Meredith Bates: The Quiet Science of Sound Worlds
On ‘The Observer Effect’, Canadian composer Meredith Bates builds long-form sound worlds from violin, electronics, and the recordings of the natural world—and finds that art, love, and politics are harder to separate than they appear.
Today, The Tonearm’s needle lands on JUNO Award-winning violinist and composer Meredith Bates.
Meredith Bates is a violinist, viola player, and composer based on Salt Spring Island, British Columbia. Her work spans electroacoustic and improvisational music, built from strings, field recordings, and electronics.
Her recent double album, The Observer Effect, spans roughly 140 minutes of music composed and recorded live in the studio, with very few edits. It’s grounded in the physics principle that observation changes what’s being observed—an idea she takes personally, musically, and politically. The album is a meditation on what it means to make music that witnesses and is witnessed.
We talked about how the record came together, the long-term artistic relationships that shaped it, and what drew her to the wisdom of witches.
(The musical excerpts heard in the interview are from Meredith Bates’ The Observer Effect)
Dig Deeper
• Visit Meredith Bates at meredithbates.com and follow her on Instagram and Facebook
• Purchase or stream The Observer Effect from Phonometrograph, Bandcamp, or Qobuz, and listen on your streaming platform of choice
• Tesseract (Phonometrograph, 2023): Bandcamp
• If Not Now (Phonometrograph, 2020): Bandcamp
Collaborators and Labels:
• loscil — Scott Morgan, Vancouver-based ambient and electronic composer
• Phonometrograph — Chris Gestrin’s boutique label, co-producer of The Observer Effect
• Curtis Andrews — Vancouver percussionist, composer, and educator
• Nadah El Shazly — Egyptian-born, Montreal-based vocalist, producer, and composer; her 2025 album Laini Tani is referenced by Bates as a percussion inspiration
Organizations and Festivals:
• Vancouver Improvised Arts Society (VIAS) — founded by Bates; supports improvised art by womxn, BIPOC, and LGBTQ2+ artists
• Listen, Listen Festival — VIAS’s annual multidisciplinary improvised arts festival
• West Coast String Summit — VIAS’s annual string-focused festival and residency
• NOW Society — Vancouver improvisers collective
Musical References and Influences:
• John Zorn — Masada — the Jewish-music-rooted improvising ensemble central to Bates’s development
• John Zorn — Book of Angels — the Tzadik series of Masada compositions interpreted by different ensembles
• John Zorn — Cobra — Zorn’s 1984 game piece for group improvisers, referenced as a workshop tool
• Marc Ribot — guitarist; Bates’s entry point into Zorn’s broader aesthetic
Field Recording and Birding:
• Merlin Bird ID — free app from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology; both Bates and host Lawrence Peryer discuss its recording archive and identification features
Concepts:
• The Observer Effect — the quantum mechanics principle that observation alters the system being observed; the conceptual and titular foundation of the album
• Acoustic Ecology — the study of sound environments and their effects on living things; an ongoing influence in Bates’s compositional approach
(This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.)
Lawrence Peryer: I had quite an emotional experience listening to the record in preparation for our time together. There were a couple of tracks in particular that I just found myself sort of welled up inside, at least. But I was very swept up. The third incantation off of Book I and the opening piece from Book II both just grabbed me and woke me up. It was quite an experience.
Meredith Bates: Oh, that's cool to hear.
Lawrence: Yeah.
Meredith: I like that.
Lawrence: I worked very hard to not try to understand that, you know what I mean? Like, I don't want to know what was happening there. I feel like it ruins the fun, ruins the experience.
Meredith: Yeah. I don't know. I mean, it is probably different on a second listen, you know what I mean? Maybe it could be—yeah. That's really interesting.
Lawrence: In relation to that, I'm curious about your experience. My understanding is that there were little or no edits or overdubs in this work. And given the scale of some of the pieces, what's happening to you when you're inside that sort of creation bubble? What's your experience?
