Performances Presented in 2025

Tree Frog Radio in the Northern Gulf Islands is an unique underground FM radio initiative in British Columbia that uses trees as antenna masts for localized radio broadcasts - expanding the community's boundaries of the possible. In this work interviews and field recordings about Tree Frog Radio collide through loopers and feedback systems in order to blur the space between audio documentary, drone and noise.

Online listeners will enjoy a special video feed of the performance while in-person audiences will hear a localized FM broadcast over dinner. Both audiences will join together in a discussion about the powers of radio to strengthen community ties.

The Near North Mobile Media Lab in North Bay is partnering with New Adventures in Sound Art (NAISA) in the presentation of five audio pieces by Shaughn Martel, Lina Choi, Genevieve Kiessling, Kyle Vanderlaan and Stephanie Dupuis on the theme Ozhaashikwaa (The Ice is Slippery). The pieces will use ice sounds recorded on Lake Nipissing and Trout Lake and will be played at two special listening parties during the outdoor Ice Follies Festival.

Jane Tingley will introduce the IoT prototyping platform shiftr for connecting sensor data to the Max programming environment. She will teach participants how to think about distributed systems, and how to use shiftr as a server that interconnects these systems.

This workshop will use the same sensor data stream used by Foresta Inclusive: (ex)tending towards, which was collected from the rare Charitable Research Reserve in Cambridge, ON in the summer of 2022.

Tingley will lead participants in the process of importing this data stream into Max, in order to create their own sound and media creations.

For full details on content, pricing and scheduling visit the workshop webpage

For full details on content, pricing and scheduling visit the workshop webpage

Echoes Between Us is an immersive outdoor experience in two parts created by Corrine Alice, in Wonderland. She is an interdisciplinary artist based in the Almaguin Highlands. The performance will begin with a guided soundwalk inviting participants into deep listening, attuning to the layered soundscape of Warbler’s Roost. After the walk, she will give a solo performance using live looping, voice, and other instruments in intuitive response to the environment. The sounds will rise and fall in conversation with the natural world. This piece explores connection between breath and bird call, silence and song, artist and audience. At its heart, it’s an invitation to remember that the land is always speaking, if we learn to listen. The concert is the first event in a weekend long celebration of World Listening Day.

Here is a video of the performance component.

This indoor multi-loudspeaker concert continues a weekend long celebration of World Listening Day and this year's focus by NAISA on water sounds. Created in 2009 "A Sound Map of the Housatonic River" is the third in Annea Lockwood's seminal series of river sound map pieces. The piece takes the listener on an imaginary voyage from the source of the Housatonic River in the Berkshire Mountains to the river’s mouth in Long Island Sound, Connecticut. The mid-summer journey includes sounds from the natural world and those placed there by the human commercial activity.

What does the world sound like underwater? Cast a hydrophone into the lake and find out. Eric Powell will lead participants on an exploration of the underwater sounds of Deer Lake. Meet at Warbler's Roost. Equipment provided. Event happens rain or shine.

This performance by Rani Jambak features an instrument that she developed called the Kincia Aia. It is inspired by the traditional water wheel from Minangkabau, West Sumatra, Indonesia. Kincia Aia has 10 pestles that can be activated manually and it plays many layers of live sound and pre-recorded samples.

It is almost rare to see the traditional waterwheel now in Minangkabau, because of new technology and from the lack of current in the springs and rivers resulting from climate change in the area. The purpose of the instrument is to recall ancestral wisdom and creativity and to raise awareness about the current climate conditions.

Jambak’s music is influenced by the many traditions and musical cultures that can be found in Minangkabau and her birthplace in Medan, Indonesia. Medan is a unique city as it has 8 original ethnic groups which makes it very rich in sound diversity. In the last 5 years her main focus has been to re-interpret in musical form Minangkabau philosophy and ancestral knowledge. Starting from learning the culture and history through its sounds, to creating instruments like the Kincia Aia, and from understanding history through Tambo Alam Minangkabau, a manuscript about the origin of Minangkabau from the early 19th century.

This performance is supported by the VenusFest in Toronto.

For full details on content, pricing and scheduling visit the workshop webpage

For full details on content, pricing and scheduling visit the workshop webpage

"EARTH (Okâwîmâw Askiy - ᐅᑳᐧᒫᐊᐧᐢᑭᕀ)” is a 12-hour event that follows on the heels of 2020’s You, 2021’s And, 2022’s I, 2023’s Are and 2024’s Water. It is the sixth in a series of twelve annual events taking place on December 12 from 12 noon to 12 midnight CST (UTC -6). NAISA Radio will be broadcasting the audio livestream from the USask Galleries in Saskatoon.

