Maja Zećo lived through the Bosnian War and the siege of Sarajevo in the early 1990s, but considers herself lucky it took place before the era of military drones. As a survivor of conflict, her interest in exploring the experiences of war has become an important part of her work, particularly in relation to how it manifests in questions of migration, displacement and environmental change.

In 2025 she ran a soundwalk workshop through London called Emitters & Receivers - Listening with Aerial Drones in which participants were given the sounds of military drones to play from their phones as they walked through the city. The impact was confronting for both participants and the people they passed on the street, and it is in staging these jarring encounters that Zećo’s work thrives.

It was after this project that we had our first conversation, exploring Zećo’s practice, her memories of war and the other projects, such as Silencer and Defend & Protect, that she has performed on the streets of Aberdeen and Zagreb respectively. The first involved Zećo wandering the city in a custom sound-proofed suit, sonically insulated from the outside world, and the second as a spectral figure, protected by sandbags and a face mask, emitting drone frequencies into the night. They were collected with other pieces at an exhibition called Discomfited Futures, curated by Jon Blackwood in 2024.

A resident in Aberdeen for 10 years, Zećo’s work has also turned to her new home and the tensions and contradictions arising from the green energy transition, specifically in the St Fittick’s Park area of the city. In February 2026, she co-led a day-long workshop that I was invited to attend discussing the role of arts methodologies in how environments and communities are changed by green energy, such as windfarms. These ideas are further developed in Zećo’s forthcoming exhibition The Attuning Zone at Peacock & the worm in Aberdeen, exploring how people experience the sounds, textures and atmospheres of energy transition.

Although some time has passed since our initial conversation, the workshop and exhibition offer a new reason to publish this interview. In the context of the ecalating violence of the US and Israel’s wars on Iran and Lebanon - enacted in part through the brutal and detached use of drones - much of what we discussed has taken on a new urgency.

Your work covers many different themes, and I wondered if we could start by exploring what brings them together for you?

Embodied experience resurfaces in my work in different ways. I always choose to organise soundwalks in very complex spaces, where there is a sense of loss, either related to ecology or class or other sorts of political situations. My practice deals with memory and experiences of sound, or how memories inform our experience of soundscape. I’m only now starting to work specifically with drone noises, and it came to me with urgency and a question of how we can create a sense of empathy with people living under constant threats, and how we can relate to that experience from the relative safety of the West.

You did this by staging these drone sounds in the centre of London.

There was of course discussion of consent, because you’re emitting these sounds in a formal space, it’s almost a form of protest. A lot of these sounds are extremely abstract. They sound like military planes and engines. There were a few people who asked us what was happening.

I think it’s an interesting political action, even if personally we can’t immerse ourselves in the possible danger that these sounds might represent. Because drones are often not visible but are heard on the ground, it is quite profound to play those noises in a powerful political centre such as London.

Acquainting the city with the sounds of drone warfare people might not have experienced in person?

Yes, but I would say the question remains how far we are from a possible world conflict and how vulnerable we are. We are in a bubble of safety, and people like myself never feel fully safe and far from conflict. We are hyper vigilant in a sense that people around us are not.

This question of sonic memory seems very relevant, particularly in relation to past trauma.

Exactly and it’s something that I explored in my PhD research, asking questions of how memories inform our experience of soundscapes today. In Bosnia, if you interview someone now and ask them what their favourite sound is, or the sound of their home or neighbourhood, within ten minutes everyone mentions the war. For me that was really fascinating, because I went there consciously with the intention not to ask about that history. I suspect that’s how the experience of conflict came into my work as well, because I never really wanted to deal with it explicitly.

Sarajevo is full of sites of memory because it was under siege for four years, so as soon as you stop, tune in and potentially record the sonic environment, it can take you into the past and open up that whole dimension. I’d ask someone about the sound of the river, and they’d say, “yeah, I don’t like the sound of the river, but of course the river sounded very differently during the war, because we didn’t have windows.” And obviously, someone who lived there knows that all the windows were shattered in the first weeks of the war due to explosions in the city. We had these plastic sheets on the windows instead that made their own sounds, while also being much more transparent and less isolating of outdoor noises.

I wonder if, when people think of the sounds of war, they tend to think of explosions, rather than the ways in which the conditions of conflict change the soundscape in material ways.

Exactly. I think Steve Goodman and his work Sonic Warfare talks about sirens. I have a work about air raid sirens and I had quite a few people discussing the sound of air raid sirens being even more scary and alarming than sounds of explosions. Personally, I don’t remember sirens at all, I need to ask my mum whether we had them, or if it’s literally a gap in my memory. I have worked with strobe lights, with air raid sirens, with quite extreme noise in my practice and that comes from this urge to explore the sensory experience and the relationship between the body and memory. It is a challenge to place this work in a gallery, so that’s why a lot of my practice is based around performance in public space.

There is a porousness between private and public, and it feels like your work is interested in blurring that boundary.

For me as someone who lived through conflict, it’s more about revealing interior experiences, but you have to be aware that there have been such huge shifts in the way wars are conducted. Now there are these control centres that are in completely different geographical spaces, and drone operators using tiny screens, often without any sound input. They are completely detached from the context, from mortality. This gamification of warfare is terrifying, and to have something potentially able to enter your home in the middle of the night and kill you in your bed silently, it’s that level that we’re dealing with. For me it’s a matter of privilege that I wanted to disrupt or to make apparent. We have a privilege to live in an environment here and not be threatened by military drones.

We met at In the Field conference in 2024 where there was a lot of discussion about positionality in sound art. It seems like you are quite interested in how to translate an experience of conflict for people who haven’t experienced it

Yeah, I think it’s our responsibility to do this. Of course we have to be understanding and I live now in this privilege in the UK, but my family is in Bosnia which is at peace, but might be in conflict again. So that makes me alert. I think we need to talk about it, and researchers in the UK often feel shy to discuss these topics. I think a lot of organisations wouldn’t support this workshop because it can be triggering, it can be difficult for participants and people around you. We had quite a few warnings of course, but then how do we have these conversations about how we are complicit in what’s happening in different parts of the world if we don’t extend our empathy?

Through this feeling of discomfort?

Exactly. And then the question maybe for some is, do you need to feel scared to create this impactful relationship? I think we really need to practice our muscles a little bit. We are oversaturated with images and ideas. Susan Sontag wrote that lovely book Regarding the Pain of Others which deals with this gaze, and that for me was very helpful in understanding the Bosnian conflict and responses to it. I think through sound we can provide another way in.

Many authors like Salomé Voegelin and others also talk about imagination as a creative force. We are just not used to using it in this scenario. And that was the invitation. For me it was incredibly imaginative to emit the sound of aerial drones produced by the US or the UK and now used in the Middle East or in Ukraine, next to the British Museum. There is a political statement in that, albeit subtle and ephemeral.

By listening to the acoustic environment around us augmented with these sounds that you’re emitting or that you hear from others, you explore your own sense of safety, shelter, normality and home. But what is normal? In Sarajevo we got quite accustomed to it. And so you start making evaluations. We had nicknames for different ammunition. How far is the strike? You hear a grenade bursting through the sky and maybe you can sense proximity, so either you continue playing or if you judge it’s coming really close then you run to the shelter or you duck to the ground, or you turn your body if there is no time to duck to the ground. You are constantly acutely aware, but then you also find a way to live with it. So for me the question of normality is the big one, and in the one hour of the soundwalk, it’s difficult to get accustomed to it, because it’s quite a short time.

Does your interest in sound come from this sense of image saturation?

It’s deeply rooted in my experience. I’m primarily a performance artist who works with sound, and it’s that combination of the body, the context and the situation that allows me to explore these experiences for myself, but also for people around me.

Could we end by speaking briefly about your recent project on the energy transition in Aberdeen and how this relates to your research more broadly?

The project revolves around soundwalks that I led in St. Fittick’s Park a couple of years ago. The park is a well-known example of an unjust energy transition, as it is a rare green space in a socially deprived part of the city, now endangered by further industrial development. During this time, I worked collaboratively with Aberdeen-based curator Rachel Grant and researcher Gisa Weszkalnys, based at the London School of Economics (LSE). Following the soundwalks, we held an exhibition at LSE and a workshop on the role of the arts in debates concerning energy transition.

Through this body of work, I’ve been searching for ways to listen to the site and its inhabitants in various ways. This intention brings me to work with people, with sonic and video material, and with my body to amplify and make visible the politics of the place. All my work is situated in very layered places, and it makes it meaningful to me to turn to environmental violence and non-armed conflicts in some of my future work, as there is trauma, grief and a sense of loss there too. Currently, I am developing a new performance work that will be premiered at the park as part of my solo exhibition at Peacock & the worm in Aberdeen.

Maja Zećo's The Attuning Zone takes place at Peacock & the worm in Aberdeen, between 2nd May and 4th July 2026.

“I find value in allowing sound to remain itself,” says Swedish composer and sound artist BJ Nilsen. Interested in the productive tension between recording and perception, Nilsen’s work stretches back three decades. He has collaborated with Chris Watson, Jóhann Jóhannsson, choreographer Örjan Andersson, and visual artist Femke Herregraven, released solo work on Editions Mego and Ideologic Organ, and spanned disciplines and environments to explore the layered ways in which we listen to the world around us. Rather than offer concrete perspectives, his work encourages a kind of creative ambiguity that, he says, “allows the listener to engage more freely, letting perception and imagination shape the meaning of the sound.

