Christof Migone
4-panel cd digipak.
5 soongs, soo oo ngs, soo oo oo ngs, soo oo oo oo ngs, soo oo oo oo oo ngs.
Five soongs that foocus oobsessively oon the dooubling oof the voowel oo.
The soongs coonjure a stereoo set oof speakers. Oone ‘oo’ too the left, the oother ‘oo’ too the right. Ooscillating soound mirroors.
Coonfused oorthoography. Oo misspells troouble.
- oo (9:01)
- oo oo (9:39)
- oo oo oo (9:20)
- oo oo oo oo (9:49)
- oo oo oo oo oo (9:01)
Liner notes by Martin Arnold.
Mastered by Sage Kim at Lacquer Channel in Toronto.
A related book, Stéréoophonie, was published in 2026 by Le Laps in Montreal.
Release date: May 21, 2026.
Thanks to Martin Arnold, MH, Marie-Douce St-Jacques, Tibor Szemző’s Tractatus, Justin Evans and all at the CD Esoterik podcast.
|CD+24bitWAV+16bitWAV+MP3 $15+postage|
|24bitWAV+16bitWAV+MP3 $9|
oo is music that uses electronic hard/software as a prosthetic rather than as a technology with which to sculpt soundscapes from a god’s-eye view. There is nothing of the orchestral about this music; it is chamber music, music in essence produced in the chambers of the mouth, the lungs, the gut. It is a combination of utterances, or, with its chopped, staggering repetitions, its stutterances. Each song sets up strange grooves. Each is a kind of dance music but not a kind that would have a place in most clubs; rather, the grooves resonate from, then in, the mouth, the lungs, the gut, before engaging anything from the hips down.
In an email Christof wrote: “oo is probably my most song-like project, it’s probably also my least conceptually-driven.” But he also discussed oo as a continuation of a project that started with the text installation Stéréophonie written in collaboration with Simon Brown and Julie Doucet; and the book project Stéréoophonie (the double ‘o’ is intentional). Christof writes: “Stéréoophonie is plural. A polyphonic project with its three authors, its doubled ‘o’s, its nonsensical meanings. It calls for a slow reading, but in rapid bursts. It all takes place in the stereo field. It’s a playful game with layers that spread into the corners of a state of mind that oscillates endlessly from left to right, from right to left.” The stereo field that oo happens in is physical, doubled-down on by the extensive panning. But the linking of oo to the Stéréo(o)phonies also suggests a conceptually-driven background. I guess his message speculates that perhaps it’s not crucial a listener know these concepts to fully engage oo.
Like any conceptual art able to be called art, Christof’s work is always made stranger by the texts it mediates; they never explain the work, they never constitute its full content, they are never what the piece is about.
In Aesthetics of Appearing Martin Seel discusses the emergence of aesthetic experience manifested as a perpetual appearing. The experience is always immanent to phenomenal perceptions, but if art happens the representable aspects of the empirically apprehended materials are joined by an unrepresentable singularity as the aesthetic takes hold. To illustrate, Seel proposes a scene where a red ball sits on a green lawn. He discusses many of the discursive potentials that might arise attending to this scene: the physical attributes of the ball/the lawn or the logistics that might surround its occurrence. But then he discusses the potential for the non-discursive, the figural, the aesthetic to activate this scene, incommensurate with any representation/discourse.
Despite the common application of terms like non-retinal or non-cochlear to conceptual art, there is always a phenomenal/perceptual component to such work (even if it’s the presence of absence), as there are always cultural texts that interpenetrate traditional artworks disguised within praxis. Concepts are part of the material scene. Perhaps in oo they’re the green lawn that backgrounds a pair of balls, then two pairs of balls, then three pairs of balls, then four pairs of balls, then five pairs of balls.
— Martin Arnold
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Christof Migone is an artist, teacher, curator, and writer. He often works with language, voice, bodies, performance, intimacy, complicity, and endurance. He co-edited the anthologies Writing Aloud: The Sonics of Language (Errant Bodies Press, 2001) and Volumes (Blackwood Gallery, 2015). His writings have been published in Aural Cultures, S:ON, Experimental Sound & Radio, Musicworks, Radio Rethink, Semiotext(e), Angelaki, Esse, Inter, Performance Research, The Oxford Handbook of Sound Art, Sound Art (ZKM/MIT), etc. He obtained an MFA from NSCAD in 1996 and a PhD from the Department of Performance Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts of New York University in 2007. He has released numerous solo and collaborative audio cds on various labels. He has curated a number of exhibitions and events: Touch that Dial (1990), Radio Contortions (1991), Rappel (1994), stuttermouthface (2002), Disquiet (2005), START (2007), STOP (2008), and Should I Stay or Should I Go (Nuit Blanche 2010). He was the Director/Curator of the Blackwood Gallery between 2008 and 2013. He has performed at Beyond Music Sound Festival, kaaistudios, Resonance FM, Ménagerie de Verre, Experimental Intermedia, Méduse, Images Festival, Send+Receive, Kill Your Timid Notion, Liquid Architecture, Mutek, Victoriaville Festival, Casa del Popolo, Théâtre La Chapelle, CAFKA, Museum Leuven, Whitney Museum, Apologies in Advance, DE PLAYER, LUFF, Cave 12, Ftarri, Borderline, Irtijal, etc. His installations have been exhibited at the Banff Center, Rotterdam Film Festival, Gallery 101, Art Lab, eyelevelgallery, Forest City Gallery, Studio 5 Beekman, Mercer Union, CCS Bard, Optica, Oboro, Museum London, etc. He has collaborated with Lynda Gaudreau, Sam Shalabi, Michel F. Côté, Gregory Whitehead, Set Fire To Flames, l’Oreille à Vincent, and Fly Pan Am. A monograph on his work, Sound Voice Perform, was published in 2005. In 2006, the Galerie de l’UQAM in Montreal presented a mid-career survey of his work accompanied by a catalog entitled Trou. A book compiling his writings on sound art, Sonic Somatic: Performances of the Unsound Body was published in 2012 by Errant Bodies Press. He has been the recipient of commissions from the Tate Modern, Dazibao, Kunstradio, Centre for Art Tapes, New Adventures in Sound Art, Radio Canada, New American Radio. He is a founding member of Avatar (Québec City). With Alexandre St-Onge he runs Squint Press. He recently was a recipient of the Glenfiddich Artist Residency with Marla Hlady. He is currently curating a 12-year event titled You And I Are Water Earth Fire Air Of Life And Death. He lives in Toronto and is an Associate Professor in the Department of Visual Arts at Western University in London, Ontario.