Soft Tongues

Winner of the 2023 Robert Fleming prize for composition from Canada Council of the Arts, Jami Reimer’s sound and performance work interweaves solo and choral singing, text, video, and field recording practices in an ongoing and shifting investigation around chorusing— specifically, into the overlapping vocal terrains between humans and amphibians. Beginning in 2022 with a bioacoustic field residency undertaken in collaboration with the Amphibian Natural History Lab at the University of Campinas, Brazil, her project Soft tongues: a bioacoustic opera, plays with the science recording as a form of subjective listening, Jami works with sound catalogues of extinct frogs, creates recordings of remaining wetland choruses, and composes immersive listening experiences inflected by mythological songs, speculative soundscapes, and ‘eavesdropped’ science recordings. Soft tongues: a bioacoustic opera interrogates the relational, adhesive, and compounding qualities of voice, and the listening that tethers it.