Art Metropole

#13382

Audible Songs from Rockwood: Second Edition

Artist

Simone Schmidt

Date

2017

Publisher

Idee Fixe Records

Format

Artists' Books

Size

20 × 29.5 × 0.4 cm

Length

27 pp

Genre

Music, Audio

Simone Schmidt, aka Fiver, is a Toronto-based musician working within the frame of traditional North American folk music. Her album Audible Songs From Rockwood is a series of eleven fictional field recordings, gathered from case files of patients at the Rockwood Asylum for the Criminally Insane between 1854-1881. The rigour of Schmidt’s writing process is shown through the work: Over the course of 2 years, Schmidt pored over the asylum’s primary documents – patient files, architectural diagrams, superintendents’ diaries – spinning her findings into historical fiction and, from there, into song. The voices on the record are crafty, witty, evasive, despondent, and lucid. Audible Songs of Rockwood shapes its subject matter as expertly as any old bluesman would, with wit, baseless optimism, sadness, and even joy. Using a strictly acoustic sonic pallet and working with some heavies in the Old Time folk tradition (John Showman, Max Heineman, Chris Coole, Kristine Schmidt) and odd ball instrumentalists (Cris Derksen, Alia O’brien of Blood Ceremony) the performances carry forward potent gateways to explore the tragedy and optimism that gives traditional roots music its soul, while also giving voice to people, living in the margins of History, out of sight and mind.

The album is accompanied by a book written by fictional ethnomusicologist, Simone Carver, written in the style of the liner notes of Smithsonian Folkways compilations. It includes lyrics and supplemental information about the historical context of the inmates and their songs along with original artwork by Darby Milbraith, Geneva Hailey, Jennifer Castle, Jeff Bierk and Julianna Neufeld. The package carries questions about the archive as an apparatus of colonial power, definitions of sanity and criminality, and the early settler-colonial agenda foundational to those modes of thought still operating in today’s carceral system.

Perfect-bound, softcover, b/w and colour
Book includes 2 digital downloads of the album