Meredith Bates – The Observer Effect
Canadian composer and string player Meredith Bates releases The Observer Effect, her third recording (and third double-CD release) on phonometrograph.
Based on Salt Spring Island in British Columbia, Bates’ practice as an artist has spanned numerous approaches and styles; she regularly operates within improvised music scenarios, performs as a member of groups like Gentle Party and JUNO Award winners Pugs & Crows, and contributed to recordings by noted artists such as Peggy Lee & Cole Schmidt, Buck 65, Rae Spoon and Selina Martin.
Her string of singular solo releases make the question of her artistic identity all the more alluringly complex. Beginning with 2020’s If Not Now, and followed by 2023’s Tesseract her discography presents a highly personal blend of sounds and concepts and the forthcoming Observer Effect is no exception.
Bates favours an expansive (both sonically and durationally) textural approach that envelopes listeners in a mesmeric swirl of different layers, variously strange and lush. Violin and viola are the primary engines behind her music, but they appear in an assortment of guises from acoustic to electronically decimated. Her work does not fit comfortably within typical stylistic paradigms such as ambient music, contemporary composition, free improv. Instead, she hybridizes their techniques and auditory characteristics. Though her vision is staunchly individual to the point of feeling hermetic, here she has enlisted co-producer Chris Gestrin to add synthesizer to one track, percussionist Curtis Andrews to play on the final cut, and Scott Morgan (AKA Kranky Records’ Loscil) to collaborate on Book One’s two long works.
The Observer Effect does indeed draw upon its namesake, the quantum physics principle established via things such as the double slit experiment that asserts that human observation or measurement fundamentally alters the behaviour of a given system. However the fact that the album’s release date falls in the week following International Womens Day, is also telling. Bates is fascinated by the many ways in which this notion overlaps with feminist thought, from how patriarchal scrutiny impacts the women to the connections between quantum mechanics and witchcraft (as referenced by her evocation of magick in her titling throughout).
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