And yet, Nilsen’s work is not without specificity. For his latest project Scalar Towers, Nilsen visited two locations in the Netherlands, where he is now based, to ground his work - the water tower at 20th century communications complex Radio Kootwijk, and a former feed silo at the cultural site Het Lage Norden in the north of the country. Ground may be the wrong word. Pursuing an interest in the acoustics of vertical structures, Nilsen chose his sites for their height and the resonant qualities peculiar to narrow or tall spaces. Belltowers, lighthouses, cliffs and stairwells come to mind. In a sense it’s a simple premise - to explore how sound moves up and down a landscape, rather than across it - but not one I’d given much thought to.

Both sites had specific material qualities, as well as complex socio-cultural ones. Built in 1918, Radio Kootwijk facilitated long-distance communication between the Netherlands and what was then the Dutch East Indies, and although now decommissioned, remains a troubled monument to the colonial enterprise and the flows of control and information that underpinned it.

Taking part in the Sonic Acts Spatial Sound Residency in 2025, Nilsen used a custom-made vertical microphone array to capture recordings that were then worked up into compositions to be presented on the 60-speaker Acousmonium during the festival weekend of Sonic Acts Biennial in Amsterdam on Saturday 28th February. It was with Scalar Towers then, that we began our interview.

Tell me about the background to your new project Scalar Towers?

Scalar Towers began as an investigation into what happens when you think about sound vertically rather than horizontally. We’re used to imagining sound spreading out across a flat plane, but I became interested in what happens inside vertical structures — architectural shafts, towers, even geological formations — where sound doesn’t disperse evenly. Instead, it’s channeled. Horizontal movement is restricted, so reflections intensify along the vertical axis. You hear rapid returns, layered echoes, and you become acutely aware of what’s above and below you. The space starts to feel like a column of resonance.

With Scalar Towers, I wanted to explore how scale and elevation reorganise perception. Rather than presenting sound as a horizontal field, I approached it as something that accumulates, rises, or descends — something stratified. The concept of the work is really about shifting the listener’s orientation, from a lateral experience of space to a vertical one.

How did you approach the residency at Sonic Acts and what did you set out to explore?

For the residency at Sonic Acts, I wanted to work very directly with vertical architecture. I set out to explore how existing vertical structures could actively shape and transform sound — not just as sites for recording, but as resonant instruments in themselves.

I worked with an Atmos rig using twelve microphones designed by Danny van Lugt, which allowed me to capture sound spatially and with a strong sense of height. We brought the rig to two locations: an old water tower in Radio Kootwijk and a disused silo in Lage Noorden.

Rather than simply documenting these spaces, I played sounds from other vertical environments back into them and recorded how the architecture responded. The idea was to create a dialogue between vertical sites — to hear how one column of space would translate another, and how each structure would filter, stretch, and re-layer the material.

Why did you choose those sites specifically, and what were your first impressions when you visited? How did they sound?

They’re actually two very different kinds of vertical structures, and that contrast was important to me. The water tower in Radio Kootwijk is relatively closed and contained, so the acoustics feel concentrated and self-contained. The sound circulates internally — it builds up with a fast return, and creates a very focused column of resonance with a very clear and crisp long reverb trail. Like a huge bathroom.

The metal silo in Friesland, by contrast, is more open. Sound from the outside seeps into the structure, so the acoustic field feels more porous. You’re hearing not only the architecture itself, but also the surrounding environment filtering in. That permeability produces a very different spatial experience — less sealed, more contingent. We had quite some rain and wind which also played with the structure.

Those first impressions were very physical. One space felt overwhelmingly introspective and compressed; the other felt exposed and relational. That difference became leading to how I approached recording and composing with each site.

How did you approach the compositional aspect of this work?

The major challenge was how to translate the field recordings and complex acoustics into a meaningful composition — one that takes the character of the sites, their resonance, and the underlying concept into account. There’s always a delicate shift between the raw recording and the processed material: how much to preserve, how much to transform.

I was also attentive to the way external sounds bled into the structures, becoming part of the architecture’s voice. So the central question became: how do I compose with all of these parameters at once — site, scale, resonance, intrusion, and intention — without flattening their specificity?

In what ways can sound help us access or articulate the layers of history and narratives encoded in places like Radio Kootwijk, which are so implicated in Dutch colonialism?

Sound can help reveal the layers of history in places like Radio Kootwijk by thinking of sound as a kind of residue. Instead of telling history directly, I’m interested in how sound lingers in space and atmospheric traces that remain after human activity has passed. In that sense, listening becomes a way of sensing the past as something urgent but transformed. It can create a moment of reflection. I’m aware that a work might not spell everything out. Instead, it invites the listener to engage actively, using their senses and personal interpretation to fill in the gaps. The intention is to create a space where perception and reflection work together, rather than presenting a fully resolved or closed statement.

Can field recordings exist as sound objects independent of their sites, or will that context always make itself known?

Field recordings can function as sound objects in their own right, but I don’t think they are ever completely detached from their origin — there is usually a reason why they were recorded in the first place and will influence a composition. That said, I also believe that revealing too much about location or recording context can limit the listener’s imagination. Once everything is disclosed, part of the interpretive space is already filled.

How do you tread that line between context and experience for the listener?

I’m interested in working within that tension rather than resolving it. I’m not a purist when it comes to field recording. In Scalar Towers, I try to give enough context for the listener to have a starting point, a sense of site or atmosphere without fully fixing the meaning of the sound.

I value ambiguity because it allows listeners to bring their own associations and imagination. It’s about balancing contextual traces with keeping the sound open to interpretation. Artistically I need to engage with the material from a compositional perspective, it’s part of my process.

I am interested in the idea of vertical geography – thinking about the layers and elevations of landscapes and their political significance – but hadn’t thought much about this in sonic terms. What brought on your interest in verticality more broadly?

I also think about verticality in terms of layers. My interest began in mountains and vertical landscapes — in observing treelines, rock or snow lines, and other ecological thresholds that mark shifts in environment. Those visible strata made me aware that elevation creates distinct conditions. Over time, I began noticing that there are sonic thresholds as well — points where sound changes with height.

As you move upward, wind becomes more prominent, certain frequencies recede, and the density of forest or the openness of rock filters and reflects sound differently. The landscape operates as both a natural filter and resonant body. Vertical geography, then, is not only visible; it is audible.

Elevation influences who occupies certain spaces and whose voices are heard or muted. Sound can cross some boundaries while being shaped or blocked by others, making vertical space feel active rather than fixed. I’m interested in how these layered and political qualities can be experienced directly within a space.

In the mountains, you can feel both hidden and very audible — the terrain conceals you visually, but sound can carry clearly across distance. In the mountains everyone can hear you scream.

Perhaps a naïve question, but how does sound move in narrow vertical space? And how did you render or manipulate this back at the studio for spatial playback?

That’s not a naïve question at all. In vertical space, sound tends to be channelled rather than spread outward, reflections move primarily between surfaces above and below, creating rapid echoes and resonance build-up. This can produce a strong sense of height, where sound feels like it is rising, descending, or circulating In the studio, the goal wasn’t to reproduce the vertical space exactly, but to preserve the perceptual feeling of constrained vertical movement — the sense that sound is circulating upward and downward within a bounded structure. In the end I dropped a lot of microphone signals as they started to confuse the vertical sensation.

I’m going to borrow a question from the accompanying text to your 2025 album True Than Nature to end on: “What is the role of listening in understanding the world?” Have you found any answers to this through your own practice?

In my work, listening is a way of understanding the world that goes beyond information or representation. It allows me to experience environments as living, changing systems that is shaped by movement, material, atmosphere, and presence. Through projects like True Than Nature, I’ve been thinking about listening as a form of attention rather than a way of arriving at fixed answers.

I also think that this can be approached in many different ways. In the end, it is a series of personal and artistic choices and determinations that shape the outcome. Listening doesn’t reveal a single truth about the world, but opens up many possible ways of engaging with it more carefully and sensorially.

BJ Nilsen’s work will be presented as part of the second Sonic Acts Spatial Sound event at Paradiso in Amsterdam on Saturday 28th February, and the Listening Room programme which runs until 13th March.

There is a phrase in the introduction of Cal Flyn’s book Islands of Abandonment that has stayed with me since I read it a few years ago: “Every environment bears a palimpsest of its past.” In Flyn’s case, visiting sites of historic pollution, ecological collapse or urban decay, it calls us to look a little more closely. Understood in sonic terms, it’s also a phrase that could be applied to the work of Vicky Clarke and Kamila Narysheva, whose 2025 project T1/2 listens between the layers of overwrite at Semipalatinsk, a Soviet-era nuclear test site in Narysheva’s native Kazakhstan.

Semipalatinsk, also known as the Polygon, was the primary nuclear test site for the Soviet Union. Roughly the size of Belgium, the site was subject to around 450 nuclear tests between 1949 and 1989. Some were atmospheric, others were underground - all exposed the rural Kazakh population to unsafe levels of radiation without prior warning. Shut down in 1991, the environmental and public health impacts remain - a dirty legacy of geopolitical misadventure and slow violence, whose history has yet to have been fully reckoned with.

Brought together by the British Council, the remote collaboration between Manchester-based sound artist Vicky Clarke and Almaty curator and researcher Kamila Narysheva focussed on teasing out the acoustic memories of the site, using sound as a medium through which to transmit the “invisible but tangible traces of catastrophic events.”

Based on Narysheva’s in-person field recordings and subsequently manipulated and composed with Clarke into a 37-minute piece, T1/2 was premiered in the basement gallery of a former Soviet building in Almaty earlier this year, referencing not only the psychological and architectural elements of the site, but also providing a contrast to the themes of ecological repair and renewal that they encountered in the sonic environment.

