unit Structure Sound Recordings. More recently Ota started a new imprint called Noise Sensitivity Research, putting out the first full length release from WKO called Mineral Format Memory Collections in early 2023.

For this performance, Whitney will be performing composed and improvised music on a Eurorack modular synthesizer, rooted in the hypnotic rhythms and transcendent minimalist forms of the kosmische musik movement of the 1970s, alongside motion controlled video synthesis.