Auguries refers to the ancient divinatory practice of reading signs in the behavior of animals and natural phenomena to anticipate the future. Here, however, such readings are neither stable nor resolved; they are suspended within an expanded field of audition in which signs remain partial, receding, and fundamentally opaque.
The work is constructed from field recordings gathered across the Pacific Northwest, interwoven with an ensemble of percussion, cello, bass flute, and electronics. These recordings are not treated as documentary impressions of specific places, but as phantom traces within a distributed and unstable ecology. Ambiguous environmental sounds partially cohere into musical utterance. Instrumental gestures emerge from and dissolve into environmental texture—amplifying, obscuring, and calling into question the acoustic worlds from which they arise. Through the interplay of these sonic agents, listening becomes a site of contingent negotiation rather than clarity: an encounter with a world that exceeds human interpretability.
Composed in Vancouver, Auguries situates itself in proximity to the historical emergence of acoustic ecology at Simon Fraser University—where Maier is currently a professor—under figures such as R. Murray Schafer and Hildegard Westerkamp. While indebted to this lineage, the work departs from its foundational assumptions of legibility and ecological coherence. Instead, it proposes a “dark acoustic ecology”: a mode of listening in which non-human sound is encountered not as a communicative partner readily available to interpretation, but as something withdrawn, indifferent, and resistant.
In this sense, Auguries does not seek to reveal the soundscape, but to stage its irreducibility—to foreground the limits of human aurality and destabilize the coherence of the meanings it claims. It oscillates between recognition and estrangement, inhabiting the irresolution of provisional access.