What initially interested you about working at the Semipalatinsk Test Site?

[Kamila Narysheva] It started as something both distant and strangely close. My dad’s side of the family is from northern Kazakhstan, and many of them spent years living in and around Semey. Growing up, I heard stories. They were never dramatic, often quiet, but the Test Site was always somewhere in the background. It would come up in passing, but rarely in detail. That kind of heavy silence stayed with me. What drew me in was a feeling that something important had been left unprocessed, not just historically, but emotionally and culturally. I was curious about how the Test Site exists in the national imagination, and at the same time how absent it can feel. Over time, I began to see it less as a historical location and more as an ongoing condition, something that still hums quietly beneath the surface.

I also kept returning to the idea of the "half-life." Not only as a scientific term, but as a metaphor: for interrupted lives, for suspended time, for stories that were never fully told. Working at the site became a way for me to listen more carefully. Not just with my ears, but with attention and care, and with a willingness to sit with things that resist easy explanation.

In many ways, working on T1/2 has been a way of trying to get closer to that unspoken legacy. It’s about listening for what hasn’t been said, or couldn’t be said, across generations.

What does the site feel like when you are there? And what does it sound like?

[KN] Being there is unsettling in a quiet way. Not dramatic like in the documentaries. No warning signs, no spectacle. Just steppe stretching endlessly, snow in winter, dry grasses, a few crumbling structures. The silence is thick, as if something has been pulled out of the air. The stillness feels off, charged by what you know happened there. The site sounds almost like nothing. Wind. Footsteps. But that absence becomes its own sound. I recorded through different mics, pipes, soil, concrete remains, all gently vibrating with air and time.

Wind on the steppe

And within that stillness, there’s a kind of quiet resilience. Grasses push through. Birds nest in old impact sites, horses graze along the road. The land hasn’t forgotten, but it’s learning to hold both damage and recovery at once.

What kind of recordings did you make and what were you interested in discovering through making these recordings?

[KN] I was interested in how different materials and surfaces at the site might hold onto memory. I used contact microphones on rusted debris, geophones in the soil, hydrophones in bodies of water. One of the most striking moments was submerging a hydrophone into the Atomic Lake, a crater lake on the site, and into the Irtysh River, which had once supplied the Test Site’s industrial operations. These recordings felt deeply charged, not just acoustically but symbolically.

Decay of materials, Atomic Lake

While some recordings were passive, letting the environment unfold, I also experimented with more direct interventions. At one point, I attached a contact mic to a slab of concrete and struck the exposed metal rods embedded in it, trying to trace how impact traveled through forgotten infrastructure. I paid close attention to elements that made the Polygon function: the railroads, the river, the built and broken systems of extraction and logistics. These were often overlooked in how the site is represented, but I saw them as central to its acoustic and political history.

What I hoped to discover was not a single truth but a layered acoustic image. The recordings are not illustrative or explanatory. They ask you to spend time, to attune yourself to the site’s more subtle expressions: what still vibrates, what barely moves.

[Vicky Clarke] The range of recordings was fascinating to listen back to, from vast open expansive wind from the Steppe to subterranean bunker recordings to the inside of concrete and metal rods and debris. We undertook a listening and categorisation process that was initially anonymous, so Kamila sent me the recordings, and I listened without the knowledge of what they were. It was interesting to compare what I imagined the sounds to be and then Kamila revealed the recording details. I found this fascinating as my practice is inspired by concrete techniques and approaches, considering sound without context, so I saw these samples as sonic fragments or atoms that had innate qualities. I am very much in the camp of letting sounds speak for themselves, letting the material guide you through the composition process. For myself who wasn’t able to go physically to the site, I wanted to discover and relate to the location through the recordings themselves.

How did you process, manipulate and compose using the original recordings?

[VC] In general we wanted to stay true to the material recordings and not process them too much, enabling the listener to become as close to the source sounds as possible. Where we added some manipulations for dramatic effect, for example there is a drone sequence created out of layered planes and pitches, it was important that these were made from the field recorded material and not inserting a synthesiser line that might take it away from its source.

Planes and industrial noise recording

There was so much depth in terms of frequency content to play will, lots of low and moody rumbles and claustrophobic feelings to glitch small micro sounds so it was important that each sound was heard and ordered, so where needed there was of course some small EQ here and there, and even with field recordings these are already edits, choices made at the time of recording, so there is already an imprint. Another dynamic of working with the micro to the expansive sounds was to enable them to inhibit space. As a durational piece (37 mins), sounds needed to breathe and allow the listener to inhabit them before transitioning into something new, so changes often happened subtly and slowly to evolve to new sound spheres.

There was a key section of the piece where we did manipulate sound recordings, in order to purposely and drastically degrade them over time, an artistic motif to convey the poetic ideas of decay and transformation.

Expanding on this, could you explain the relationship between radionuclides, decay and regeneration that is also central to this project?

[VC] At the start of our collaboration we brainstormed ideas, influences and what inspired us sonically around the theme of Half Life ((T½) is the time required for a quantity (of substance) to reduce to half of its initial value), we had many cross overs including deep time, technological materiality and transmutation. We thought it would be interesting to develop an algorithm that could decay sound material itself, so we developed a Half Life Max MSP patch that deconstructed recorded samples from the Polygon and used these within our piece. A key reference point was Togzhan Kassenova’s Atomic Steppe book, which lists the half lives of the radionuclides found on the Steppe, these include Carbon, Tritium, Strontium. From here we mapped and translated these (often very long) time intervals into more musical temporalities (i.e. number of seconds rather than years) that would take a sample at full fidelity and move to total degradation through an exponential curve.

We made this into a Max4live patch for use on [music production software] Ableton so we could both experiment, so the user adds the effect to a channel, draws a curve, presses go, and you can hear the sample degrading over time. This was an interesting creative process as depending on the time interval and steepness of the curve, you can get lost within a sample’s materiality.

For our composition we degraded lots of the materials and added these within a key section of the piece. Crucially although it is a degrading curve, the material never disappears to nothing, it has become transformed into something new, reflecting a recurring motif of our project, that material transmutes into something else, that life finds a way.

In her book Curated Decay, Caitlin DeSilvey talks of how artistic interventions can serve to both create new narratives and rehabilitate sites of historical violence. How did you navigate this tension between the site’s dark history and the aesthetic needs of an artistic project?

[KN] This was a central concern for us throughout the project. We were aware that any artistic approach would inevitably reframe the site in some way, and we wanted to be careful not to aestheticise or simplify its traumatic history. Rather than aiming to represent or explain the site, we focused on creating a space for deep listening and attention, something that invites reflection without offering closure.

The sound installation was intentionally minimal and immersive. We kept the space dark, slow, and physically quiet, so that the audience could engage with the material in a bodily, open-ended way. We didn’t want to dramatize or illustrate the history. Instead, we were interested in holding space for what continues to resonate: what is still felt, even when it’s not directly visible or audible.

Equally important to us was grounding the work beyond the gallery space. From the beginning, I planned a public programme alongside the installation, inviting artists, researchers, and community members, especially those from Semey and nearby regions, to contribute. I saw this as a way to shift the frame of the project away from isolated artistic authorship and toward something more collective, situated, and accountable. Creating space for those voices felt essential to the integrity of the work.

Has the project changed the way you think about the site?

[KN] Yes, profoundly. Before starting the project, most of what I had encountered about the Test Site came from media and documentary sources that focused almost entirely on suffering and catastrophe. While those narratives are real and important, they often stop at victimhood. They rarely highlight the strength, resistance, and ongoing efforts of the communities who live with the consequences. That shaped how I initially perceived the site, as a place defined by devastation.

But spending time there, listening closely, and meeting people whose lives are still entangled with that landscape changed everything. The site is marked by violence, but it’s also marked by persistence. Not in a symbolic or romantic way, but in the quiet, everyday forms of resilience. Grasses grow. Animals return. People remember, adapt, and continue to fight for recognition and justice.

This shifted how I listened and how I approached the work. I began to understand the site not just as a historical wound, but as a space where life keeps asserting itself. There is power in that, power in survival, in the ability to carry on without resolution. The project didn’t offer closure, but it gave me a deeper respect for what endures and what refuses to be erased.

I first came across Max Ritts’ work while I was doing my masters a few years ago, reading about ocean noise pollution. Of all the papers I encountered, Ritts’ work on conservation acoustics with Karen Bakker struck a chord, not least because it took a critical approach to the use of sound in conservation practices with their own set of political and economic imperatives.

Assistant Professor of Geography at Clark University, and about to take up a position at Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) in July 2025 where he is originally from, Ritts’ new book A Resonant Ecology takes some of these ideas and applies them to a long-standing fieldwork engagement with the First Nations territories of the North Coast in Canada, exploring sonic expressions both in a conservation and a cultural context - from whale song to indigenous noise music.

Interrogating the use of nature sounds and underwater recordings to showcase the region’s wildlife, Ritts explores how “colonial capital can co-opt sonic efforts to protect the coast” and illuminates the ways in which sound is exploited as a data resource in its own right. Working across scales and communities - human and non-human - to expose how sound can both perpetuate and refuse capitalist colonialism, “Ritts challenges the idea that the sonic realm is inherently liberatory and reveals sound to be a powerfully uncertain object.”

Or as he tells me over video call, sound is not necessarily an object at all, but a set of relations. Instead, drawing on Stuart Hall’s assessment of cultural studies, Ritts is interested in “understanding the terrain of struggle through sound”. In what was a sprawling and detailed interview, I’ve pulled together parts of our conversations in which Ritts introduces the idea of sonic capital and unpacks some of his nuanced approach to sound as an area of study in geography and ethnographic research, in the hope that it will lead you to explore his work – the recent publication A Resonant Ecology – in more detail.

