Jen Yakamovich: Dude Chilling Park

In response to The Only Animal’s prompt of composing for an ecosystem wit which I have personal connection, I explored the public park I lived beside from 2022-2024, up until the duplex I lived in succumbed to a fire. Walking through this park every day, I approached the famously (and aptly) named “Dude Chilling Park” in Mt. Pleasant, Vancouver as an urban ecology.

Combining field recordings and samples collected throughout Fall 2023 and Winter 2024 with rhythmic and melodic motifs on piano, percussion, and synth, each movement thematically explores sections, fragments, and encounters in the park. Part of the “worlding” project of this score draws from my earliest associations with sound: various theme songs of what felt like utopian worlds in computer RPGs (role playing games). In my attempts to explore “more-than-visual” worlds, I imagine a map of the park as the home screen, in which the listener may then travel to different sections of the park through sound. Visit the house finches in the Himalayan cedars, local dudes chattering near the legendary public art sculpture, recess ruckus in the rain, a rat dragging a zucchini in the community garden. As a percussionist, I am inclined towards writing with repetition in mind, finding I can come to know something through patterns and loops.

above Satellite Image of Dude Chilling Park

These urban jungle jingles serve as an homage to the city park, to the abundance of life it contains, and to the world the park represents as a public space: what scholar N. Malone might call a natureculture, the idea that nature and culture are so tightly interwoven that they cannot be separated.

About the artist

Jen Yakamovich is a Halifax-raised, Vancouver-based drummer and percussionist who works across disciplines as an improviser, composer, educator, researcher, live performer, and session musician. Holding a Master’s degree in Environmental Studies from Dalhousie University (2019), she is interested in the connections between sound, rhythm, and social-ecological transformation. She approaches her relationship with the drum set—a system of interrelating sounds and parts— as a window into relationships with her own internal system and wider social webs.

In addition to working across musical contexts, Yakamovich enjoys opportunities to take the drum set into less traditional settings and disciplines. She regularly collaborates with dancers, visual artists, galleries, essayists, theatre groups, and environmental scientists. Recent projects and performances have included Active/Passive Festival (2022), Coastal Jazz Iron Fest III (2022), Harvest Moon with Rumble Theatre (2022), grunt gallery’s Tactile Residency (2023), Sled Island (2023), and Vines Art Festival (2023). She has been a percussionist for artist and instrument-maker Roxanne Nesbitt’s nine-month research creation project and installation, “Thunderous Wondering” (2023).