“An absolutely beautiful rendition of arriving here on this plane. So simple, yet so profound… subtle and powerful in its ability to evoke memory.”
Arrival offers a trans poetics of listening: an ambient unfolding of attention, layered like tideswept debris, shaped, fragmented and re-membered by water, held in continuity of relation. Sound artist Lindsay Dawn Dobbin draws from their deep listening practice and ancestral relationship with the Bay of Fundy—through their Acadian lineage as défricheurs d'eau, or “water clearers”—to create Arrival, a slowly evolving soundscape built on two tones that mirror the motion of a wave cycle. The piece follows a full moon intertidal drumming pilgrimage, performed during the highest tides in 28 years, when the ocean rose 40 metres in just six hours. Dobbin translates this experience into sound, inviting us to attune to the tidal rhythm of becoming. Like the ever-shifting shoreline—where accumulation and erosion coexist—harmonics emerge and dissolve. Each sonic repetition reshapes the original, like tides pulling sound away from and back toward its source. In Arrival, we hear water become land, and land become water—the animacy of continual transformation.
“Captures the experience of hearing gorgeous sounds from afar... evolving gently at a glacial pace into a tapestry of harmonic resonances and overtones. Surrender your undivided attention to Arrival and it may be one of the most rewarding listening experiences you’ll have.”
“The sound of slowness makes me think about arrival, not as an end in itself, but as a process and embodied experience with our surroundings, vast and open like the long performance that led to this audio work.”