I was initially drawn to your work because it was one of the few places where I’d read a nuanced critique of an assumed inherent virtue in sound. In A Resonant Ecology you describe this as “the notion that recent turns to sound are inherently progressive in nature and, if properly socialized, will only aid in the realization of ecological consciousness needed today.” I thought this would be a nice place to start.

There is a lot of good geography work around the critique of sound that I was drawing from in the space of capitalism and colonialism. Michael Gallagher, Jonathan Prior, AM Kanngieser and Sandra Jasper were all doing work in this area. I was reading a lot of sound studies too. Jonathan Sterne and his idea of the Audiovisual litany really informs the critique - that sound is invested with these ecological qualities, as mystical, as apparently spherical, as intimate, and that somehow positions it as better or superior to an objectifying, distancing vision.

I think we need to interrogate that assumption, and the point of A Resonant Ecology's theoretical introduction is to say that sound is a non-innocent object of ecological politics, and for all these reasons. For the fact that it can be used for digital capture and surveillance, but also for the way that noise gets mobilised continuously to marginalise and suppress particular perspectives and voices, and of course indigenous peoples and whales have differently experienced that history.

I wanted to make the point that to study these kinds of tendencies we need to take very careful consideration of place. If you take the totality of sound cultures in one specific place at once specific time then you have to be more attentive to the tensions and contradictions around the progressive ecological valences of noise. The community in Dodge Cove could be articulating this ecological politics around sound preservation while also not necessarily questioning their settled-ness as white settlers to the area. Well, noise in music is articulated very differently for a different community that's in the same development context. In other words, the geography part is really important. It's all happening on the North Coast at around the same time, and that allows you to test these assumptions about whether sound is inherently good or not.

One specifically technoscientific initiative you look at is the application of what is called SmartOceans. Could you explain what this is and how it provided a lens for tehse ideas?

SmartOceans was a proposal from this initiative Ocean Networks Canada to wire the coast for sustainable development. It runs on the assumption that ecological spaces can be managed more efficiently, more responsively through the intermediation of digital technologies - so smart meaning smart technological networks, of sensors and data capture and so forth. It's a very appealing pitch, and I think in the chapter I relate some of the successes of their pitch because people were faced with little alternative vision for the coast. We're going to get development, we're going to get shipping, we might as well deal with it the best that we can and maybe we can even train our kids and get some new jobs in the meantime.

What is the sonic component of the SmartOceans project?

A lot of it is hydrophones, but there are other kinds of sound recording technologies and whole arrays of underwater sensing tools. Accelerometers, and instruments to measure salinity and depth and other kinds of noise and vibration. It's all being data-fied and turned into predictable management data streams that can be implemented for decision making. Hydrophones would be the one that links to whales directly, but it also included things like geological sounds, the idea being that maybe there'd be a vibration from an earthquake that they could capture acoustically before it hit the region.

What impact is this hoped to have on the relationship between whales and shipping?

The vision is being realised in the Lower Mainland, which is to reroute shipping lines, and one day, in a fantasy, maybe whales themselves could be rerouted by appealing to them acoustically somehow. But right now, it’s moving shipping lanes in accordance with sightings or soundings of whales, and implementing vessel slow-downs.

Could you explain how this relates to your idea of sonic capital?

One way to look at it is to look at the ocean noise question in more detail. I'm not saying that ocean noise is the sound of capital because it happens to be the sound that ships make when they transport commodities around the world. What I'm saying though is that sonic capital emerges as an input to capital’s valorisation. Specifically, what you have is the creation of all sorts of new assets like different kinds of algorithm technologies that attempt to predict or regularise behaviours of animals by listening to them more carefully, because of the ocean noise issue.

What I'm talking about is that these services, these commodities that come out of managing ocean noise, are tools of risk assessment and these tools are examples of sonic capital, because they create value for service providers. They're basically selling these services off the back of an acoustically injured animal or the risk of an acoustically injured animal, and the service package is an example of sonic capital generation. It's the example of how sound provides input to capital’s valorisation to the realisation of new streams of capital. It's not the ocean noise, it's the service that is sonically mediated that comes out of the response to the ocean noise.

It begs the question then for whom the bioacoustics monitoring of an environment is useful and to what end?

Like with Andreas Malm's book Fossil Capital, his point is that when capital passes through carbon and combusts to create carbon dioxide, value is being created for certain people, namely for the owners of the oil companies, even though we're all facing the effects of the production of carbon dioxide. And in a similar sense, ocean noise is a generalised effect, but the profits for dealing with it go to certain people.

I want to return to another quote in the introduction of A Resonant Ecology which caught my attention and I think follows on from this discussion nicely: “The proposition of sound as a kind of freely available resource has gained a wide institutional uptake: raw material for extractive industries, digital arts, surveillance states and innovative techno-sciences alike.”

This is something we can trace across multiple concurrent streams of cultural activity. The growing interest in eco-management, in sound art, the accessibility of certain new kinds of sound art - in site-specific installations and in conservation work - is all being enabled by digitalisation. There is a lot to say about tracing those concurrences out in more detail and if I have time I'd like to do that at some point.

In your 2021 paper Conservation Acoustics, co-authored with Karen Bakker, you talk about sound as digital data containing the promise “of disembodied experience, in which we learn by staring at screens rather than by sensing the world around us.” I wonder if you could expand on this a little bit?

When I think about this I try to resist the impulse to nostalgia, because I think there is a real desire to say something as simple as “scientists used to listen and now they don’t listen anymore”. And that almost gets into the acoustic ecology moment that I'm not trying to associate myself with. It is a romanisation of listening, which then becomes a question of privilege of who gets to do those things. I think scientists have long treated sound as a data input and done great things with it despite the fact that they've been objectifying it and putting it into statistical graphs.

I think the best scientists that I've met are the ones who are able to do that and also demonstrate empathetic listening and creative listening. It's these multidimensional appreciations that I want to cultivate in my critique in the book, and these are the people I end up learning from the most.

I suppose one possible consequence of treating sound as data is that it can remove context, affect and the space for uncertainty or ambiguity?

Another paper I wrote with Jennifer Gabrys and Trishant Simlai when I was working on the SmartForests project identified this weird tendency to equate the conservation priorities of elephants and tigers with the detection of poachers, both of which rely on acoustic means. Gunshot detection algorithms were being used by forests and park services in Central Africa to allow these systems to identify both would be poachers and would be protected animals.

And yet it's the same idea, the same logic that would identify either of them, meaning a signal that is picked up on an algorithmic system that classifies it as this or that, and the fact that the poacher could be a conservationist figure or it could be a farmer, is not allowed within that system. And likewise the animal might not be an animal at all, it might be misidentified. So there are these emerging ambiguities around the human and the non-human as well as between the classifications of the human and the non-human.

Which challenges this idea of sound as a stable entity that can be reliably interpreted for meaning?

Yeah, exactly. It's the abstraction and the consolidation of a single sound object rather than a set of relations - a web of relations. It’s that idea from Pierre Schaffer that there is great pressure to achieve a kind of narrative structure. We will never get to the sound itself. It's impossible to listen without a narrative.

A Resonant Ecology is published by Duke University Press.

In early 2024, Belgian artist Elise Guillaume was selected for the "EMBracing the Ocean" artist-in-residence programme organised by the European Marine Board. Having recently completed Arctic film project Eventual Horizon, in which she was particularly struck by the audience’s emotional responses to her use of sound, Guillaume began to explore the ways in which underwater recordings might engender feelings of surprise, awe or emotional connection with a realm typically outside of the reach of human hearing.

Working with environmental psychologist Marine Severin and acoustic ecologist Clea Parcerisas, Guillaume developed a sound project called Waves of Resonance, incorporating underwater recordings of both anthropogenic (human-made) noise such as pile driving and boat engine revs, and biological sounds of crustacean stridulation, dolphin whistles and fish recorded in the North Sea and the Arctic.

Working at the intersection of psychology, ecology and notions of care in our relationship with the natural world, Guillaume’s work treads the line between hope and grief, following an intuitive thread across disciplines and mediums - whether sonic, visual or installation-based - that asks a familiar but fiendishly difficult question: in what way can artistic practice intervene in and amplify scientific research about the environment?

With Waves of Resonance set to be displayed alongside new work at Guillaume’s next solo exhibition, Par le corps (Through the body), at La Chapelle Jeanne d’Arc - a contemporary art centre located in a deconsecrated chapel in Thouars, France - Guillaume invited her collaborators Marine Severin and Clea Parcerisas to join her in answering a few questions for Through Sounds, providing a multi-disciplinary take on the emotive impact of underwater sound, from the perspectives of an artist, a psychologist and an acoustic ecologist.

Tell me about the background to Waves of Resonance to begin with. What sparked your interest in working with marine sounds?

Elise: Last year, I made Eventual Horizon, a film in which I express a parallel between the experience of mourning a loved one and ecological degradation in the Arctic. It considers grief, in a time of climate crisis, as an active step towards hope. The film’s soundscape is made from Arctic field recordings including the sounds of carving glaciers, melting glaciers and sea ice. When Eventual Horizon started being shown in exhibitions and festivals, the film received emotional responses which gave way to some really meaningful conversations.

While I’ve always been interested in art’s potential to raise awareness and create forms of togetherness, I also question the extent to which art can have an impact. I wanted to explore whether certain marine sounds evoke specific emotions, and if so, whether these emotional responses could deepen our connection with the ocean, to understand if this emotional engagement could enact behavioural change. So, Waves of Resonance is an opportunity to look into that.

