Vesper Guthrie

Intermediary
01.16–02.28.2026

‘‘This anti-romantic mise-en-scene suggests the discredited idea of time and many other ‘out of date’ things.’’ [1]

Intermediary is an immersive binaural audio work that transforms field recordings from historic urban sites into a spectral mirror of Montréal’s layered past. The piece’s otherworldly ambiance is built from textures, filtering, and spatial processing to create an allegory of the crossroads where history meets the unseen. The title references a spiritual in-between state: in darkness, an intermediary might be a guide through liminal terrain. Sites bearing physical traces of the past become gateways to a post-gothic imagining of Montréal’s built environment, haunted by collective memory or its lack.

The work emerged from my experience living near some of the city’s oldest stone structures, the Sulpician Towers dating to the 1600s. I was drawn to the intactness of their twin monolithic forms, sheer stone save for two gun ports near the top. They felt like subliminal echoes of Montréal’s emblematic concrete brutalism, the architecture of a faded future. Intermediary plays with sonic site specificity, enacting a process of signal degradation, decay and entropy. It invites ‘‘ruins in reverse” [1] to emerge from the realm of sound, opening fissures between the real and imagined.

Two procedural touchstones guide the project: psychogeography, the practice of reading emotional and historical resonances in urban space, and Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP), the paranormal research method that seeks meaning in processed audio. Like EVP practitioners, I use heavy signal processing to explore faint traces that inhabit places, transforming environmental recordings into evocations of spectral presence. The binaural format creates a private encounter, positioning the listener as intermediary between recorded and real space, wrapped in a sonic shroud of the city’s paranormal ecology.

—  Vesper Guthrie

[1] Robert Smithson, A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey, 1967.

Audio mastering: Raphaël Valensi