Darren Copeland

Perdu et Retrouvé collects eight fixed-medium works by the Canadian sound artist Darren Copeland, from two early pieces made at Simon Fraser University in 1991-92 to six composed in his own studio between 2001 and 2003. In his note he ties them together through a tension between abandonment and discovery: memories, people and objects that are lost and later surface again, often while searching for something else.

Several began as commissions for radio. They’re Trying to Save Themselves was made for a CBC broadcast marking the first anniversary of 9/11, entirely from an eyewitness account aired on CNN, its words turned into low-flying aircraft and panicking voices. Early Signals, for CBC Radio One’s centenary of the first transatlantic wireless signal, frames static, Morse code and Atlantic waves between the archive voices of Guglielmo Marconi and Peter Eckersly, one of the founders of the BBC. On Schedule, from the series Pieces of Letters, draws pitch and spectrum from the 27 scheduled stops between London Waterloo and Moskva Byelorusski, using a single train recording from the World Soundscape Project collection.

Streams of Whispers condenses into 12 minutes a 45-minute installation for a stairwell of the Latvian House in Toronto, built only from the whispered phonemes of its title. On a Strange Road reuses sounds from his soundtrack for Jennifer Fawcett’s play The Hurricane Project, and The Wrong Mistakes, named after an expression of Yogi Berra, keeps the accidents instead of deleting them. In Faith-Annihia (1991), 75 sound environments ordered by dice were meant to flicker past and instead fused into a slow industrial sludge.

Born in Brampton, Ontario, in 1968, Darren Copeland has been active since 1985 in multichannel spatialization, soundscape composition, radio art and installation. He is the founding artistic director of New Adventures in Sound Art (NAISA) in Toronto and holds degrees from the University of Birmingham and Simon Fraser University.

DVD-Audio in OGplus, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 0683, 2006.