“What we like about sound is the way it bypasses your intellect. It can go inside of you in a way that nothing else can,” says George Bures Miller, whose sound installations, created for decades in collaboration with his wife, Janet Cardiff, have quietly taken the art world by storm. Cardiff and Miller’s most epic work to date_, The Murder of Crows,_ opens at the Park Avenue Armory on Friday. Weaving together spoken dream narratives, the voices of a Russian men’s choir, the mournful cawing of crows, and the hubbub of a factory floor, all of it meanderingly projected through the Armory’s vast Drill Hall on 98 speakers, it’s a surreal—and sometimes comic—audio tour through the dark corners of twentieth-century and recent history.
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“We were thinking of it as something like a requiem for our age,” says Cardiff, who cites inspirations ranging from Francisco de Goya’s great etching “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters” (1799) to the films of David Lynch and the dreams Cardiff had during a six-month period she and Miller spent in Kathmandu in between 2007 and 2008 while awaiting the adoption of their daughter Aradhana, now 5. (Canadian natives, the artists currently divide their time between small-town British Columbia and their studio in Berlin.)
“We had a stack of speakers in our apartment in Kathmandu and started recording bands going by, weddings, Buddhist nuns,” Cardiff recalls. “The dreams came from being in a foreign environment and trying to cope, as well as the stresses of adoption and the world situation.”
The 30-minute composition ends on an optimistic note, with Cardiff’s voice singing a haunting lullaby written by Miller. But the artists’ worldview is rimmed with uncertainty. “One of our past prime ministers, Pierre Trudeau, said that being next to the United States is like sleeping with an elephant,” Cardiff explains, speaking to the angst that runs like a leitmotif (alongside deadpan humor) through her work, “because when the elephant rolls over, you get affected, too.”
The Murder of Crows runs through September 9 at the Park Avenue Armory; armoryonpark.org