Meredith: Well, the process was: I had the studio for a few days. It was locked out so I could create my little stations and zones. My intention with this was much different than when I recorded Tesseract and If Not Now, where I was intentionally going in with the idea of there not being too many edits later on. So to compose—kind of like instant-compose—these forms: to have an arc built in that I didn't plan for, because it's improvised. But that was the objective—in a way, to have a beginning, middle, and end, like a long story. I would create these little sound worlds, and you never know what's going to come out first. So every little world was kind of catapulted from whatever sounds emanated first from the pedals or my brain or whatever, the violin. And then we just kind of followed these threads—we, as in myself, or if loscil was there, Chris or whoever, or Curtis—we would follow these threads together.
Lawrence: Tell me a little bit about the idea of the stations. Is that you have each sort of instrumental or sound capability set up and you're moving around? Is that what's going on there when you said stations?
Meredith: Yeah, so for this, because I only send out a mono signal—the next step would be getting into Ambisonic and Atmos spatialized recording—I'm always asking Chris to master it like it's a Beyoncé album. And he's like, "I can't do that and I don't want to." (laughter) But what I mean is, when you listen to those big pop albums, you're in the sound. It's almost like they were recorded with an idea of immersiveness, and I wanted that sense of walking into the room and being in that space, completely surrounded. So we set up the stations: I had a violin station, a bunch of pedals, and then I had a viola station that was about five feet away. At the viola station, I also had my field recordings, the samples. And then loscil came in the next day and he was a whole other station, ten feet away from me. So the idea was that we tried to, with the room mics, have a little bit of separation in the sounds before we even went into the mixing and mastering process. I don't know how successful it was, but it was an approach that we hadn't tried before, and I think it worked—gave us some more options.
Lawrence: Something I'm curious about is when you're in the room, when you're working in real time, creating these pieces, manipulating sound, doing the thing you do—how do you differentiate, if we could think of it as a spectrum between the intuitive at one end, maybe, and the intellectual at the other? You're working, so you're moving around, you're deciding when to go someplace. Are you deciding, or is the work saying "go over there now"?
Meredith: I don't have a romantic idea about the sound, the music coming to me, channeling any of that stuff. But it's coming from somewhere, and my whole goal when I'm doing these improvisations is to shut off my thinking brain and get into this sort of flow state. So if it's not coming from some other plane of existence, then I guess it's coming from me. But what feels good to me is that it's coming from intuition. It's being guided by a lot of practice and a lot of twiddling knobs before going into that. I know exactly what every single knob and button and dial on my pedals does. In the moment, I'm not going, "Oh, I should increase the delay speed by this much"—I'm sort of flowing with all of these instruments that are available to me.
Lawrence: That's beautiful.
Lawrence: When I was reading through some of the material and listening to the music, I came across something you said about witnessing and being witnessed. I'm curious about that notion just as a standalone—what that means to you—but I'm also curious about how something that conceptual makes its way into the sound or into the finished work. Does it have to do with intention or a thought bubble? Are you going back after the fact and realizing that that element's there, or is it aspirational? Really curious about that.
Meredith: Maybe all of the above? (laughter) I think I came up with the concept after the compositions were complete. I think the one part that I knew I wanted to tap into was a sense of—it's like a human connection and also a very sensitive connection with nature and those beings around us. I live among a lot of big trees now. I mean, BC is pretty amazing for the big trees, and the winds and the birds and the orcas in the water. So we have a lot of communication going on, and I think there's a set of folks that tune into that and, on some level, are aware of it and use it to different degrees. I'm like a beginning practitioner of being in tune with the universe.
And I think the other big-picture part of it that came in after the fact was: I really love reading about quantum physics. I don't claim to understand any of the math, any of the nitty-gritty stuff, but I like the philosophical aspect of looking for new truths. I was listening to a contemporary physicist and he was talking about this idea of new truths being discovered in the fringe, in the innovation—in that sphere.
