Listening to the Room: A Day with ishKode at AWE

The room is all glass and light.

It’s the kind of unseasonably warm mid-April day that feels like it arrived early, like something slightly out of sync with the calendar. Sun pours through the windows on the second floor of Art Windsor Essex into a studio space, stretching across the floor, sometimes so bright we’re squinting. Outside, the Detroit River moves slowly past, and beyond it, downtown Detroit rises in a soft, distant haze.

Inside, the room begins to fill with sound.

Not music, at least not yet. Something looser. Fragments. Taps. Loops. Half-formed ideas.

ishKode stands at his side desk, fingers moving lightly over a Maschine 3 controller, triggering a series of samples. Some are percussive, others more abstract textures than true tones. He plays a few beats, thinks a moment, then shifts to a new set of sounds. There’s no sense of rushing. The process feels exploratory, almost conversational.

Before anything really begins, he introduces me to his photo and video team, Mark and Nick, there quietly documenting the day. Then he sets about connecting the various cables between my Nord keyboard and his unassuming rig: two speakers, a few mics, a controller and a laptop.

It’s clear he’s done this before. He knows he’s getting things ready to open a door.

Experiment and community

ishKode completed his Emerging Artist in Residence work at AWE on May 1st. For the last several months, his Fridays were rooted in experimental community work from his studio space just off the main gallery. Between time spent developing his Dry Goods Gallery installation The Ancient Future, he opened the studio to anyone open to creating and learning. Because, in his words, his residency wasn’t just about producing a final work. It’s about the process, and about bringing people into the act of creation itself.

When I visited his space in mid-April, that process became clear quickly.

A practice built on listening

As we set up to play, he doesn’t position himself as the center of the room. Instead, he creates space. He sets something in motion, then lets others move through it.

At one point, he pulls out a small black notebook – unassuming, worn – and begins sketching. The lines come quickly, almost urgently. Layout, positioning, flow. He draws where elements of the installation will sit, where someone might stand, how sound will move through the space. It’s not a polished diagram. It’s thinking in real time.

You get the sense that this is how he works: ideas not fully formed until they’re in motion, until they’ve been tested against the room, against other people.

There’s a moment where he pauses, looks up, and explains, almost casually, why he’s here.

“To help people learn and make amazing things.” It doesn’t land like a slogan. It feels matter-of-fact.

From there the setup grows organically.

He’s invited me there to experience the space and his process. The Nord comes into play, the layered sounds and tones I’ve shaped and saved over time. ishKode dives in immediately, curious to hear each of my custom patches, listening closely, mentally filing away tones and texture.

Later, he’ll ask to sample those sounds. But first, the room needs more voices.

Poets filter in. The first is Emily Roe, host of Toast Open Mic at Phog Lounge. There’s no formal transition, no announcement that “now we begin.” It just happens. ishKode points a mic. Levels are checked. Emily speaks her first runthrough of the poem.

ishKode shifts into a different role.

He stands just off to the side, monitoring. Listening. He’s attentive, but not controlling. There’s a quietness to how he directs, if it can even be called directing. He doesn’t interrupt or shape the moment too tightly. He lets it unfold.

Meanwhile, the music begins to form underneath. It’s improvised, exploratory, sometimes messy. But the decision to just try something, encouraging me to improvise under the poetry and see what happens, becomes the turning point. The keyboard fills in space beneath the words, not overpowering them, but responding to them. Loops are built, adjusted, layered. Some moments fall flat. Others lock in instantly.

And when they do, it’s obvious. There’s a shift in the room. A kind of alignment. Emily and I look at each other with recognition.

ishKode notices it immediately. There’s a smile, a wide, genuine, almost childlike smile of excitement. Not because something is finished, but because something clicked.

That seems to be the metric here. Not perfection. Not polish. Just: did it work? Did it feel right?

The sound of place

At some point, the conversation turns to how ishKode gathers material for his work.

He talks about going into places – bars, venues, everyday environments – and listening.

Not passively, but actively.

