Last July 2023, I wrote a one-page article for The Wire Magazine (July 2023, #473) featuring a collection of records and sound works that focus on the sonic proprieties of plants, biofeedback work, sonification of plant chemicals, plant-based field recordings, and plant music folklore. The article includes a short review of records/audioworks from Dr. George Milstein, Jeroen Diepenmaat, Ludwig Berger, Yuji Dogane & Mamoru Fujieda, Christine Ödlund, David Vélez and Zach Poff. This guide to plant life on disc is a companion to the article about Michael Allen Z Prime‘s new set of 3 CDs called Biolectrical Music compiling his audio and video work across bioelectrical compositions, bioelectrical field recordings, and bioelectrical installations.
Working With What You Have was created for the radio festival Radiophrenia (2023, Glasgow, Scotland) and is composed of field recordings collected during one year of work (April 2022-May 2023) in Manhattan, NY. This piece follows the making of a Tonkotsu ramen soup in a compact kitchen in Midtown. This type of ramen is known for its long periods of cooking that can extend for over 12 hours. The sounds of the different stages of preparing the ramen broth are interwoven with the fast-paced rhythms of commuting to the city, the sounds of the subway, traffic, sirens, walkways, and workers.
A sonic feature of Midtown, Manhattan, brought forward in this piece is the sound of artificial waterfalls abundant in small pocket gardens between corporate buildings, offices, and international consulates. The anesthetic quality of the sounds of the artificial waterfall in an otherwise stressful environment is a revealing piece of the fabric of this neighborhood. Its calmness and sense of rest constitute a feature of the capitalist structure of the city and the sense of empire-building, business as usual, serenity, and high productivity at work.
The latter sounds of this piece are from a Union rally in Manhattan, aiming to unionize a well-known grocery store chain. Voices from different labor unions and work sectors, including construction workers, delivery and service workers, baristas, and other professionals, come together for fairer work conditions in the city.
* The ramen broth is made of pork and chicken bones and served with chashu, toasted minced garlic, scallions, egg, and bean sprouts. ** The Union drive fell short by one vote.
This music chart was published in Issue #447 of The Wire Magazine, and it was inspired by works dealing with sounds sourced from commutes to work, public transportation, sonic interpretations of landscapes adjacent to roads or train tracks, and oral testimonies around transportation infrastructures.
Discontinued Commutes 15
Yara Mekawei & Mina Nasr – Shoubra Line (Atrellewa)
The February edition of The Wire magazine (issue 432) features the chart Waterfall as Metronome, composed of works inspired by the sight and sound of waterfalls including field recordings, on-site improvisation, sound installations, white noise, ethnographic work, and new-age interpretations of water, flow and the effects of negative ions. While putting together this list, I imagined a speculative history of music where compositions were not driven by metronome’s mechanical account of time, but by the continuous atemporal flow of a waterfall.
Waterfall as Metronome 15
Sarah Hennies – Gather (Category of manifestation)
I feel like a balloon going up into the atmosphere, looking, gathering information, and relaying it back. Rachel Rosenthal, 1985
Last April 2019, Sounding Out! published my two-part article, “On the poetics of balloon music,” exploring sound, listening, and the atmosphere through the object of the balloon. The first part focuses on late 18th-century balloon travels and the descriptions of silence in the upper air that constituted a staple of Victorian balloon memoirs and literature of the time. Ascending above the noise of the industrialized city, the first balloonists were constructing a sonic identity rooted in the privilege of buoyancy and constructs of the sublime, harmony, and silence that excluded other ways of sounding.
The sight of boundless space and the quietude of the higher regions of the atmosphere inspired colonial narratives of territorial expansion. Sounds produced outside this imperialist worldview were perceived as invasion, contamination, and noise. By establishing an early connection between the exploration of the atmosphere and a listening ear based on elitism, race, and class, the article goes on to analyze some contemporary sound-art practices that use balloons to explore the atmosphere and that take on the challenge of creating a more inclusive relationship with the medium of air.