Meredith: Novel ideas occur when we're just throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks. When you're opening your eyes up and trying to be in tune with something, you're looking for something but you don't know what it is. And I think it's that act of observation—when you're looking for something but you're not sure what you're looking for, it changes as you hone in on it. That's the witnessing. And maybe the being witnessed is more about society and women's role in society and just people in general. We are so quick to judge and label, and sometimes in doing that, you change what—in your expectations of what a person is—that person changes, or vice versa.
Lawrence: So that's the observer effect—
Meredith: In a nutshell.
Lawrence: Thank you. All right, we're done here. You get forty-five minutes back. (laughter)
Meredith: I mean, without even talking about physics. But there's that diagram on the inside of the album—there's kind of a common visual that goes along with the physics understanding of the observer effect. Particles changing.
Lawrence: Your point about quantum physics is interesting because I agree with you—I'm no mathematician—but it's very hard, especially if you're interested in any kind of esoteric practice, to not see the obvious correlations between the principles being discussed in these different paths. Quantum physics is almost, to me, just the modern rationalist trying to make some reconciliation with what mystics have known for millennia. They just can't help but break out of the Western framework. It's like there's almost a degree of shame about some of the things they have to reckon with—the uncertainty or the high strangeness—
Meredith: Yeah.
Lawrence: —that other paths just take as a matter of course. The beings in the other realms, whether they're plants, animal, or other intelligences that are around us—we're not seeing them, but some people have learned to observe and potentially interact with them. There are paths where that's not strange, whether it's a First Nations path or an Eastern path, or even Western mysticism. Those are not strange or scary or even taboo concepts.
Meredith: Yeah. No, it's natural. Yeah, exactly.
Lawrence: You use the word "incantation" in this work. It's a specific and evocative word. And it's particularly interesting in the context of some of the things we're approaching here in our conversation. Can you tell me a little bit about what it means in the context of this work and how that relates to the intuitive, the feminine power, the practices that we're talking about?
Meredith: There are two things with the incantations and the books. First of all, there's a shout-out to John Zorn, who has had a lot of impact on my music. I really like his music—the projects, the breadth.
Lawrence: Me too. He's important to me.
Meredith: Yeah, exactly. So that's a little, you know, if-you-know-you-know sort of nudge. And then the witchcraft stuff has to do with a curiosity that I have and a feeling, or a hunch, that that's the way forward. We talk a lot about matriarchal power, and the guys have had it for so long. Maybe it's time to follow a different path, or work together. There's an intuitiveness that I see in a lot of my female friends or feminized friends—it just has a different grounding. Something keeps happening. I think it happens to everybody, but just depending on how in tune you are with observing and sensing, there's this cohesion: we are one gestalt, but also sometimes when you're paddling in the same direction, things happen where it feels like they're outside of your power, but your lives keep lining up somehow. You think about somebody and suddenly they call you on the phone. You're having a conversation about a friend you haven't spoken to in years, and suddenly they pop up in your feed. There are ways that the universe kind of shows you that you're paddling in the right direction because the molecules seem to be lining up somehow in the bigger picture. That's what I was meaning about cohesion and bringing in the witchy powers—that there's another way of being in the world where you're sensing into things a little bit more and perhaps also listening a little bit more, which is something we try to practice in improvised music.
Lawrence: Tell me a little bit, then—how does the incantation framing of the pieces, if at all, shape the making of the music itself? There's such a boundarylessness to this music—you're letting it go as long as it needs to go. Not all of the pieces are forty minutes long, so it implies to me that you did allow: if it needed to be shorter, you knew, and if it needed to be longer, you knew. When you started a piece, were these incantations, or did you have prompts?
Meredith: No prompts.
Lawrence: No.
Meredith: To be totally honest, other than one piece, I completely arbitrarily took the names of spells and applied them to the pieces. The only piece that I knew what it was, was the love song.
Lawrence: Oh, that's the one that got me.
Meredith: There you go.
Lawrence: I'm a romantic. (laughter)
Meredith: Yeah. The love song is good. I really like it. It's about long-term relationships. If you listen to it, you can hear what's going on.
Lawrence: I need to go back with that framing.
