About us

Studio Apothicaire is a recording and production company founded by Fili 周 Gibbons. Since 2018, we have been providing high-quality audiovisual services to individuals and organizations at the crossroads of music, sound and the arts.

Our focus is in sound and video creation work, and we also have a passion for sharing audio skills with individuals and communities. We offer individualized learning sessions for creators, group workshops, and technical consulting 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 started improvising 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 beat-maker 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.

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?

Our Approach

Audio and video work is about connection — 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 — we listen, see, feel and remember things.

We feel that audiovisual technology has the same root—the practice of remembering and transmitting experience. It’s a way of connecting with other beings and with the world. 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 paying careful attention to one’s equipment and sensations, being receptive to the context or environment, and finding new ways of working. In all our techical work, we focus on 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.