Toni-Leah C. Yake: Chorus of Absence

This work is a world built from cicada recordings collected across various physical and digital locations. Constructed over a year, it emerges as an attempt to rebuild connection to what has vanished sonically from my childhood. Through layering, I sought to create a realm of absence and presence—mourning lost landscapes and invoking their return. The voices of cicadas merge with fragments of memory, forming a speculative ecosystem. This became a site for grief and imagining; listening as an act of remembrance and revival. This work holds the hope of sonic resurrection for non-human beings that once populated my early world and possibilities of kindling connections between place, sound, and time.

About the artist

Toni-Leah C. Yake (Euro-settler; Kanyen'kehà:ka, Six Nations of the Grand River Territory, Turtle Clan) is a composer-performer currently based on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.

Her interdisciplinary practice engages with themes of land, memory, world-building, and embodied response. Informed by dream interpretation and Kanyen'kehà:ka epistemologies, Yake's performances frequently navigate liminal states through the integration of archival recordings, synthesis, and noise-based sound practices. Grounded in ongoing kanyen’kéha (Mohawk language) research, her work explores the interplay between conscious and unconscious experience, symbolic resonance, relationships with unseen dimensions, and the invocation of ancestral and archaic memory.