Meredith: I did not have any intention when I composed these pieces. They were completely free. The idea was that they were long-form, that I created little sound worlds. Beyond that, there was no prompt or preconceived notion. I think everything I just described about why witchcraft played a part applies to the compositions as well—the process—because it's really about intuiting, listening, sensing into different spaces, the unseen, getting into a flow state. I don't want to say "spiritual," because that's not it—it's creative. But my point was to tap into some unseen things and feel what that felt like and make music out of that space.
Lawrence: Did you establish the connection?
Meredith: I think so?
Lawrence: Yeah. (laughter) That's wonderful.
Meredith: I think so. Those little pieces—the interludes, we call them—anything under twenty minutes, let's say, those were definitely the short pieces.
Lawrence: You have a twelve-minute interlude.
Meredith: Yeah, those were edited—edited in the sense that they are part of a piece that I found, a sound that I really wanted to include or that served well as a transition. The long-form pieces, the thirty-five-minute and twenty-five-minute ones, those are composed from start to finish without much in terms of editing. I might have taken out a nasty note or something. There are some edits, but those edits are those little tiny pieces.
Lawrence: I love the inclusion of the found sounds, the field recordings. I always love to ask artists about the role of place and acoustic environment. Those things seem to be important in this work, if not more broadly, in your work. And I'm curious if you could talk to me a little bit about that intersection of space or place and emotion as compositional inputs—I mean that literally, as in the room as well as BC, or as broadly or as narrowly as you feel it's relevant.
Meredith: It's super relevant. There are sort of three things at play. I chose Afterlife Studios for a reason. I really like that room. There are certain rooms that draw sound out of a person somehow and feel comfortable to play in and feel supportive. It's a room that doesn't have a lot of resonating frequencies in it, so it's not a church, it's not my living room. Because it's a more controlled environment—it's a beautiful room, and it's the perfect amount of liveness for me. And then there are some drums in the corner and some guitars over there and a piano and some vibes. Those instruments are contributing to the warmth of the sound. I love that room. I think John Raham is amazing and the team there is really great. I just keep choosing it over and over. The bigger part of that question is the place I'm in now. I have moved over the last two years to Salt Spring Island from Vancouver, so that's a change. But this was all recorded before that move, other than the two overdubs. But I've been transitioning as a person of water influences to a person of air influences. I don't know how much this matters to you, but—
Lawrence: This is some of the most important stuff! (laughter)
Meredith: I think so! Something really important happened at a concert. Not this September, but the September before. I played at the Chan Centre with a really wonderful artist and kind of went for a little walk. It was a really deep experience, the performance. And I went for a little walk in the gardens and the forest right before playing. When I rounded the corner back into the parking lot—which is kind of ugly, it has a bunch of exhaust fans and parking spaces, and it's cementy; it's the stage door, so it's the back—I came from this beautiful walk, rounded the corner, and right as I did that, this huge gust of wind rattled all the dried leaves up top in the maple. It was just this split second, and it hadn't happened any other time. Something grabbed me in that moment and made me turn around and laugh at this tree a little bit, or with this tree.
Lawrence: Mm-hmm.
Meredith: It was just a split second, but something shifted in me. I felt that the wind was carrying a lot more meaning and sort of messages, and it's been that way up here. We live on a mountain and there's a lot of powerful wind. We're kind of in the treetops, and there are also a lot of birds and a valley between us and the next mountain. There are thermals that the turkey vultures and ravens ride on, and I just feel that the wind is carrying a lot more meaning lately. That environment shifted. The found sounds that I used—I used to use a lot more rain and wave sounds processed, and now I feel like I'm using more of the native bird sounds. A little bit more of the wind influence. I've got some raven wings that come in and out.
Lawrence: Is it a requirement for you, or a part of your musical practice, that you record those found sounds yourself? Or do you use libraries? How does that work?
Meredith: Mostly I record them, because I always have an idea of what I want. If I can't find it or if I can't capture it with decent sound quality, then I'll turn to sound banks. But I use pretty specific ones, like Bird Nerd Sound Banks. I like to find them myself, though.