Against Levity: Experimental Music and the Latex Balloon
Part 2 of this article features an interview with composer and sound artist Judy Dunaway, who has been developing sculptural sonic performances with balloons for over 25 years. Dunaway’s work with the balloon as a sound producer has been the exclusive focus of several records (e.g., Balloon Music, Mother of Balloon Music), scores, sound sculptures, solo performances, ensembles, and installations. In this interview, Judy Dunaway talks about how her balloon compositions are in active dialogue with questions relating to feminism, body/mind, ecology, civil rights, memory, and the overall creation of musical expression and lexicon that lives outside a classical heritage.
As Dunaway points out, the balloon as a musical instrument bypasses dominant hierarchies of music production, leveling the access to experimentation and sonic textures that are restricted by expensive electronic technology. Besides democratizing sound, the latex balloon functions as a resonant chamber, offering an embodied and inclusive mode of listening through the vibration of its membranes. This object duality of sounding and sensing opens up room for what the scholar Steph Ceraso calls a multi-modal listening that plays with the body, affect, behavior, design, space, and aesthetics.
“From my earliest work with balloons as musical instruments, I instinctively knew that I must limit myself to the balloon and my body. This required that the balloon function not only as a musical appendage by which I may transmit sound, but also one that transmitted vibrations back to me through its sensitive body. (…)” Judy Dunaway, The Balloon Music Manifesto
Interference~balloonis an audio piece made for Earlid’s annual Liminal Soundsunder the theme of Retreat, Disappearance. The work unfolds in three acts and is recorded in one take, exploring the balloon/breath as a low-tech noise-canceling tool. The sounds are recorded through a contact microphone placed inside a balloon. First, one can hear the balloon being inflated and the tunning of different radio stations. The song Take My Breath Away (1986) from the band Berlin is being broadcast on one of the stations, spurring the release of my breath from the mouth of the balloon. The song is interrupted by commercials and station ads, and the sound of the air release is used to cancel the airwaves and the pull from the atmosphere of commercial interest and capital.
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“Liminal Sounds and its motif of retreat and disappearance: what arrives is the proximity of ghosted towns and birds, imagined dissipation of entities lurking in and out of real life, the canceling signals crossed and masked, anticipation of vaporized languages, words stuck inside mouths.” Joan Schuman
Still from Take My Breath Away music video by the band Berlin, 1986
On June 28, I’ll be talking about Music for Plants at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, Colorado. This talk is part of an event series called 3 Things, Any 3 Things that mixes performance, lecture, and music. The tagline for the event reads: We bring you three experiences. We smash them together. We make no connections. Let’s see what happens.
Alongside music for plants there will be a Hip hop harpist (Erin Newton) and a whiskey tasting (Ryan Negley). I’m pleased to do this lecture in the hometown of Dorothy Retallack, author of the book Sound of Music and Plants (1973), that famously spread the rumors that plants don’t have an ear for Led Zeppelin or Jimi Hendrix’s acid rock.
MCA, Denver Colorado, June 28:
Music for Plants + Whiskey + Hip Hop Harpist with Carlo Patrão, Ryan Negley, and Erin Newton
This year’s edition of Megapolis Audio Festival will be held on the weekend of September 16th and 17th as part of Philadelphia’s Fringe Festival. Megapolis is dedicated to sound art, featuring works and performances from musicians, filmmakers, educators, urban planners, scientists, and radio producers.
Zepelim’s radio piece about Misophoniawill be played at PhillyCam alongside other digital works. Radio will be one of the main focuses of the festival, with discussions about radio art with Joan Schuman from Earlid, the politics of storytelling with Karen Werner, live performances from Radio Wonderland, and radio in translation with Eleanor McDowall’s Radio Atlas.
Description: Portuguese radio artist Carlo Patrao tackles the recently discovered and little-understood chronic condition known as Misophonia. The condition is characterized by highly negative emotional responses to auditory triggers like chewing, breathing, sniffling, coughing, or slurping. This radio collage explores and utilizes this range of intrusive bodily sounds and discourse around it, while transforming those very sounds into music and performance art.