At Phog Lounge, he taps glasses, wood surfaces, fixtures. He describes with anticipation how he’ll be doing the same at Dr Disc the next day, recording the small, incidental sounds most people ignore. Each object, each space, carries its own tone, its own resonance. Together, they form something like a fingerprint.

The idea isn’t just to capture sound. It’s to capture place. Music built and shaped by environment and how sound exists within it.

Those samples become the building blocks of his music. They’re not generic drum kits or pre-packaged sounds. They’re specific to a room. To a moment.

It reframes what music can be – Not something imposed onto a space, but something extracted from it.

A different kind of authorship

What stands out over the course of the session is how little emphasis there is on ownership.

There’s no sense that this is “his track” or “his piece” in the traditional way. The work is collaborative by design. He assures us in the room that we’ll be credited on any recording release, and he even describes how to claim royalties if we’d like to. Contributions are folded in, reshaped, passed back out again.

Even the technical process reflects that.

The Nord keyboard, played over hours off and on, becomes part of the system. Its sounds are sampled, manipulated, recontextualized. What starts as a live performance becomes raw material for something else.

ishKode approaches it with curiosity rather than control. He asks before sampling. Listens before acting. Leaves space for others to influence the direction.

It’s a kind of authorship that feels less about asserting a vision and more about facilitating one.

Outside of the residency, ishKode runs Big Heart Beats, working with schools and community groups to bring this same approach to a broader audience. His personal work is rooted in his Anishinaabe heritage and cultural liberation. The philosophy carries through.

Working with ishKode, music isn’t positioned as something exclusive or technical. It’s accessible, immediate, and rooted in experience. You don’t need formal training to participate. You just need to listen, to experiment, to engage with what’s around you.

In a place like Windsor, where the arts scene often feels fragmented, where information about events and opportunities can be scattered. that kind of accessibility matters.

It lowers the barrier to entry. It invites people in.

The Ancient Future

The sketches in the notebook start to make more sense as the day goes on.

This isn’t just about producing tracks or recordings. It’s about building an environment. A soundscape.

The Ancient Future installation at Dry Goods Gallery carries these ideas forward, or as he put it at his May 1st reception, “I’m going to tell a story with sound.” Sound revealed as something spatial, something you move through rather than simply hear. The positioning of elements, the way a listener stands or walks through the space, and becomes part of the composition.

The work created during sessions like this feeds into that. Not directly, necessarily. But as influence. As raw material. As proof of concept.

The installation isn’t separate from the process. It’s an extension of it.

Listening differently

By the end of the day, the room feels different.

Not physically. The same light, the same view of the river are there. But perceptually, something is new. There’s a heightened awareness of sound. Small details stand out more. The hum of equipment, the movement of people through the room. The subtle acoustics of the space itself.

It’s not something that was taught explicitly. It’s something that emerged through participation.

Spending hours inside that process – playing, listening, adjusting, responding – shifts your sense of what music is, or could be. It becomes less about composition in the traditional sense, and more about attention. About noticing.

About recognizing that sound is already there, waiting to be shaped.

A quiet center

There’s a tendency, when talking about local arts scenes, to focus on what’s missing, and to compare with other cities, other artistic landscapes. But days like this suggest something else.

Not a fully formed system, but a set of practices. A network of people experimenting, collaborating, building things in smaller, more fluid ways.

ishKode sits somewhere in the middle of that.

Not as a central figure, exactly – but as a connector. Someone who moves between spaces, brings people together, creates conditions for something to happen.

The work itself is important, but the day suggest that the way it happens might matter more. Layers of sound, captured and reshaped. Moments of alignment. Fragments of collaboration that may or may not make their way into a final piece.

Working with ishKode, it’s hard to point to any one thing and say: that was the outcome.

Instead, it feels cumulative. A series of small, interconnected moments. A process more than a product. And maybe that’s the point.

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ishKode is the 2026 RBC Emerging Artist in Residence at Art Windsor Essex (AWE). His installation is free and open to the public at Dry Goods Gallery, located at 1012 Drouillard Rd, runs from May 1 through June 28. More about his work and his vision of using music and media in transformative experiences can be found at https://bigheartbeats.wixstudio.com/b-h-b.