Silence Descends
A collaborative audio art project and audio CD release
Curated/produced by Absolute Value of Noise 1999.

Silence Descends was a collaborative project that I organized in 1999 when I was working at the Western Front - an artist run centre in Vancouver, Canada. A group of six sound artists (Shawn Chappelle, Joelle Ciona, Peter Courtemanche, Anna Friz, Eileen Kage and Bill Mullan) made an audio CD that was inspired by "Silence Descends: the end of the information age" - a novel by George Case that was published in 1997 by Arsenal Pulp Press. The book describes the end to the Information Age - starting at the present day and progressing 500 years into a future where civilization exists in a much calmer and more meditative space.

The project involved a number of jam sessions, a performance and CD launch, and a web stream that was sent to Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria as part of the Sound Drifting project that was produced that year by Kunstradio.

Link to the original Silence Descends web-site from 1999

Link to the original online "virtual CD" from 1999

At last the wind dies
Now a stillness calms the trees
Now silence descends
- Katsuichi Yamashiro, Japanese poet and engineer (1990 - 2043)

absolutevalueofnoise.ca   |   audio available on bandcamp