What have you discovered or learned so far about ocean acoustics in developing this project? And what emotional impact has it had on you?

Elise: Quite early on in our collaboration, Clea shared a recording of the sound of pile driving for windmill construction in the North Sea. Listening to this high intensity impulse noise was exhausting and violent to some extent. I learnt that recent studies showed that pile driving noise was killing some species of small fish and with the increasing evidence of the damage it produces to marine life, more attention and legislation is currently being put into place to diminish the negative impacts. New technologies to lower the sound levels have been and are still currently being developed. With Clea, I also heard some biological sounds I’d never heard before, like the sound of fish which was amazingly surprising to hear.

Marine: I have learned about the large diversity in ocean sounds and the sometimes surprising nature of these sounds. For example, listening to dolphin whistles is not what I had imagined and I initially thought the sound was anthropic. Listening to crustacean sounds has also been a marvel as I was exposed to sounds I’ve never heard before. Learning about the nature of these sounds gives me a sense of closeness to marine life, making it appear more real and alive.

How big a problem is underwater noise pollution and what challenges do we face in addressing it?

Clea: Underwater noise is a current topic of concern for policymakers, as in recent years there has been growing evidence of the adverse impact it has on marine life. The main source of noise is shipping, which is present overall in the world (see this link for an image), but the recent increase in the development of offshore wind farms is also of growing concern. Piling is a very local, short-timed, extremclimateely loud sound, while shipping is a less loud, global, constant source of noise.

It is complicated to protect the ocean from noise pollution while at the same time not blocking the necessary transition to greener energies such as wind energy, which is expected to double in Europe by 2030. For reducing shipping noise there are currently no plug-and-play solutions, so research is currently designing ships that will be less loud in the future. A common proposal by experts in the meanwhile is to ask ships to slow down, as then they are quieter at the same time that they reduce their carbon emissions. This is ecologically interesting but might go against the expansion and fast-delivery wishes of certain shipping companies.

The only thing playing an advantage to the reduction of underwater noise pollution is that once the polluting source stops, the pollution is not there anymore (which is not the case for chemicals and plastics for example).

How would you like to see this project progress and do you have any further outcomes in mind?

Elise: In terms of how the work will be shown— I’m thinking of Waves of Resonance as a sound project which will express itself through a series of iterations that continue to evolve over time. Similar to the research workshops, every iteration of the work will provide us with new insights, creating a feedback loop of new research for the next iteration of the project. In my next solo exhibition, Par le corps, opening at La Chapelle Jeanne d’Arc on the 22nd March, an iteration of Waves of Resonance will be presented as a surround soundscape in the crypt of the chapel. Through sound spatialisation shaped according to the crypt’s architecture, and a dim green light emanating from a sculptural work made with seaweed, the work hopes to offer an immersive listening experience.

What power do you think sound has to communicate aspects of the climate crisis that other mediums do not?

Elise: As a filmmaker, I find myself increasingly questioning the role and impact of images. In an era where we are inundated with countless visuals every day, it seems we are developing an immunity to their affect—a form of desensitisation, which is perhaps a coping mechanism reaction. Working solely with sound has been fascinating to understand the relationships between image and sound in regards to affect and the climate crisis. During research workshops for Waves of Resonance, some participants described that they conjured images through memory or imagination during their listening experience which then led them to feel a form of proximity towards the ocean and a willingness to protect it. I’m curious about how sound can teach us to see the invisible.

Marine: I think that the climate crisis is mostly communicated through visual mediums, which can enable a strong emotional impact, as already shown in scientific studies. However, much less is known in terms of the impact of using sound in climate communication, although I expect it to also be efficient due to the strong link between nostalgia and sound. Sound can be easily connected to memory and so any positive experience of the coast can potentially be recalled when listening to ocean sounds. Recalling these experiences will likely increase closeness to the ocean and a willingness to protect it. Another dimension is the potential of ocean sounds to induce awe, especially as they are sounds that we are typically not exposed to. Awe makes you feel smaller in comparison to the vastness and grandeur of what you are perceiving. It is a “self-transcendent emotion”, enabling a sense of connection to other entities, which in this case would be the ocean.

What role has listening and natural soundscapes played in your life? Do you have strong memories related to sounds when you were growing up or is this something you have come to as an adult?

Elise: I’ve always loved being outdoors but I started listening to natural soundscapes, perhaps more consciously, as an adult. I got into field sound recording kind of accidently actually. Five years ago, I was on my way to join La Wayaka Current, an artist residency in the Atacama Desert. Just before getting picked up by the organisers, I was robbed and all of my filmmaking gear got stolen. Since I no longer had my own gear, a friend from the residency loaned me their Zoom H5 recorder and some earphones. It was my first time recording sound. I remember listening to the earth cracking as I walked on the desert ground and the howling wind brushing chachacoma plants. I was in awe. Through listening, I discovered a new sense of proximity, presence and wonder towards the earth. Since then, my way of being in the world and how I approach my practice as an artist and filmmaker has completely changed.

Marine: I have always been in love with music but I don’t think I’ve really exposed myself to natural soundscapes before taking part in this project. I remember listening to the soundpiece that Elise created made me feel very nostalgic and made me feel immersed in my prior experiences at sea, such as swimming and hearing that specific echo when you put your head underwater.

What role do you think artistic or creative interventions can play in bringing scientific research to a wider audience?

Marine: I think that artistic or creative interventions can help the public relate to or connect with the scientific research. For me, art is feeling, and so presenting a certain research topic or finding through art enables the public to feel, and as it is well known in psychology, emotion and action are deeply intertwined. I’m not sure however if these feelings always lead to understanding, which is what scientists usually aim to generate, but perhaps in some cases a strong emotion leads to greater action than a solid understanding.

Clea: I think science is very disconnected from the rest of the population, kind of a very tight closed bubble. Scientific results often do not even reach the right policymakers, and it is only by communicating these findings and results with the wider public that they can have a positive impact on society. This cannot be done using scientific language, as it is complicated to understand when not in the field (and even when in the field!), so using art as a means of communication to the wider audience has great potential to act as a very necessary translation tool.

Elise: This is a question I ask myself a lot as an artist. Of course, I agree with Clea and Marine’s points above, but I also think it really depends on the context in which the work is being presented too. Showing an artwork in a public space is very different to showing it in a gallery. Something which I’ve found very special through our collaboration with Marine and Clea is that it is reciprocal. We work together and the project contributes to advancing our respective research and work. So far, the research workshops have taken place in both scientific and cultural contexts with participants from very different backgrounds. My hope is that Waves of Resonance will continue to evolve in multiple contexts and reach even wider audiences.

Elise Guillaume’s new exhibition Par le corps opens at La Chapelle Jeanne d’Arc, in Thouars, France on 20th March and runs until 22nd September 2025.

In early 2024, I was fortunate enough to meet artist and researcher Juan Cortés in Bogotá. I had come to learn about his work with the sound of soil, and in particular a body of work called A Tale of Two Seeds: Sound and Silence in Latin America's Andean Plains.

Using field recording, data sonification and immersive audio-visual storytelling, the work explores how ‘pirate’, transgenic (or genetically modified) seeds and indiscriminate herbicide use have resulted in the degradation of Colombia’s soils and the erosion of its indigenous practices. In linking processes across scales that are otherwise intangible, Cortés’ practice treats sound as a witness to ecological collapse.

Made alongside UK-based studio Semantica (Jemma Foster and Camilla French) and Atractor Estudio (Alejandro Villegas, Juan José López and Juan Quiñonez) in Colombia, A Tale of Two Seeds won the Are Electronica Prize for Digital Musics and Sound Art in 2023.

“Sometimes we need to be able to touch subjects like soil in a different way, to perceive them from a different perspective,” he tells me, outlining creative methods that blur the boundaries between scientific research and investigative journalism. “I do think that sound art – and art in general – can draw lines between ideas that have become disconnected.” Trans-disciplinarity, he explains, is crucial in addressing multifaceted challenges such as environmental degradation, social injustice, and cultural memory.

When I met Cortés again in London a few months later, I was excited to learn that he would be presenting a new work with Semantica called As Above So Below at a forthcoming Somerset House exhibition SOIL: The World At Our Feet. And then, in late 2024, I was commissioned by Sonic Acts to write an article about Cortés’ work for their annual publication Ecoes.

With the Somerset House show now open, what follows is a short section of my interview with Juan Cortés, originally published in Ecoes in January 2025 with the title Sounding out the Subterranean.

A massive thank you to Hannah Pezzack of Sonic Acts for commissioning and editing the feature. Click here to buy a copy of the magazine, which also includes Salomé Voegelin, Shortwave Collective, Charlemagne Palestine, Jacek Smolicki and many more.

I am particularly interested in this idea of sound as a witness to the degradation of the soil. Could expand on this idea of sonic witnessing more generally?

Certainly. Sound holds immense potential as a witness to ecological collapse, particularly regarding subterranean environments where visual observation is limited. Acoustic signals can reveal vital information about biological activity, soil composition, and the presence of fauna. The diminishment or alteration of these sounds can indicate disruptions within the ecosystem that might precede visible signs of degradation.

By employing techniques from acoustic ecology and bioacoustics, we can monitor the health of ecosystems through their soundscapes. For example, changes in the acoustic signatures of soil – such as reduced activity from microorganisms or invertebrates – can signal declining soil health. Sound, therefore, becomes an early detection system, alerting us to ecological disturbances that may not yet be apparent through other means.

