Studio Apothicaire is a recording and production company founded by Fili 周 Gibbons. Since 2018, we have been providing high-quality technical and creative services to individuals and organizations at the crossroads of music, sound and the arts.
Our focus is in sound and video production work, and we also have a passion for sharing audio skills with individuals and communities who are realizing their own creative work. We offer individualized learning sessions for creators, for group workshops, and technical advising for arts organizations, research groups and community arts projects.
About Fili
Our name is Fili 周 Gibbons (pronouns ’we/they/us’) — we’re a musician, sound designer and audiovisual recordist. Our first musical instrument was the cello, which we started at a young age. When we were still in high-school, we got into improvisation in a local jazz band and this and opened our playing to music of all kinds. We studied cello formally and played in orchestras and chamber music — and we’ve also performed across genres such as jazz, traditional music, roots, rock, electronic, and interdisciplinary performance.
Our passion for recording started as a DIY bedroom recordist and beatmaker in our teens. In 2016, we began to work freelance as an audio and video recordist, and from 2017 to 2020 we studied a masters of the Sound Recording at McGill University. These studies helped to ground us in the principles of sound and audio, ear training, and hands-on recording in many production environments.
Our work in sound engages with and attempts to bridge sonic and cultural barriers, preserving and re-inventing traditions, and empowering communities through self-mediation. We are researching ways to rethink and reprogram sound engineering to improve access and representation for the sonic experiences of independent artists, marginalized communities, and unheard voices. This initiative was part of a masters research project we developed independently in 2020. Since then, we have worked with artists, youth, cultural organizations, schools, and research groups, and learn about sound practice with collaborators in diverse contexts. This journey continues to this day, in our work, and our writings here on this site.
Balancing full-time class with several recording sessions per week (sometimes in the middle of the night) — we fell into an unhealthy lifestyle in our studies. In 2018, we experienced a severe burnout and had to take a leave from school for health reasons. This was a painful lesson, but it was also a chance to pause, and remember what was essential to us in our practice, why recording felt so meaningful to us in the first place.
In 2019, we returned to school developed a research project exploring audio practice as a tool of connection and exchange among communities and plural sonic cultures. We wanted to see how audio practice can be shared and transformed across relations of context, ways-of-knowing, lands and environment.
Our Approach
If audiovisual practice is a kind of ‘mediation’ — a participation in the flow of expressions and connections between people, communities, knowledge systems, and environments... ...what happens when we carry out media work founded on the intrinsic qualities of these connections, and actively nurture and strengthen their integrity through intentional work?
Audio and video work is about making connections — capturing vibrations and motion existing in one time and place, and then recreating them in another. The human body already has the capacity to record our experiences — like when we listen, see, feel and remember things. Though we can’t directly recreate these experiences with others, we have developed symbols, visual arts, gestures, and speech that allow us to relate our experiences for others. We feel that audiovisual technology has the same root—the human practice of remembering and transmitting experience. It’s a way of connecting with other beings and with the world.
So when we think about recording quality, the question comes — how can our tools serve the integrity of these connections? It’s not only technical skills and knowledge that are important, but also an observation of how the tools affect what we experience in our body, our environment, and our intangible beings. This practice involves a process of paying careful attention to one’s equipment and sensations, being receptive to the context or environment, and finding new ways of working. So in our technical work we focus employing high-fidelity tools and working methods that can allow us to stay close to the human experience—creating sound and video work that lives, breathes and moves the body.
Our mission
If you feel curious and up for some reading, below we’ve written more on concepts that are important to us and that ground our audio work…
| m e d i a t i n g c h a n g e |
Our core belief is that recording is an important means of empowerment. Recording permits sonic mediation - that is, the preservation of sound within a media (like an mp3 file) so it can be heard at any time, in any place. This creates unique opportunities for listening, being heard, having a voice, and conveying that voice to many. For this reason, sound recording is significant for its ability to preserve a sonic past, while at the same time negotiating the present sonic realities of individuals and their communities.
| p l u r a l s o u n d |
Given the many potentials of mediation, there is an urgent need for greater accessibility to sonic tools, knowledge, and platforms that can serve people's creative agency across plural landscapes of cultural identity, economic standing, sexual orientation, and gender. Recording history itself is rooted within cultures of Western musical representation, and these aesthetics have often been applied to recordings of 'other' cultures.
The result is that traditions of sound and self have often been appropriated into Western ways of listening and consuming sound. A truly diverse landscape of audio production can only exist as a conversation on equal footing. It is not enough to learn sound recording within a single dominant framework. Our mission is to develop tools and vocabulary that can help mediators recognize and challenge these assumptions, and support plural cultures of sound that are both innovative and traditional.
| e m b o d i e d s o u n d |
The human body is the original sound system. Our ears are like microphones, and our memory is like a tape machine. Though contemporary audio practice gives much care to the treatment of studio spaces for accurate listening, many engineers do not discuss the human body itself as a space for listening. This seems contradictory, since the often sleepless bodies of engineers are often challenged to perceive their work accurately. As one contribution to plural practices of sound production, we would like to suggest ways to engage the body in the same way it is already implicated in sound practice, namely through intuition and experience.
Inspired by holistic body practices like Tai chi, or Yoga, we are actively developing practices that can promote bodily well-being during media work. We can do much more to engage the embodied parts of sound mediation, such as our own human listening and memory, and in this way harmonize our use of technology with our human faculties.
| o n l i n e r e s o u r c e s |
Finally, there is a shortage of high quality, accurate, and comprehensive audio production materials on the web. There is a need for straightforward learning materials that can empower the self-sufficiency of artist-producers, providing an apporach that is grounded within one's own listening, technical understanding, and instinct. This site will provide a platform for discovering sonic principles and practices through online publications and multimedia learning materials.
| s o n i c a p o t h e c a r y |
Through workshops, online publications, and collaborative projects, Studio Apothicaire is committed to meeting the above needs, providing professional audio skills and knowledge through plural frames of empowerment, creativity, and community. The apothecary has traditionally been a place where medicine is prepared. It has provided gateways for practice combining craft and technique with nature and healing, informal learning, and professionalization of marginalized peoples, such as women healers. Inspired from these meanings, this studio-apothecary embraces the unprecedented opportunity we have today to heal through sound, and heal the ways we carry these sounds through audio media.
