Signals

The concept for this piece came about after talking to other Japanese-Canadians of my generation. A common experience that was shared was a sort of disconnection to "Japanese-Canadian Culture". I didn't really know what to do with this information at the time but it stuck in my mind and was percolating throughout the following months. At a certain point I had the thought that if culture is built around shared experiences, and we're all having a shared experience of feeling disconnected, then at least one aspect of Japanese-Canadian culture among young people is centred around disconnect and isolation. This makes sense within the context of the Japanese-Canadian experience during and post-World War Two, where families weren't allowed to return to their homes following the internment camps, effectively dismantling community networks that had existed prior to the war. I thought about the thousands of individuals feeling disconnected from a "proper Japanese-Canadian Culture" that existed only in a collective imagination and how the desire for community was either un-communicated or getting lost in the noise. This is how I arrived at the concept of Signals and all the ways they could be distorted (I also happened to be deep in wireless network troubleshooting at this time). Musically, the piece is built around simple repeating patterns that are treated as signals - they have qualities of clarity, weakness, and are subject to disruption, interference, and saturation among other things. I wanted to let these small blocks of material exist in various sonic environments and see how they interacted with each other. Similar to human communication, the patterns build off of one another - interrupting, aligning, and distancing themselves throughout the piece. While there is no correct way to listen to this work, I'd encourage listeners to aim their attention to the relationship between these small groups of notes as they were what I focused on primarily while writing the piece.