Artist Statement

Trajectories Collective is made up of 3 members, Charles Harding is from New Brunswick, Malte Leander is from Sweden, and Connor Cook grew up in Calgary, Alberta, where he studied theatre performance at Mount Royal University at a now-defunded program, and performed in Shakespeare by the Bow the year of the Calgary Flood.

All three of us met in Montreal while pursuing degrees in electroacoustic studies (sound art and music composition) at Concordia University. We formed Trajectories during the early days of the pandemic, creatively exploring our circumstances, responding to the moment in a city with an aggressive curfew by turning our ears and microphones to the apartments and natural environments around us, transforming our own homes and neighbourhoods into the instruments that we composed with and developing a compositional approach that eschewed accessible musical touchstones in favour of exploring more vulnerable states - inner landscapes that were explored and then multiplied by one another through compositional exercises that combined our individual practices into singular pieces greater than the sum of their parts.

Originally, Michael Pinsonneault, our composition professor, collaborator and friend was the fourth founding member of the collective. Michael passed away in December of 2023. His creative vision, passion, and generosity of spirit were essential building blocks to our practice, and they echo to this day through everything that we do.

In our time as a performing and composing collective, the group has toured Sweden and New Brunswick, the homelands of two of the members, where we’ve been grateful to perform or undertake residencies with numerous artist-run and community centres, including Hypnos Theatre in Malmö, Sweden, and Connexion ARC in Fredricton, New Brunswick. The missing piece of the hometown tour has been Calgary, Alberta, where Connor’s familial connections are still strong.

This was Trajectories’ second journey to Scandinavian countries, our first saw us attending the Åland Archipelago Guest Artist Residence on the remote island of Kökar in the Baltic Sea, where a 3-week residency saw the members collecting the material and forming the compositions that would form our 2nd long-form music release, the album Quiet on Kökar, which we self-released in early 2024.

trajectories.net
Instagram: @trajectoriescollective
Bandcamp: trajectoriescollective