The Woe Trumpets is an audiovisual album that reimagines narratives of disaster and dystopia by attempting to find hidden subtexts within the master metaphor of apocalypse. 

In a timely yet awful coincidence, the project was conceived in October of 2019, just months before the pandemic hit and rendered the album’s themes painfully non-abstract. The work began as a movie theatre installation experimenting with multichannel sound effects from disaster films. However, with movie theatres still largely out of commission, the work has moved online in the form of this installation. 

What was originally intended to be a critical study of cinematic soundscapes has become something far more personal over the past year. Though the initial impulse was to replicate a state of emergency within the music, amplifying all of the thunderclaps and Kaiju roars of disaster cinema to the point of absurdity, the pandemic has swiftly shown the privilege inherent in this mode of representation. Accordingly, the priority has shifted from fascination with despair toward reimagination and repair. As the climate change activist Eric Holthaus writes, “Refusing to accept a dystopian future is a revolutionary act.” This installation is a speculative sketch of what one form of refusal could look and sound like. 

Combining music by Matthew Tomkinson with found footage compiled by Josh Hite and artwork by Bynh Ho, The Woe Trumpets revisits films from the golden age of disaster cinema, finding new meanings in these blockbusters’ quieter moments and microexpressions. In the video, characters’ mundane gestures are rechoreographed, emphasizing specific typologies of looking and reacting. Small human moments replace scenes of cataclysm as the main cinematic event. By removing these sequences from their narrative context, Hite reappropriates and undermines disaster’s affective structure. Crisis is perpetually averted, sidelined, delayed, reduced to a hidden cause somewhere off-screen. What’s left is the before-and-after: the perpetual anxiety of anticipating the worst, and the processing that follows. 

The score channels these tensions in foreboding synthscapes, numbed-out ambiences, doom-metal overtures, atmospheric rumblings, and calming drones. Incorporating cinematic samples, field recordings, modular synths, and virtual instruments, the tracks draw upon different end-times scoring conventions, from dissonant choral requiems to otherworldly arpeggios and squalls of spectral noise. Compositionally, the album moves between stillness and shrillness, calmness and chaos, promise and peril. The result is an uneasy reflection on a year spent in constant fight or flight. Above all, The Woe Trumpets is an attempt to move stagnant feelings, to rewind and rewrite the doom-scroll.

Filmography

The Andromeda Strain (1971)
The Omega Man (1971)
The Poseidon Adventure (1972)
Earthquake (1974)
The Towering Inferno (1974)
The Bullet Train (1975)
The Cassandra Crossing (1976)
The Big Bus (1976)
Airport ‘77 (1977)
Rollercoaster (1977)
The Swarm (1978)
Meteor (1979)

This work was created with gratitude on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and səl̓ilwətaɁɬ (Tsleil-waututh) nations.