Each year the event moves through each word of the 12-word phrase, You And I Are Water Earth Fire Air Of Life And Death, to activate the word of the year in myriad ways.

This year's edition is curated by jake moore and Christof Migone. Featured artists include Christina Battle, Joshua Bonnetta, Tanya Doody, Michaela Grill / Karl Lemieux, Jessica Karuhanga, Masha Kouznetsova, Cassie Packham, Danielle Petti, Laura St Pierre, Aurora Wolfe, Worried Earth, and many more.

The word ‘earth’ when preceded by a direct article becomes planetary, the Earth. This proximity shifts our understanding of ‘the substance of the land surface; soil’ into ‘the world’. It moves from ground under your feet and soil you can hold in your hand, to expanse you walk on and territory you live within. This perceptual transformation makes clear the potency of spatial relationality in language and worldmaking and opens the parallel in this year’s title and prompt, Earth (Okâwîmâw Askiy - ᐅᑳᐧᒫᐊᐧᐢᑭᕀ).

The planet Earth is the only one in this solar system whose English name is not taken from Greek or Roman mythology. The word Earth comes from Old English and simply means ground. Ground-, grounded, defined as the solid surface of the earth, a limited or defined extent of the earth's surface; land, land of a specified kind, an area of knowledge or subject of discussion or thought, factors forming a basis for action or the justification for a belief, a prepared surface, solid particles that form a residue; sediment. While the planets that exist light years away are assigned narratives already in existence, it is Earth’s spatial and relational proximity to us, that invites beings to story it directly with experiences born of connections between living and place. Humans continue to re-story the world as Earth’s topography informs us while we simultaneously inform, deform and re-form.

One story goes that when Earth was a young planet, a large chunk of rock smashed into it, displacing a portion of Earth's interior. The resulting chunks clumped together and formed our Moon. Unlike other discrete moons in this solar system, Earth and Moon were once one. Moon is made of Earth, and Earth, like its human inhabitants, is mostly made up of water. These critical correspondences and seeming oppositions of liquids that produce the appearance of solids make clear the intra-relations at play, the co-constitutive nature of things, and how our wounded planet maintains balance through its spatial tether to its long-lost entrails.

Another story, not our own to tell, but its repetition here is required to indicate the inadequacy of univocality when coming to know a complexity. We have listened to this story many times, so we choose to retell it here as we have the one above, as listeners, as receivers, with unique positionalities to inform its reception. This story tells of how Ota Aski, as we know it now, comes into being. Sky Woman, who lived in solitude in the heavens, comes through a hole in the sky to rest on a gigantic turtle’s back. Earth at this time was an entirely watery surface. Sky Woman asked the beings living there; plants, two legged, four legged, winged ones, and swimming ones, to bring up some soil from below the waters. Only the small muskrat succeeds in her travel below the waters to deliver soil to the edge of the turtle’s shell. In doing so, muskrat is passes. Sky Woman surrounds the turtle’s shell with the soil to create a place for generation. She revives the tiny muskrat and asserts her role as a giver of life. Earth is our mother, Moon is our grandmother. Still of one another, entwined.

How do we definitively describe something still coming into being? How do we definitively describe something that is brought into being by multitudes, and regardless of consensus of origin, fully exists?

These co-constitutions, interreliance, and fluidity of meaning reflect how Earth is primarily made up of water—its seeming material opposite—and the ground itself is made up of a series of relations. Western science describes it as the only planet in this solar system to support life as ‘we’ know it (knowing Western understanding of life is limited). In this cosmology, Earth is an ocean planet reliant on its moon to keep it from wobbling uncontrollability. There is an intimacy implied and required in making our world a whole constructed of millions of parts, distributed and connected, reliant on their ongoing transmission and reception. Electronic communications require grounding to flow uninterrupted and make clear our species’ reliance on Earth to both imagine and articulate connections and the potential to be whole, if wounded, through them. Amplifying Earth as a series of relations becomes our grounding premise.

Samuel Beckett concludes one of his Fizzles with these words “ruinstrewn land, little panic steps.” As both unsettled settlers of Argentinian/Austrian and Scottish/Dutch heritage, the paths we take are teeming with these little panic steps, but they are steps nonetheless.

We are coming towards you from this ground here. Here, kisiskâciwan, the traditional territories of the Nehiyawak, Maškékowak, Nîhithaw, Lakota, Nakoda, Dakota, Saulteaux (Anihšināpē), Dene, and the ancestral lands of the Métis, specifically Treaty 6 on the Canadian Prairies.