This event is included with the Friends of Reethaus annual pass.
In 2008, the elusive artist Terre Thaemlitz released Soulnessless, a sprawling work in five cantos, replete with video pieces and a 165-page booklet that pushed the definition of liner notes. Its centrepiece is the 30-hour piano solo “Canto V: Meditation on Wage Labor and the Death of the Album,” a response to a music industry in which albums keep getting longer while royalties are stagnant or decreasing.
With a bit of masochistic humor, Thaemlitz materializes her statement on art as work and the uncompensated labor of artists by taking the technical limits of media technology to their absurd conclusion. Until the advent of digital music formats, the limit of the album was the approximately 36 minutes of high-quality audio a vinyl record could hold. This increased to 60 minutes or more with the arrival of the CD and online releases. Thaemlitz decided to play with the fact that under the FAT32 system used across both Mac and PC machines, 4 GB is the maximum file size handled — which equates to about 30 hours of mp3 music.
“Canto V: Meditation on Wage Labor and the Death of the Album” is a gentle composition played with admirable endurance across the white keys of a Fazioli grand piano at York University. Limited in tonality, insistently languid, and saturated with radiant silences, the work easily succeeds in inducing the meditative state evoked by its title. Eventually, the meditation wins out over any particular object, and listeners can simply float in the plain beauty of the music. For a nihilistic Thaemlitz, this carries a message of hopelessness about the potential for material changes in the music industry and public listening practices.
This September 28, Reethaus and Soundwalk Collective present a slice of Thaemlitz’s reflection on the commodification of artistic inspiration. In yet another invitation to slow listening, the first seven hours of Canto V will be heard at Reethaus, lightly spatialized across the 16-channel sound space of its inner room, offering more volumes in which to engage with this meditation.
The artist has requested that phones be switched off in the inner chamber of Reethaus during this listening. No recording will be allowed.
