Vancouver songwriter Stefana Fratila used to specialize in quirky, folksy sounds, but she has since moved on to embrace a more electronic palette, and this can be heard in her new track "No History."
The 20-minute piece was captured live at Vancouver's Skylight Gallery just a few days ago, on April 10. It begins with 10 minutes of woozy, warped electronic ambience that includes some snippets of political chatter. Halfway through, a beat enters, and the second part of the piece features woozy syncopations and distant, layered vocals.
In a statement on SoundCloud, Fratila explained the track like this:
As a gesture of bearing witness to ongoing colonial violence, I wrote this piece and sampled Stephen Harper's 2008 "apology" for the Indian Residential School system, his G20 speech only a year later (where he stated in candid denial that Canada has "no history of colonialism"), and time-stretched excerpts from Tanya Tagaq's "Ancestors" (who is a throat-singer from Ikaluktutiak and one of approximately 150,000 Indigenous children who attended a residential school).
My idea was to create a piece in 'time-stretched witnessing', where sounds from a colonial reality are extended so that we can hear them more deeply and clearly. As a means of retracing memory, the moment of bearing witness is also longer, more moving and more meaningful.
Hear it below.
The 20-minute piece was captured live at Vancouver's Skylight Gallery just a few days ago, on April 10. It begins with 10 minutes of woozy, warped electronic ambience that includes some snippets of political chatter. Halfway through, a beat enters, and the second part of the piece features woozy syncopations and distant, layered vocals.
In a statement on SoundCloud, Fratila explained the track like this:
As a gesture of bearing witness to ongoing colonial violence, I wrote this piece and sampled Stephen Harper's 2008 "apology" for the Indian Residential School system, his G20 speech only a year later (where he stated in candid denial that Canada has "no history of colonialism"), and time-stretched excerpts from Tanya Tagaq's "Ancestors" (who is a throat-singer from Ikaluktutiak and one of approximately 150,000 Indigenous children who attended a residential school).
My idea was to create a piece in 'time-stretched witnessing', where sounds from a colonial reality are extended so that we can hear them more deeply and clearly. As a means of retracing memory, the moment of bearing witness is also longer, more moving and more meaningful.
Hear it below.