Michèle Saint-Michel
Filmmaker, Intermedia Artist, and Poet
Audio Works by Michèle Saint-Michel: Experimental Sound, Memory, and Metaphysical Listening
Welcome to the audio works of Michèle Saint-Michel—Brooklyn-based sound artist, filmmaker, and poet. Blending sound art, experimental audio documentary, and poetic composition, these pieces explore trauma, memory, intimacy, and time. Featured works include Ontology of Us (2024), a collective sonic reflection on relational identity; Getting Out Without Catching Fire (2023), a feminist audio ritual of survival; Score for Memories and the Weather in Montenegro (2021), an ambient elegy on place and grief; and The Immortal Charlie Parker (2021), a jazz-inflected meditation on disembodiment and musical legacy. Through deep listening and emotionally resonant sound design, Saint-Michel creates immersive experiences that blur the line between archive, music, and metaphysical inquiry.
The Immortal Charlie Parker
The Immortal Charlie Parker (2021). 19-minute audio piece. Cover image for Disembodied Voices, featured by Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge.
The Immortal Charlie Parker (2021) is a 19-minute audio poem by Brooklyn-based sound artist and filmmaker Michèle Saint-Michel, published by Disembodied Voices, Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge. This experimental sound collage blends archival radio broadcasts, news audio, and poetic narration to explore the emotional terrain of trauma, trust, and pandemic-era vulnerability.
Fractured and intimate, the piece unfolds as a meditation on PTSD, sensory overload, and the need for safety in uncertain times. The repeated phrase “a trauma response” reverberates through its layered soundscape, echoing the psychic weight of past wounds intersecting with collective crisis.
“In The Immortal Charlie Parker, artist Michèle Saint-Michel tells an intimate story which, she writes in her email to us, is about ‘safety, trust, and inherent worth’. The spliced audio of radio pronouncements and news pieces transports us through her experiences of the pandemic, framing the fear of vulnerability in this tentative connection. It captures the strangeness of our times through a personal prism, one which has at the forefront a question: Are we now only dangerous to each other? The phrase ‘a trauma response’ punctuates the poem repeatedly. Those with PTSD and/or experiences of trauma will know well how the pandemic has intersected with our wounds.” —Sumaya Kassim, Disembodied Voices Co-editor, University of Cambridge
Rooted in feminist sound art and experimental audio practice, The Immortal Charlie Parker offers a vulnerable, resonant listening experience—one that speaks directly to those navigating trauma, disassociation, and longing amid public catastrophe.
Ontology of Us
by Michèle Saint-Michel, Bad Saturn (2024)
Ontology of Us (2024) is a 4-minute, 34-second audio poem by Brooklyn-based sound artist and filmmaker Michèle Saint-Michel. This experimental piece unfolds as a sonic love letter—an intimate reflection on connection, temporal distance, and the metaphysics of parting. With soft-spoken narration and minimalist sound design, it explores themes of relational memory, quantum entanglement, and emotional velocity. Through lines like "the tender manoeuvre of a hand releasing" and "the ontology of us, of you and me," Saint-Michel offers a poetic meditation on intimacy, loss, and the beauty of almosts. Rooted in feminist poetics and somatic listening, Ontology of Us invites the listener to sit inside longing, and let it echo.
Ontology of Us by Michèle Saint-Michel, Bad Saturn (2024)
Getting Out Without Catching Fire
Getting Out Without Catching Fire (2023) is a collaborative experimental audio album released by Bad Saturn, featuring sound works by nine international artists in response to the poetry of Michèle Saint-Michel. Each piece is inspired by her collection Liner Notes for Getting Out Without Catching Fire (Bad Saturn, 2023), a book of poems navigating trauma, healing, and transformation through love, memory, and grief.
Featuring contributions from Sheena Dham, Hermon Mehari, Lina Dannov, Sophie Stone, Arun Sood, Sylvia Hinz, Eryk Salvaggio, James Fella, and Silvia Cignoli, this audio compilation spans avant-garde composition, electroacoustic experiment, and spoken word. The result is a layered, genre-defying sonic meditation on survival and emotional alchemy.
Curated by Michèle Saint-Michel, Getting Out Without Catching Fire offers a rare convergence of poetry and experimental sound—where language becomes score, and listening becomes a practice of release.
TRACK LIST
I (It’s So Hard To Tell) - Sheena Dham
The Death of Cleopatra - Hermon Mehari
Bird’s Shed Now or Never - Lina Dannov
Rothko Paints to Mozart in a Room Filled with Atoms II - Sophie Stone
Three Sheets to the Wind - Arun Sood
An Occurrence of Multi-Temporality in Music - Sylvia Hinz
DOD 5220 Dot 22 Dash M - Eryk Salvaggio
Rothko Paints to Mozart in a Room Filled with Atoms III - Sophie Stone
The Snow is Falling - James Fella
Judith and Her Maidservant - Silvia Cignoli
Rothko Paints to Mozart in a Room Filled with Atoms - Sophie Stone
Score for Memories and the Weather in Montenegro
Graphic Score by Michèle Saint-Michel (2021)
Selected for the Oregon New Music Festival, 2023
Winner of the Charlotte Street Gallery New Music contest, 2021
Score for Memories and the Weather in Montenegro (2021) is a graphic score and experimental audio work by Brooklyn-based sound artist and poet Michèle Saint-Michel, based on her poetry collection Saint Agatha Mother Redeemer. Winner of the Charlotte Street Gallery New Music Contest (2021) and official selection of the Oregon New Music Festival (2023), this work blends Fluxus-inspired instruction with poetic abstraction to explore trauma, healing, and somatic ritual.
Each movement in the score is titled after a heading from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essays, creating a conceptual structure where sound, philosophy, and memory converge. Performed live by multi-woodwindist Lina Dannov and electronic musician Tim Harte at Charlotte Street Gallery, and later interpreted by the Oregon New Music Ensemble, this piece invites both performers and listeners to inhabit states of emotional intensity, fragmentation, and recovery.
Why did your pain feel tender? What’s the weather like in Montenegro?
These lyrical provocations form the metaphysical core of the piece. Score for Memories and the Weather in Montenegro transforms graphic notation into an immersive performance of grief, disassociation, and radical presence.
Explore the latest from artist and curator Michèle Saint-Michel — from open calls and media features to grief-centered writing and news about exhibitions, screenings, and books like Grief is an Origami Swan. This is your hub for updates, reflections, and press on somatic cinema, healing, and artistic resistance.