Lawrence: I just recently, over the last month or so, got into the Merlin app from Cornell.
Meredith: So good. It's so good.
Lawrence: It's so cool. And it came up, actually, in a conversation I had last week with Maria Schneider—the composer. Birding is a big part of her life. Somehow we landed on the fact that we both had the Merlin app and went down that rabbit hole for a minute.
Meredith: I love it.
Lawrence: Yeah, it's really neat.
Meredith: I've made so many recordings that my phone is filled up just with storage from that app. I've been using the recording function to identify birds, obviously, and now I want to find ways to grab those recordings. I mean, they're essentially voice memos within the app, and then bring them into my performances. I think that would be cool.
Lawrence: I was looking at the app last night. What really blew my mind was that some of the recordings were date-stamped from the fifties and sixties. It's an incredible library of bird documentation.
Meredith: They have a pretty sophisticated little community—the birds. I don't know if it was This American Life, but there was definitely a really great podcast about basically bird real estate and how they sort out who gets which location. The communication that goes on—I think it's actually talking about intuitiveness and living based on instinct rather than all this headiness that we get into. I think the birds have got it right.
Lawrence: Tell me a little bit about your collaborators on this record. What went into choosing them, and what went into choosing to have collaborators at all on this piece, when clearly you have the sonic toolkit and capability to create this entire work on your own?
Meredith: Well, I do to a certain extent, but I can't get that low, low bass. So that was part of it—bringing in a couple of people that I knew could fill a certain sonic space that I couldn't quite access yet. I really like Scott Morgan. I like him as a human and have always enjoyed the brief encounters I've had with him. So we've worked a tiny bit together—mostly on his projects; he's invited me to do some recording and a little bit of live performance with him. I don't know, it just seemed like this was the right time to see if he would be interested in coming and experimenting, and he was super game and very generous with his time. It was interesting because he was presenting it as: "Well, I don't improvise, I don't do this, I don't do that. What are you looking for?" Wanting to put all these parameters in and prepare—which I totally respect. Obviously, any time I collaborate with someone, I want them to feel good and feel safe and feel excited, and for it to be easy in a way. I have no expectations and just want to go in there and see what happens. So that might not feel safe for everybody.
Lawrence: Yeah.
Meredith: We did pretty much those two long-form tracks that you hear with loscil. I shaved off a bit from the top—there was some chitchat and a couple of instances of testing out some patches—and then we were in it, and it grew in such a beautiful, organic way. There's some clunkiness in the middle where we're switching from one atmosphere to another, but that's part of the music to me. It wouldn't necessarily fit everyone's aesthetic—I know a lot of people would chop that out and make it a twenty-five-minute piece. But for me, having that feeling of us going through the process of leaving one space and discovering another, I think is kind of magical. And then Curtis—I wanted percussion, and he's actually been involved in a few different projects of mine, including the Listen, Listen festival and some dance collaborations. But I wanted to have this drum build. It was inspired by a Montreal Egyptian artist that I really like named Nadah El Shazly. She just released an album within the last few months, and one of the tracks has this incredible drum build—there's some processing and stuff too, but that was the inspiration for that. And then Chris just played a bass line that I sang and did the synthesis. We found a sweet bass patch, and then in the love song, added that in. He is my partner in life and love and the universe, so it seemed fitting that he be part of this long-term relationship analysis that I did. (laughter) Yeah, we're going to try to recreate it live. This is the first time I've ever tried to recreate an actual piece from my album in a live setting. So for the album release in May, we're going to try to play that love song.
Lawrence: Wow. Where are you doing that?
Meredith: Salt Spring, at the All Saints After Dark series that I run.
Lawrence: Interesting. I'm in the Pacific Northwest as well. I would love to experience—I was going to ask you about the live presentation of this music. What date is that? Do you know offhand?