And in the context of ecological collapse, sound not only documents change, but also serves as a medium for storytelling and memory. It can capture the loss of biodiversity and the silencing of natural environments, making abstract concepts of environmental degradation more palpable. As the soundscape ecologist Bernie Krause notes, the collective voices of ecosystems – the biophony – are critical indicators of environmental integrity. I think that sound is an amazing way to create not just an emotional, but also a sensory connection to the soil as an organism.

This brings us nicely on to your new commission, As Above So Below, which is presented at Somerset House exhibition, SOIL: The World At Our Feet in London. What can we expect?

This work emerged from a conversation with Semantica. Lately, we've been thinking about how the technification of agriculture, combined with advancements in computational biology, often excludes essential criteria needed to fully understand biological organisms, such as soil.

In South America techno-colonialism appears to be imposing itself as the only viable future. Innovators in the tech industry promise algorithms to enhance efficiency in crop production, despite the unsustainability of such models. The logic of monoculture continues to devastate biodiversity; agricultural frontiers expand, leading to deforestation, and land use becomes increasingly limited, prioritising private investment – especially foreign – over ecological considerations.

Within this context, the commission for Somerset House – As Above So Below – involves replicating a well-known computational model used to simulate soil behaviour, including its chemical changes, and the bacteria, fungi and networks that inhabit and constitute it. However, we introduce a pivotal alteration, connecting the model to an API that tracks the stock market, specifically focusing on companies developing agricultural technology, to incorporate this variable into the simulation. Through this, we pose questions such as: How are the temporal processes of soil affected by the vast influx of new crop accelerators? What impact do herbicides and the primary products of agro-industry have on soil sustainability?

One of the principal focuses of the project is sound. Incorporating sound allows us to translate complex data and ecological transformations into sensory experiences that can be more readily apprehended by the public. By sonifying data related to soil degradation and financial market fluctuations, we aim to reveal the often-invisible entanglements between ecological systems and global economic dynamics.

It seems we are witnessing an unprecedented interest in organisms and systems like mycelium – both in the arts and popular culture – that are challenging to fully comprehend without imaginative responses.

We are governed by so many intangible forces. Our connection to the earth, to fungi, is a way to root ourselves again – not in a ‘hippy’ sense, but as a genuine recognition that we are part of intrinsically interlinked systems. These are our food systems; we depend on them. If we don’t put our hands in the soil, we’re going to be completely screwed.

Ecoes #7 is out now. Order a copy here and find out more about visiting SOIL: The World Beneath our Feet at Somerset House here.

I first came across Dr Usue Ruiz Arana’s research at an event in a small gallery space in Dalston called Microscope in June 2024. It was the launch of her new book Urban Soundscapes: A Guide to Listening for Landscape Architecture and Urban Design, and sounds from the street outside - cars passing on Kingsland Road, people chatting at the wine bar next door, the rhythmic clacking of stolen Lime bikes - were bleeding in through the open window.

In doing so, these sounds were making a point for the urgency of Ruiz Arana’s work, which emphasises the value of affective, embodied listening in the way our cities are designed and experienced.

Or as her introduction succinctly puts it: “The guide invites landscape architects and urban designers to become soundscape architects and offers practical advice on sound and listening applicable to each stage of a design project: from reading the environment to intervening on it.”

Another thing that drew me to the work that day was the breadth of disciplines represented in the room. Ruiz Arana may be a landscape architect, researcher and lecturer at Newcastle University, but she was fielding questions from educators, engineers and artists alike. It felt like a live space for interdisciplinary discussion - where policy meets practice and chartered acoustic surveyors were taking notes from the teachings of experimental composers.

One such composer is Pauline Oliveros, whose Deep Listening practices have been an inspiration to me (and of course countless others), working in the composition and appreciation of music. When I finally got hold of Ruiz Arana’s book, I was excited to see Oliveros’ approach to listening threaded through her approach to landscape architecture. Exploring sonic methodologies - such as soundwalks and auralisations - are key to Ruiz Arana’s writing, both to offer new skills for practicing architects and to attune us all to the particularities and materialities of our sound environments.

I was thrilled then when Usue Ruiz Arana agreed to answer some questions about her work for Through Sounds, opening up her thinking on a wide range of topics, some quite literally concrete, others a little more ephemeral - from pedestrianisation and acoustic refuges to sonic gentrification, memory and multispecies soundscape design.

I love this notion of a “soundscape architect” and your proposition that “landscape architects and urban designers are soundscape composers”. Could you give an example of this composition in action?

Landscape architects and urban designers compose soundscapes, whether consciously or not, through the spaces that they create, and the communities and uses that those spaces nurture. Communities and uses are sound events, as are the morphology and materiality of those spaces that in turn determine how sound travels within them.

When designing the public realm of a neighbourhood, for example, we can avoid constant hums by keeping car circulation and car parking to the perimeter and encouraging pedestrian-priority streetscapes. Within these streetscapes we can craft spaces for informal play and socialisation that lead to a vibrant soundscape of voices that connects residents to their environment. We can introduce planting to soften hard surfaces and minimise reverberation, and to increase biodiversity and their sonic expression. We can orientate buildings and street furniture, such as low walls, to create acoustic refuges or quieter spaces. We can provide a variety of surfaces to step on and sound. The possibilities are endless, and can really make a difference to how those spaces are used and valued.

In that regard I was excited to see composer Pauline Oliveros appear throughout the book too. What inspires you about her work and to what extent are the practices you set out for architects and designers analogous to those she set out for composers in Deep Listening?

One of the aspects that attracted me to Pauline Oliveros work in the first place, as a landscape architect, was her understanding that anyone could be a composer and a performer, making music and sound art accessible and inclusive. And that proposition is so valid when thinking about urban soundscapes that are composed by a multitude of communities. Deep Listening can be a way of actively involving communities in designing urban soundscapes through the production and performance of written scores, for example.

I have been delving into Deep Listening more recently, completing an intensive course with the Center for Deep Listening at Rensselaer, which has made the connection with the design practices that I advocate for even more apparent. A focus on Deep Listening leads to care-full landscape architecture and urban design processes and approaches. For example, the two modes of listening, focal and global, that Oliveros proposes can be integrated into practices for reading soundscapes as a starting point for intervening on them. Through focal listening we pay attention to others and acknowledge their presence and contribution to landscapes. Through global listening we immerse ourselves in landscapes and design from the myriad of connections that we sense in the process, more care-fully.

In her book Quantum Listening, Oliveros talks about Deep Listening as “exploring the relationships among any and all sounds, whether natural or technological, intended or unintended, real, remembered or imaginary”. How could landscape architecture and urban design engage with these more intangible sounds in particular?

Landscapes, whether urban or rural, are made up of many layers - physical, cultural, and natural – that are constantly evolving. Some of those layers are visible, palpable, audible, such as the vegetation of a site. Some others are intangible, held within collective associations and memories of places, or as possibilities or imaginaries. Sounds are intrinsically linked to those intangible layers, and listening enables us to decipher them. For example, sounds can trigger specific memories and associations, which might be helpful to bring attention or express the historic layers of a site. There is an example in the book of a project in Glasgow, the high street Goodsyard, where we used sound as a way to connect communities with a culverted and forgotten burn that played a key role in the development of the medieval city. In the book I also introduce several aural effects associated with memory that can be useful for design.

The introduction to your book begins with your own sonic memories of places from your childhood. What is it that makes these memories so evocative?

We have all cried to music, and responses to soundscapes can be equally emotive. Soundscapes can trigger memories and instantly transport us to places, times, and people that we feel deeply connected to. Some of those connections might be individual, based on live experiences, such as the underwater listening that opens the book. Some other connections are collective, ingrained in particular cultures, such as the soundscapes created by local events or soundmarks that I narrate. These intangible place and culture connections that soundscapes can trigger have a place in landscape and urban design.

Since the book came out, I have been heartened by how these sonic memories have awoken others in readers, particularly in acoustic engineers, who perhaps focus more on technical aspects in their daily work and see an opportunity to expand into more creative and affective sonic methods.

How would the built environment sound if it had been designed by thinking with our ears rather than with our eyes?

Such an interesting question. More varied, for sure. A way to imagine what it would sound like is to think through urban planning decisions that have not been made through ears. For example, mixed-use developments that haven’t considered or addressed in their design the sonic consequences of mixing residential with commercial uses. Or streetscapes where cars dominate leaving little space for community uses (human and non-human) and their sonic vibrance. Or parks covered with pristine lawns devoid of food for pollinators and their buzzing. I hope one of our readers takes up the challenge of crafting such a soundscape!

Why do you think it is that noise pollution is still not taken seriously as an environmental stressor? And more specifically why have landscape architecture and urban design practices also tended to avoid addressing it?

There is a political and economic dimension to why noise pollution is still not taken seriously. In the introduction to the book, I describe the plights of neighbours in Hondarribia [in Spain], who are unable to sleep in the summer due to the active and long nightlife. Tourism and nightlife contribute greatly to the economy of the city and are currently prioritised in decision making over the neighbours’ right to rest. This is just but one example of decisions that are not made with ears. We also do not have the resources in place to monitor live sounds across cities. Noise policies require noise maps to be produced and measures to be implemented based on them, but these maps are static and only capture certain sound sources. That said there are some great citizen science projects happening across the world geared towards collecting live noise pollution.

As a society, we also take noise pollution as inevitable, a consequence of living in urban environments or close to industry. This might well be because we don’t fully grasp the health and well-being effects of continuous exposure to noise. It is a less tangible polluter than others, yet it affects not only our hearing but also our quality of life and longevity, and that of other species too.

