Applied Silence
Founded in 2021 by Vancouver-based composer/musician Stephen Lyons and Toronto-based writer/director José Teodoro, Applied Silence forges new works in which music and narrative merge in dynamic ways, developing multiple projects in collaboration with innovative artists from Canada and abroad, working in an array of disciplines.
Among those projects is the film Binary Star, which was written and directed by José with music composed and performed by Stephen. Part travelogue, part essay on time and architecture, part long-term/long-distance love story, Binary Star is the product of a unique collaboration, featuring cinematography from a dozen filmmakers and visual artists working in as many countries. This November, Stephen and José will travel to Cali, Colombia, for a special screening of Binary Star, featuring live music and voiceover, at the Cali International Film Festival (FICCALI). Applied Silence also contributed the soundscape to Serbian-Canadian costume designer/director Snezana Pesic’s film Suture, which won the Best Experimental Film prize at the 2022 Toronto Independent Film Festival.
José Teodoro
José Teodoro is a writer and director working across disciplines such as theatre, essay, music, and cinema. José’s literary nonfiction has appeared in publications such as Brick and The Fiddlehead. His interviews, essays, and reviews have appeared in publications such as Film Comment, The Globe & Mail, Cinema Scope, and The Literary Review of Canada.
José’s current projects include a new play developed as part of Playwrights Theatre Centre’s Associates program; a screen adaptation of his play Cloudless for producer Hugh Gibson; a book of conversations with filmmaker Peter Mettler entitled Nothing But Time; and a nonfiction novel called Without Destination.
Read more about José here.
Stephen Lyons
JUNO Award-winning multi-instrumentalist/composer Stephen Lyons’ has been active in Vancouver’s creative music community since 2003. Critically-acclaimed for his visceral and intellectual output in the avant-rock septet Fond of Tigers, Lyons is also a noted improviser, arranger, and producer.
Recent interdisciplinary collaborations include work with Theatre Conspiracy, Pi Theatre, illustrator/animator Amanda Cassidy, and American filmmaker Colin Garcia. Applied Silence, his creative partnership with playwright José Teodoro, has yielded two plays, a short film, a sound/video project with costume designer Snezana Pescic, and the double-LP debut album, Screen Door. He’s currently completing albums by Limbs of the Stars and the new experimental trio Gowns.
Screen Door
Chronicling two idiosyncratic ghost stories in tandem, the debut LP from Applied Silence is a dazzlingly original, tonally dynamic merging of atmospheric post-rock and intimate first-person narrative from JUNO Award-winning musician-composer Stephen Lyons (Fond of Tigers) and multi-disciplinary writer-director José Teodoro (Cloudless).
This special project, tailored for spatial audio, offers listeners the chance to immerse themselves in Screen Door’s dreamy wonderment, bracing dissonance, and twilit suspense.