photo credit Jon-Mark Wiltshire
Katelyn Clark & Mitch Renaud | imaginary instruments
Working as composers, improvisers, and curators across Canada's vibrant experimental and early music scenes, Katelyn Clark and Mitch Renaud co-create long duration works unconstrained by genre. In their duo, which has taken shape since 2019 in Victoria BC, they collaborate through extensive improvisation and close listening with a reduced instrumental setup. They merge a small pipe organ modelled after a 14th-century instrument (played by Clark) and a modular synthesizer built around feedback systems (played by Renaud) to imagine a shared instrument. Subtle crackling, acoustic beats, and (psycho-)acoustic effects of their playing give the music a profound physicality with reminders of the bodily presence of the two musicians.
In Clark and Renaud's album Ouroboros, astronomical and astrological phenomena, concepts and symbols, such as the Great Year or Eternal Return, serve as the starting points for sonic explorations and experimentations. The instruments merge fluidly and in ever-changing ways through the interplay of their playing and listening, leading to a kind of circularity, a timelessness, a formlessness. Focusing on a uniquely tempered range of frequencies, from low-end drone rumbles to airy pipe swirls, the duo develops their minimalist and highly evocative sonic universe on their debut album for Hallow Ground (2025).