I wonder whether there is an element to this debate about the fact that we all listen differently, and experiences of noise are highly subjective. How do you navigate the question that “we do not all hear equally” when designing urban space?

I experience diverse listening through my own kids and their reactions. For example, in my hometown back in Spain, where there are many street celebrations that gather many people and can get quite noisy, my youngest really suffers whereas my other two kids are not troubled by it at all. Having acoustic refuges nearby to retreat to if needed can be very useful in those situations. We all hear differently, and our hearing evolves in time. A key element for the design of inclusive urban spaces that enable multiple listeners to understand and explore those spaces is to engage diverse communities in the design. Community engagement can include soundwalks to assess existing soundscape and active involvement in projecting how places will sound like in the future through co-production of auralisations for example.

Sound and silence also have social and class connotations that are governed by who or what is allowed to make or demand it. How can design intervene in the relationship between sound and gentrification?

Urban spaces can be designed to be inclusive and accessible to all communities and sound can contribute to how welcomed people feel in the public realm. In the book I introduce four principles for soundscape design that are key for understanding and exploring environments and can play a role in preventing gentrification: legibility, coherence, variety, and narrative.

Legibility is linked to way finding and coherence to how the different elements of the environment can be read as a whole. Making places accessible, that is, avoiding barriers to their use, is key to both legibility and coherence, and some of those barriers might be sonic. For example, sonic interventions have been employed to deter homeless people sleeping at night, displacing them. They are also used to deter a variety of animals. Ensuring spaces, as they evolve, remain connected with people’s daily routines and homes is also key to their legibility and use, and soundmarks can be helpful to that end.

To take this one step further, how does one begin to integrate non-human health into soundscape design?

It requires a nuanced approach to design that acknowledges diverse, species specific ways of listening, sensing, and responding to sound. For example, whereas low frequency sounds stimulate growth in certain fungi, they can also impair bird communication. So, there might be competing needs that need assessing and addressing.

Integrating multiple points of listening or sensing into soundscape design begins with an in-depth understanding of the species inhabiting a place and their particular responses to existing and prospective sounds. And it ends with a holistic approach that considers how to best cater for all species across a site and for certain species within a specific habitat or area according to species distribution.

Whereas multispecies soundscape design is complex, it is also a very exciting area for research and development, and one that I am currently exploring with colleagues in different fields and landscape architecture students. The fields of animal communication and ecoacoustics are developing rapidly and we are increasingly gaining an understanding of how sound affects individual species. We should also seek to embrace more-than-human participatory approaches to design that might enable us to grasp subjective responses to sound. Again, an exciting area for future development where collaboration amongst disciplines, including ecologists, artists, and designers, will be key.

Usue Ruiz Arana’s Urban Soundscapes A Guide to Listening for Landscape Architecture and Urban Design is published by Routledge and is out now.

I first met Gregorio Fontén in 2014 in London, on his way to finishing a Sonic Arts PhD at Goldsmiths University and already developing his thinking around what it means to listen and make sound. Ten years on and Fontén is a central part of a small but dynamic sound arts and experimental music scene in the Chilean port city of Valparaíso, hosting residencies at his Laboratorio del Eco, producing festivals and collaborating with local/global online radio station Radio Tsonami.

Although rooted in an academic context, Fontén’s work speaks outwards towards themes of identity, the body and listening. He describes this relationship as vacilar, or the oscillation between listening and dancing, through which resonances between the body and its environment are created. Interested in interventions across mediums - whether poetry, song, improvisation, piano works, field recording, installation and visual works - his work is increasingly underpinned by scepticism towards the privileging of listening in Western sound studies, offering instead a theory of making yourself heard, which for Fontén is peculiar to the Latin American experience.

The text Fontén has contributed below first introduces and then shares an extract from “The Motor-Mouth of Vacilar” which is part of the book, Del Vacilar, that Fontén has written (in Spanish) and will be published in Chile in due course. He says the book as an attempt to bring together the different elements of his practice, which he begins by describing as that of the ‘cantautor’ or singing author.

Words: Gregorio Fontén

I could describe my work as that of a singer-songwriter, or better still of a cantautor (which is the Spanish equivalent of singer-songwriter but that would translate in English as “singing author”). I believe all my work in poetry, music, sound art, visual art and academic research springs from developing this cantautor practice. From it I develop an exploration of my my cultural heritage, my personal identity, my physical presence, the influence of social and natural surroundings, and so on.

In song I am a voice singing, a hand strumming a guitar, an amplified sonic presence that influences and is influenced by others. I am present, alive as a sonic configuration that will pass away.

As a cantautor I can feel that sonic experience is not only about listening, but also about making yourself heard. Both are integral parts of sonic experience and none takes precedence over the other.

Listening and making yourself heard are both as relevant and as unavoidable.

I feel that today not only in sound art but sound studies in general there is an emphasis on listening by itself, and listening is proposed as holding a universal value - a liberating practice that will provide the basis for global justice, for empathy towards all sentient and non-sentient beings - as if listening would hold the key to mutual understanding and coexistence between all.

Listening practices are specific mind/body disciplines that cannot embrace the whole of sonic experience. Moreover, as specific mind/body disciplines, listening practices are also a way of articulating sonic experience - that is to say not of listening, but of making yourself heard.

In deep listening and other akin practices throughout the humanities, listening is built on top of a promise of justice, of tolerance, of acceptance. From the cantautor standpoint, listening is dirtier than what it is assumed to be. In this sense the emphasis I’m trying to bring about is about hygiene and justice. A listener uses space and pollutes the sonic realm. Through its discipline, its practice, its presence, it is disturbing the medium, silencing other sonic possibilities. It is not only listening but making itself heard simply by deciding to listen. By taking a listener stance, it is imposing a directionality to the experience that is silencing other possibilities.

There are elements of sonic experience that cannot be properly unfolded through listening. For us in Latin America this is intuitive as we have been forced to listen and we know, through our bodies, that that is not good enough. For example, in the 2019 social uprising in Chile, people screamed, fed up with listening to politicians and being forced into silence. The type of sonic engagement this required was not one of listening but of banging and screaming, it required making yourself heard.

Listening alone is not enough.

In this sense, I prefer understanding sonic experience in terms of echolocation rather than listening by itself, as echolocation requires both that you emit sound and listen. This is what I have developed as a cantautor. From early on I developed this approach by trying to simultaneously “manifest” and contemplate” and from that period I published my first poetry book Contemplacion (Libros de La Elipse, Santiago, 2001) and the sound poetry/winka rock album Cuchufleta Punk (2004). From that early stage I have developed and explored this cantautor practice, both as an independent artist and also in practice-based research in academia, which I enjoyed but feel disappointed by the fact that sound studies’ academic knowledge transmission cannot be done through sonic engagements but through papers and conferences which only work through visual logic paradigms. So what is the point then?

Currently I live in Valparaíso where I work as an independent artist and continue developing this cantautor practice. For me, it is deeply connected to a Latin American sensitivity of ambiguity between the colonizer and the colonized, a dislocation of cultures that leaves us in sort of a transcolonial vibration. An evanescent, sonic transit I explore as an echolocation that is not confined to acoustics only, through the idea of Vacilar and the Sonic Criollo.

Vacilar is a word that has multiple meanings in Latin American Spanish and from what I gather also in Brazilian Portuguese. It can mean to oscillate, to doubt, to trap, to party. In that sense I believe vacilar is a good way of describing a sonic engagement that is about listening and also making yourself heard. It acknowledges that there are sonic engagements prior to and after listening, just as there is listening prior to and after making yourself heard. Neither takes precedence.

Vacilar as doubting is openness, it is listening. As partying it is participating, expressing yourself. As trapping it is composing/designing the situation in which listening and making yourself heard are conjured. Like a shaman trap that traps you to open the gates of a different reality.

Vacilar is the oscillation between listening and making yourself heard which is opened by a sonic trap. A lot of my work is based on developing those traps.

The traps open what I call the Sonic Criollo, which is not a human being but a person that is sometimes identified with the individual and sometimes with the environment, sometimes it is connections between everything, sometimes it is a Western persona, sometimes it is Pachamama. It oscillates between collectivity and ego, of enforcing yourself and of erasing yourself into something bigger. At the same time it is important to understand it lacks the balance of yin yang. It has no resolution, it doesn’t dissolve into nothingness, it is Latin American in its dirtiness and ambiguity.

As such it is definitely not a theory that can be accessed logically or an intellectual concept that comes before action. It is through feeling, through embodiment that it awakens.

Perhaps this sensitivity is about reconnecting with an embodied intelligence that has to do more with the spiritual than the rational, that is more about feeling and wordless communication than with data extraction, intellectual knowledge and resource exploitation.

The Motor-Mouth of Vacilar

The following is a translated extract from “Habladuria del Vacilar”, a text that was born from an improvisation at the microphone. As I speak I add echoes to certain words to order my thoughts. Then this improvisation was transcribed by a text recognition algorithm and edited to assemble the script.

this sonic sensibility that I propose is a practice of listening, of singing, of conversation and of dance

as much

a thought as an emotion, a language as an illiteracy

this sonic sensibility, this vacilar that I call it, raises an ecological policy

from an American South wavering immersed in disparities that oscillate without ever finding balance

oscillating opposites reveal to be the same thing

oscillating the same triggers differences

oscillating time is space

oscillating one's own is alien

but at the same time

the human system is static

in its calendars, its writing, its knowledge

can balance never be achieved?

there is a grammar

unpronounceable in words

that wavers (vacila)

maybe that's what we called music at some point

music is an unfolding of language:

At once shallower and deeper.

