Boundarymind, conceptualised by Linda Jankowska and Katherine Young, is a sprawling project that threads its way through a variety of translations, mediums and iterations. What began as a commission for solo violin ten years ago ultimately evolved into an extended collaboration, a multimedia installation in 2022 and an electroacoustic sound work released on Carrier Records, all of which take the title of the project. While it was the friendship that Jankowska and Young developed and built throughout this project that became the ‘fabric of boundarymind’,Footnote ¹ the pair articulate how the project required a ‘village’ of collaborators – a community that is ‘woven into [its] fabric’,Footnote ² and one that includes Molly Roth Scranton, Kera Mackenzie and Distractfold.

In a sense, without dismissing the impacts and meaning of these collaborative working processes, neither the kind of network that facilitated Boundarymind, nor the benefits that such working practices afford, are particularly uncommon. For this reason, one of the primary points of interest for this project is the levers it pulls to not only pour the meanings and reverberations of these connections and communications into an installation, but to also coax them into an electroacoustic work.

From a sonic perspective, of the four movements that ‘boundarymind’ consists of, the first is the most enticing, and arguably the most successful in articulating the social emphasis of the project. Sumptuous synthesised lines hum, flit and dart across the stereo space, and intermingle with a series of speech samples that document the piece's creation. Meanwhile, acoustic objects jut, scrape and bounce across the foreground. The focus the project places on exploring the memory meanings of objects from the contributors’ childhoods and pasts shimmers across the work. The movement is limitless and pleasingly unrelenting, effectively drawing outsiders into the shared conceptual and relational space from which the composition was produced.

In the second movement, the sonic properties of these objects are explored in greater detail as the work traverses a series of distinct sound worlds. Throughout, the production quality is exquisite and imaginative, and the tension that simmers under the composition maintains its quietening menace for the full quarter of an hour. Next, the third movement juxtaposes various fragments of material – playfully insistent pops and twangs and gentle thuds that bounce around a barking dog that harks back to the recorded speech from the first movement. The third movement then runs into the fourth, where speech samples return with glassy violin and bassoon lines framed by various meltings, squelchings and drippings that seem to signal the end of the world. Here, there is a fulfilling sense of something significant having been built – a swirling phenomenon that eventually collapses in on itself, or is otherwise left to its own devices as we listen to it perspire, decay and expire. And this feels particularly fitting for a piece that partly attributes the performance of the fourth movement to the audience present at the recording – conjuring images of large-scale participation, even if the mechanics and specifics of this process are left to the listener's imagination.Footnote ³

However, while the fourth movement concludes the ‘boundarymind’ piece, it is then followed by another work – ‘bow breath crow’, a piece in three movements composed by Katherine Young and performed by Distractfold.Footnote ⁴ The composition, for string trio and electronics, is accomplished and evocative, with the third movement in particular being powerfully ominous. However, its inclusion on the release feels a little arbitrary. Gone are the objects scratching themselves into being, instead replaced by string instruments and a fairly conventional compositional palette which somewhat lessens the world-building and world-ending sensations of the preceding piece. Although the artists state that the piece is conceptually strapped to the boundarymind project,Footnote ⁵ the relationship between the two works is uneasy, and placing greater distance between ‘bow breath crow’ and the ‘boundarymind’ piece may have been mutually beneficial to each.

Alongside the recordings of these two pieces, the release also includes an informative set of liner notes (titled How to boundarymind) that introduce a number of the methodologies that underpinned the project, as well as a collection of photos and two text scores. These scores for ‘boundarymind’, written by Jankowska and Young, offer two interpretations of the collaborative process, which are then framed as numbered sets of gentle, thoughtful and reassuring instructions that begin to articulate the emotional impacts of the collaboration and encourage readers who may be inclined to explore collaborating in a similar manner. It is with regards to the first effect that these scores are valuable – they give weight to the emphasis that the creators place on the collaborative and relationship-building elements of Boundarymind's working process, and their intimacy and informality invite an audience of outsiders into the work. In this respect, the scores (and the liner notes in general) are integral to an experience of the work. And, for this reason, it is perhaps problematic that they may be overlooked by those who only encounter the electroacoustic work's sonic output. The project is ambitious, and the concepts that underpin it are exciting and effective. However, it is perhaps the case that the format of the work's presentation diminishes the sense of this ambition and of its efficacy; the project is certainly much more than an electroacoustic work, so encouraging the potential for it to be read as such arguably does it a slight disservice.Footnote ⁶