TRANSMISSION ART ARCHIVE

Voiceage

1990, 54:31 min.
Julia Loktev

“Voiceage” was produced in 1990 by Julia Loktev, who would go on to become an internationally acclaimed filmmaker. At the turn of the nineties, though, Loktev was a student at McGill University and the host of a radio show called “Curiouser and Curiousear” on campus-community station CKUT. Loktev’s show gave her a platform to produce experimental audio productions that hovered between documentary and scripted work. For “Voiceage,” Loktev visited nursing homes around Montreal with a tape recorder. She cut, spliced, and manipulated these tapes along with music and other samples to shape a reflection on aging as a sonic process. Loktev later said of the piece, “I was interested in memory, music and how age wears on the voice – we talk about the face but rarely the voice – and there’s a little snippet in the piece that includes an older Bette Davis in dialogue with her younger self.”- Described by Wave Farm Radio Artist Fellow 2021/2022, Andy Stuhl.