Meredith: It is May 21st at All Saints on Salt Spring Island. It's going to feature Chris—he'll come up and try to play this piece with me and he'll do a little bit of solo stuff—and also Matt Robertson, who's a fantastic synth player and keyboard player and ambient music maker.
Lawrence: The more you talk about that track, the more it makes sense that it landed for me the way it did. There's a lot in it that—now I'm so much less surprised that it impacted me the way it did, because of the people and the relationship and the intent, the thematic notion behind it. I'm really taken.
Meredith: That's interesting, because you always wonder: does improvised music—or any music, really? I mean, we know it does. But can improvised music that's meant to be a live experience translate the power that we're feeling in the room through all these electronics and into a recorded setting? So I'm happy that it has some of the intended impact.
Lawrence: You talked about the percussion piece and Curtis's importance there. I love the use of the field recording and the way it sort of absorbs, it takes over. Is there a theme or a narrative there, or is it just, "I like the way it sounds"?
Meredith: I've been a bit obsessed with the tattoo and marching bands—the snare drum brigades or whatever. There's something about the connotation of those drums, the war, the marching drums. They're the front line, they're the—
Lawrence: I mean, a lot of drumming is martial, right? It was used to scare the other side, to sound big, to issue a warning.
Meredith: Yeah, exactly. And then we tie it into what Curtis does, which is a dance practice, a drum practice, a spiritual ceremony and ritual—dance and fun and bringing community together. Kind of juxtaposing those two different kinds of intention behind the drumming, and the chaos of what's going on in the world. We were talking about place and time earlier, and there's definitely something there that felt kind of true or visceral. It's definitely supposed to bring certain ideas to your mind.
Lawrence: That dovetails very neatly into something else I wanted to ask you about: the relationship between political intent and a listening experience that is essentially nonverbal. And I guess even political intent could be replaced with a broader notion—any intent, really—like communicating intent through, as you said earlier, improvised music, especially electronically processed music. How do you not lose the signal of the intent through that? This idea of political intent in your music, the importance of that, communicating ideas—that whole notion.
Meredith: I don't think you can really separate art and politics. I think it's more that you can't separate art and values, or art and ideology, or art and feeling and opinion—and especially improvised music. It's a commentary or a reaction or a feeling that comes out intuitively, instinctively, or instantly about exactly what's happening in you and outside of you in that moment. It doesn't have to be super deep. It's a reaction to what's going on in that moment, which encompasses all those things. So I don't think you can really separate art from anything. I'm not hyper political, but I don't support war in any way, and I think what's happening around the world right now is really wrong. So I suppose when I make some of the music that is nonverbally communicating what's going on for me in that moment, that is entering in. The inclusion of nature sounds is really intentional in terms of bringing those voices into the room and giving them space and agency. And the same is true of the drumming and the invocation of wartime sounds—there's an unspoken message in that. Was it Shostakovich who said art is political?
Lawrence: He certainly experienced that. (laughter)
Meredith: "Love is political"—I believe that's a Shostakovich quote. It's kind of part and parcel for me.
Lawrence: How does that land for you? That's interesting, especially in the context of your exploration, your plumbing of a long-term relationship through your art. Does that quote resonate for you?
Meredith: The way it resonates right now, in this moment, it brings up this idea of strategy—like we're all strategizing all the time. Even when I turn off my thinking brain and try to enter into this flow state, my body is subconsciously strategizing how to keep me alive in that moment, how to interpret the sounds that are coming in and going out. It's all happening, even if I'm not judging it as it happens. To me, it invokes an idea of strategizing. Right now, love is political power. I don't know. I've got issues. (laughter)
Lawrence: No, I understand. Especially—I don't want to say "as one's politics evolve"—but as one's awareness of how their politics manifest in their life and in their behavior, that's a very real thing. It's one thing to have a politic, to have an idea, to have values. It's another thing to actually observe the contradictions in your personal life.
Meredith: Mm-hmm.
Lawrence: Powerful.
