Musagetes welcomes Kikeyah Alina Chavez, Maria Chavez, Naomi McCarroll-Butler and Kristina Guison to the Wet Sounds Fellowship program

We’re honoured to announce the Wet Sounds Fellowship cohort, a small group of artists who are collectively considering the significance of sound practice in the context of increasing overlapping global crises—including climate chaos and political violence. Together we’re thinking about not only what crises of meaning undergird this moment, but also how sound and listening can foster mending in places of disconnection with each other, the more than human, and ourselves. We’re approaching these questions with a feminist, queer, and anticolonial lens. The fellowship emerged from the series by the same name. The name “wet sounds” reflects the slipperiness of queer and feminist approaches, our interconnectedness, eroticism, water, fluids, and the leakiness and porousness we have as humans—hinting at moving away from us as always and only separate, distinct living bodies, but as part of a larger metabolism. The Fellowship is co-facilitated by sound scholar and curator meLê yamomo and curated by Anna Bowen.

Naomi McCarroll-Butler. Photo: Joe Elliott

Naomi McCarroll-Butler is an improviser, teacher and songwriter based in Tio’tia:ke / Mooniyang / Montréal. She sings, makes experimental instruments, and plays various winds and strings under the name Mer Agatha. Her music has something to do with free folk, ecstatic jazz, drone, and often investigates mysticism, landback-anarchism, transness and the abject. The focus of her recent learning has been to develop a critical understanding of history: resistance against authoritarianism and the colonial occupation of canada, and reconnecting to legacies of anti-assimilationist queers. She approaches music as a blooming of the subconscious, a technology for communal regulation, temporal-flattening and re-association with the body and the earth. It’s also playtime. The Wet Sounds Fellowship has supported her in the recording of the debut Mer Agatha album, the culmination of many years of writing and mentorship. It tells a loose story through the voices of three archetypal characters as they struggle with endings and beginnings in a dreamworld-ancientfuture-technodystopia.

Maria Chavez

Born in Lima, Peru and based in NYC, Maria Chávez is best known as an abstract turntablist, sound artist and DJ. Coincidence, chance and failures are themes that unite her work across mediums, including improvised performance, sound and marble sculpture, visual art, book objects and multi-channel installation. Her approach is rooted in Deep Listening, a form of embodied listening developed by her late mentor Pauline Oliveros. Maria also tours with The Turntable Trio, including Mariam Rezaei and Victoria Shen. Maria singularly performs with a rare needle known as the RAKE Double Needle which contains two needles on one head, allowing it to read two different segments of a single record at the same time. Chavez’s 2012 book, Of Technique: Chance Procedures on Turntable has garnered a reputation as both an academic resource on turntablism and a foundational text for a new generation of turntablists. https://mariachavez.org/

Kikeyah Alina Chavez

My name is Kikeyah Alina Chavez. I am a trans 2spirit chicana purépecha pilipina land steward, seed and medicine keeper, monarch butterfly mami, bruja and transdisciplinary artist based in tkaronto. My path and artistic practice are a spiritual inheritance that involves deep listening, sharing, ritual, play, handcrafts, song, ancestral, elemental, plant, human, and more than human co creation. It is inherently healing. My practice is rooted in my relationship to the land and community. It is guided by my blood’s memory. Being a warrior is my way. Fighting for the freedom to express our beauty. I am here to honour and embody the universal life force within me. Divine trust and play are central to my way of being. My intentions and prayers are to please the elementals and spirits and to heal memories and remember stories that have been buried by colonization. I am here to dream and co-create a future that uncovers and restores our indigenous and cultural brilliance and beautyfullness.

Kristina Chavez. Photo: fossa fancy free

Kristina Guison is an interdisciplinary artist drawing from intersections between chronobiology, psychology and culture. Thematically, her work explores ideas that shape the human and nonhuman experience of temporal realities, through materiality and sound. Her sound art practice involves performance and creation of sound sculptures / instruments which often incorporates modified time-keeping devices, tools, and other objects. Currently, she has been doing research on sound / sound art, particularly its historical evolution through technology, its metaphysical underpinnings, and its connection with our concept of the soul across time. With the recent project, “Hear”, she collaborates with Colin Cudmore and Mehrnaz Rohbakhsh in capturing the oral history of the DIY / underground experimental music, sound art and noise scene in Toronto, by conducting long-form interviews with artists, presenters, audience and various members of the community. https://kristinaguison.net/