Outside the window a storm unlike no other is taking shape. Behind the Shadows documents the imagined moment when the delicate balance between natural and developed worlds began to shift. Looking back upon an event yet to occur, time inside this threatened world is caught in an endless loop. Seeming to have no end, it stutters…repeats…extends. As if caught in a void between dream and reality, characters struggle to reconcile threats from the outside environment.
- Christina Battle
Filmmaker Guy Debord, during the early days of the Situationist International, led the formulation of a particular concept of drifting, the dérive: “a technique of transient passage through varied ambiances. The dérive entails playful-constructive behaviour and awareness of psychogeographical effects; which completely distinguishes it from the classical notions of the journey and the stroll.” Behind the Shadows is not about a dérive; rather it offers - at least, to my mind - an amorphous, shifting network of locations, varied ambiences, for my imagination to constructively drift through. The psychogeographical effects that accompany my dérive certainly take place in spaces that are well behind the shadows; but they are also radically in between any solid surface that would catch and hold a shadow.
- Martin Arnold
Toronto-based composer and performer Martin Arnold studied in Edmonton, Banff, the Hague, and Victoria where his teachers were Alfred Fisher, Frederic Rzewski, John Cage, Louis Andriessen, Gilius van Bergeijk, Rudolf Komorous, Douglas Collinge, and Michael Longton. Arnold is a founding member of the Drystone Orchestra and from 1995-2000 he was artistic director of The Burdocks. Besides having notated pieces performed internationally, Arnold currently plays guitar, banjo, melodica and live electronics in Marmots and Cow Paws as well as in bands led by Ryan Driver and Eric Chenaux and in a variety of ad hoc improvised music settings. Arnold works as a gardener and teaches in the Cultural Studies Department of Trent University.