Meredith: I agree. There's been so much—I feel that the cognitive dissonance that we're all living in constantly, especially in the Western world, is just increasing the further into time we get. Knowing and seeing what's going on around us and then living in relative comfort—there's a lot of guilt and shame surrounding that. It's a really interesting time to live in.
Lawrence: Guilt is interesting because I think it can help you modify your behavior. Shame is a tough one, though. Hard to overcome. Easy to inflict on someone else. It's brutal.
Lawrence: If you don't mind, tell me a little bit about your experience with Zorn's music—to change gears a little bit. I'm curious about that because as you were speaking about Zorn earlier, you used words that I could have used. His music has meant a lot to me for a very long time, even to the extent of helping me build the skills to listen to music. You said something earlier that brought up for me this idea of: sometimes you can't hear music yet, you're not ready yet. Your ears can't hear it, especially improvised music or dissonant or atonal or whatever. Music I was exposed to thirty years ago, I just wasn't ready for yet—I needed to either stick with it or come back to it. My ears might have been too used to pop music or what have you. Zorn's been a great conditioner in that sense. What parts of his output particularly resonate for you, if any?
Meredith: Two big influences were the Masada Trio and John Zorn's Book of Angels—I think it's called—the series, like just seeing how different groups could treat similar canons of music. Also Cobra. We've played with this idea for a long time in a lot of the workshops and improvising circles. I think we played around with Cobra in Halifax back in the day. There was the Creative Music Workshop with Jerry Granelli, and also Lisa Miller and the Now Society. Sometimes it'll come up as an activity that can help guide an improvisation or whatever. And I think I got into Marc Ribot because of John Zorn. That was my inroad to that kind of musical approach. I love music with a kind of Eastern influence—different scales, different modes—and hearing how that can be introduced into the jazz idiom and improvised music.
Lawrence: The ancient nature of those melodies, too—it's just so evocative.
Meredith: Mm-hmm. I was just in Egypt for two weeks doing a little tour. I mentioned Nadah El Shazly—her sister Mena is a beautiful filmmaker, and we were doing her project Hyperopia, which we call expanded cinema: a version of Hyperopia with live video processing and music. When you're walking around those cities and the minarets are in sync with the call to prayer, you're just hearing—in Cairo, I think there are over two hundred minarets, maybe more—and they kind of all go off around the same time, five times a day. The chants are similar but different, because each mosque has its own flavor and its own caller. These speakers all over, just going. The scales that I think I internalized from that trip are starting to now come out when I'm warming up or playing or whatever. It's so neat to go somewhere where the musical vocabulary is subtly but completely different from the one that we have surrounding us here. Just the ambience.
Lawrence: When I first moved to New York years ago, I lived diagonally across the street from an Egyptian mosque. Hearing a call to prayer was just always so transportive. On the one hand, so New York, and on the other hand, so foreign and exciting. It was really a magical thing.
Meredith: The last time I was in Montreal, they put me up in this apartment that backed onto a Hasidic temple. I showed up on a Saturday, and the kids were out—it was probably ten, eleven at night, maybe midnight. There was a big celebration of some kind, with chants coming from inside, and the kids were all outside kicking a ball around and yelling and playing as if it were noon instead of midnight. But imagine what that does to you through the acoustic ecology lens—what does that do to a population, to a community, to a person? How does that affect those different layers of being in the world? I think there's a ninety-decibel hum in Cairo all the time. That's what I heard. Must be similar in New York or Mexico City, other big cities like that. But how does that change a person versus living in the Broughton Archipelago and only hearing the odd motorboat or chainsaw and lapping waves and blowholes?
Lawrence: Yeah. I think there are people who would react to that and say it's terrible, and maybe there are terrible implications of that, but it's also not necessarily terrible—it could just be interesting.
Meredith: Mm-hmm.
Lawrence: Somatically, what it's doing to your nervous system, what it's doing to your underlying psychological—
Meredith: Mm-hmm.
Lawrence: —neural framework.
Meredith: Yeah. It could be the equivalent of a weighted blanket. Maybe it's super comforting to certain people who need that white noise all the time.
Lawrence: Yeah. It's more about the tones than the volume, right?
Meredith: Yeah, maybe. (laughter) The way that we introduce the noise on "Love"—it's a track that starts with acoustic viola, an arpeggiated thing. And then through the long form, as the noise increases and increases through the track to take over, it was really fun sitting there and listening to the different kinds of noise and deciding which one was the best for this love song. There was a very subtle difference.
Lawrence: For sure.
Meredith: You know?
Lawrence: Yeah. I hear a harsh edge in white noise that I don't hear in brown noise. Brown noise is warmer to me. But it could also just be the words, the names—"white" sounds a little harsher to me than "brown."
Meredith: Exactly. Yeah. What are our brains imposing on it? Change our observation of it.
Lawrence: And honestly, I'm fine with the ambiguity. It's more interesting. (laughter)
Meredith: Do you like vinyl or CDs?
Lawrence: I mean, I'm a middle-aged white man. Of course I like vinyl. (laughter) I'd be a traitor to my people if I—yeah. I don't own a CD player anymore and I don't have any CDs, but to me it's streaming and vinyl now, just because of the convenience and the simplicity. I appreciate the economic politics of streaming, and digital music is hard to wean off of.
Meredith: Mm-hmm.
Lawrence: And I love so much of it. I want to have access to all of it.
Meredith: There's just so much. We have access to everything now.
Lawrence: Yeah.
Meredith: I wish I could put my stuff out on vinyl.
Lawrence: Yeah, that's a whole other thing, right? Like, limited run or whatever—you either can't afford to do it, or nobody can afford to buy it.
Meredith: Mm-hmm. Exactly.
Lawrence: You mentioned earlier that this music was recorded a while back. I'm really curious about the lifespan of a project and how long you live with something, and then how long you live with it after it comes out before you're on to the next thing. Do you work on projects in parallel? Are you a linear thinker? And ultimately I want to land on: do you know what's next?
Meredith: In terms of doing things in parallel—for my solo music, I tend to work one project at a time, because it involves other people who are also busy. And the process is so long. Everything is long when you're doing thirty-five-minute pieces. I had to walk up the mountain twice every time I wanted to just check out a new mix. Everything takes longer. We also whittled this down from over nine hours of music. So yes, I have a lot still.
Lawrence: I hope you document well along the way.
Meredith: Oh yeah. But the thing is, I'm not going to use those other nine hours—and the same with If Not Now and Tesseract: I didn't use any of the stuff we recorded, and it won't find its way into a new project. That music is of a time, an era, a place. I will move on to the next project. The one weird thing about this one is I have a third album ready to go, and I'm not sure what to do with it. Maybe I try to contact some labels and see about making a shift there to get a little more exposure and have a different audience. Or maybe I self-release it again with Chris on his boutique label, Phonometrograph. Maybe I'm sick of this music and I don't put it out at all. I don't know—maybe it sits in the can for ten years and we rediscover it. I'm not sure.
Lawrence: When you put out the tenth anniversary box set.
Meredith: Yeah, yeah, exactly. (laughter) So that's the weird part about this one—there is another disc waiting in the wings. I thought I could work simultaneously on it, but I can't. It seems like I'm really quite focused. All the things that go into putting out a record that aren't making music, right? I'm trying to promote it, work out some live gigs, working with Nick at Riparian for the publicity, putting on the live release. There are so many other aspects to getting it out there. So I'll shift my focus to that third album at some point and see what I want to do with it. And then I'm kind of ready to start thinking about the next project—I think there's a three-year cycle for me. I'm starting to book time in the studio and see what happens. I'm ready to see what new music is inside me that is waiting to come out, because it'll be different. I've moved to Salt Spring now. I've gone to some new places in the world and made some new friends. I think it'll be a little different.
Lawrence: Wonderful. Well, I hope you'll come back when it's ready for public consumption.
Meredith: Anytime you'll have me.
Lawrence: Thank you. Thanks so much for making time. I've enjoyed talking with you.
Meredith: Yeah, you too, Lawrence. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.