In September 2022 I was sitting in the community hall of a small Scottish island syphoning the Wi-Fi and figuring out what to do with my life. Or at least, figuring out what to do with the next few months. I had just finished a masters in environmental politics, for which I’d focussed my research on sound and interviewed a number of scientists about their work on ocean noise pollution. Along the way, I had become aware of an organisation in Amsterdam called Sonic Acts, with a cool website and what seemed to me a rare intention to place sound art in a more grounded, outward-looking context than I had encountered before. On something of a whim, the Hebridean wind rattling against the windows, I booked a ticket to their forthcoming Biennale, and ended up spending three days in a former munitions factory on the outskirts of Amsterdam, having my ears melted and my brain rearranged.

I’d never been to a sound art festival before - maybe to call it that is itself reductive - but found it immediately inspiring and invigorating to experience such a variety of work that was negotiating the boundaries between music, conceptual art, sound, geography and climate science. I wrote about the festival at the time - which ended up being the first post on this newsletter - and then covered the 2024 Biennial too, having been invited to contribute to Sonic Acts’ publication Ecoes earlier this year.

The 2024 Biennial marked 30 years of Sonic Acts, whose inaugural festival took place in Amsterdam’s now iconic club Paradiso in August 1994 - tapping into a zeitgeist defined by increasingly affordable electronic technologies, the emergence of audiovisual arts and the more experimental edges of electronic music. An early adopter in drawing these threads together, Sonic Acts set out to explore the club as a site of critical investigation, seeking, as they describe themselves, to connect the dots “introducing Xenakis to Autechre and Stockhausen to DJ Spooky”.

An interdisciplinary arts organisation not afraid to bring academic and theoretical perspectives into contact with performance, Sonic Acts has since hosted everyone from David Toop and Eyal Weizman to Annea Lockwood, Barry Truax, Hildegard Westerkamp, Pauline Oliveros & Ellen Fullman. Evolving from an annual festival to a Biennial focussed more explicitly on environmental and ecological issues, Sonic Acts has become a space where sustained debate, original commissions and adventurous programming can sit side-by-side. Even to a relative newcomer like myself, the expansive 2024 edition, united under the theme ‘The Spell of the Sensuous’, felt like their most ambitious yet.

And so, after the dust had settled, I was delighted when, in suitably collaborative style, the Sonic Acts team (of Lucas van der Velden, Mirna Belina, Gideon Kiers and Hannah Pezzack) agreed to answer a few questions for the newsletter.

As insightful as it is about the history of Sonic Acts, I think it’s also increasingly important to hear from organisations who are facilitating artistic work in a climate where the funding of challenging work is a challenge in itself. Putting on major shows can be a fairly thankless task, and so here’s to giving a bit of shine to those that create platforms for the work of others to develop, thrive and reach new audiences, as they reached me.

Let’s begin with some basics. In what ways has Sonic Acts evolved over the last 30 years?

Sonic Acts began as a small festival taking place across three evenings. Over the years, we added a symposium and exhibition. Later, we started organising workshops and commissioning new works, distributing funds to artists we found important. This allowed us to pivot away from ready-to-be-presented programmes, which are also showcased by other venues and festivals, to a more unique, collaborative space.

Perhaps the biggest shift has been our transformation from a festival into a Biennial in 2022. With this, Sonic Acts has moved from an annual event into an expansive programme unfolding every two years. This jump in scale has led to working with more venues, international partners, and artist residencies.

In the beginning, Sonic Acts enjoyed a niche audience, but over the years we’ve managed to attract a broader, younger, more diverse crowd. During this time, sound art and experimental music have become accepted more widely and less academic than they used to be.

That’s interesting. Could you expand a little on how the audience and reception of sound art has changed in that time?

The evolution of sound art as a category is fascinating, mostly because the term became popular only in the 2000s and is now used retroactively for something that has existed for much longer. Sound art did not grow from an interest in sound but has developed over the last 70 years from music, visual, and audiovisual arts in different places around the world, influenced by experimental movements such as Fluxus, the emergence of computer/laptop music, and technologies such as sonic amplification.

Rapidly transforming, sound art is now defined as an interdisciplinary field centred around sound and listening, but it also moves in between other disciplines such as architecture, anthropology, field arts, performance art, and club/dance context. But even in a culture that is so much oriented to the visual, today we are more aware of the qualities of sound – which everyone can sense within their own body or carry along with them via portable technologies. Location-based works outside the regular cultural spaces that experiment with the relationship between sound, space, and the listener have become more relevant, often connecting sonic experiences to broader ecological, political, technological or social phenomena.

Given the multidisciplinary nature of the work that you have commissioned and exhibited over the years, to what extent is the sonic experience a central concern of Sonic Acts?

Sound is indeed a very important part of Sonic Acts (it's in our name!) and this takes many shapes – from club nights and audiovisual concerts to the presentation of archival soundworks in collaboration with Ina GRM (Groupe de Recherches Musicales) in Paris. But we also see sound as part of a broader ecosystem of mediums, including film, theory, and art, which also have a key role in our organisation.

That being said, in our ocular-focused society, sound is endemically neglected. In the art world, sound is underrepresented in institutions, and we seek to rectify this within our programming. Sound furthermore has a performative dimension which is particularly evocative and interesting, and which we have witnessed being woven into different disciplines in novel ways.

Has Sonic Acts always had as explicitly an environmental or ecological focus as it does now?

Since its inception, Sonic Acts has been dedicated to addressing shifts in the cultural, technological and political landscape. In the early years, the festival centred on what the technological and digital revolution meant for art and artists. As the climate emergency has become more pressing, it gradually emerged as a pivotal issue in our programming and a recurring theme in the work of many artists. However, it wasn't until 2015, with an edition of the festival titled 'The Geologic Imagination’ and the three-year project Dark Ecology, that Sonic Acts became deliberately and consciously focused on the environmental crisis and the inequalities that cause and perpetuate it.

What role can sound art play in articulating questions around extraction, politics and the climate crisis?

That’s a great question! First of all, it’s essential to clarify that a huge array of creative practices are represented at Sonic Acts, from musicians and filmmakers to researchers, instrument makers, scholars, and activists.

A defining aspect of the climate catastrophe is its vastness – the way it is implicated in centuries of colonial violence, capitalist systems, and inequality – and so, for artists, the question becomes how to respond to and reflect its magnitude, urgency and interconnectedness through their work. In this sense, it is important to represent a plurality of perspectives; grasping the enormity and structural complexity will take diverse approaches and methodologies.

However, sound is a unique medium – it can reveal phenomena that have been ‘hidden’ from view. For instance, the fantastic work of BJ Nilsen, who has made recordings unearthing the sound of mining, conducted in the Arctic region of Norway and Russia. Nilsen’s piece ORE makes audible how the industry resonates through the landscape, affecting local inhabitants and surrounding ecosystems.

Aura Satz is another fascinating artist – she takes up the concept of sirens and sounding the alarm in the era of climate precarity. In her film The Future Waters of the Storm Surge (2022), which was commissioned by Sonic Acts, she visits the Oosterscheldekering dam in the Netherlands, a barrier designed to protect from North Sea flooding. Embedded within the preventive architecture, the siren is an integral part of a complex web of infrastructures preempting the turbulence of future threats. In the film, the siren sound draws an invisible line across an unstable horizon, speaking to the chaos of storms to come. This film is actually one chapter of a longer documentary feature called Pre-emptive Listening, which has recently premiered and features compositions by Laurie Spiegel, Sarah Davachi, Moor Mother, Raven Chacon, and Camille Norment.

Curator and educator Margarida Mendes – who participated in the 2024 Sonic Acts symposium – offers another compelling example. In her 2019 project Sounding the Mississippi, Mendes recorded the river, exploring it as an acoustic space, and considering the relationships between the body, environment and industry. Through sound, poetry and visual elements, she delved into the diverse sensory experiences within the industrialised soundscape of ‘Cancer Alley’, an area dense with petrochemical plants and high in pollution.

There are many, many other names we could mention here who are exploring the rich potential of the sonic. With the emergence of new technologies and methodologies, we anticipate that this field will continue to grow and yield fresh insights.

What are the editorial intentions behind Ecoes magazine and what themes have you been interested to explore?

A portmanteau of ‘ecology’ and ‘echoes’, Ecoes is a bi-annual magazine about ‘art in the age of pollution’ that showcases compelling artistic and critical perspectives engaging with the past, future, or afterlives of environmental harm, toxicity, extraction, and waste. The magazine is greatly inspired by the work of M Murphy, who we were honoured to welcome to the Sonic Acts Biennial 2024 symposium. Murphy puts forward the concept of 'alterlife' to describe the way that our bodies, both now and those that follow, bear deep traces of chemicals and toxicants, making our bodies an integral part of the environment. Ecoes aims to echo this perspective in its pages.

The magazine is published bi-annually, with a special Biennial edition that serves as a companion to the programme. Apart from the Biennial issue, we typically explore loose ‘themes’ that ground the content. For instance, Ecoes #5 delved into water and hydro-logics, while Ecoes #4 focused on oil. It’s been a pleasure to feature many respected and established names – Astrida Neimanis, Stefanie Hessler, Tomoko Sauvage, David Abram, Karen Bakker, Margarida Mendes, and Elvia Wilk, to name just a few – alongside emerging practitioners.

What’s next for Sonic Acts?

Right now, our team is enjoying some rest and recalibrating post-Biennial. After that, we’ll be brainstorming the programme for 2026, which is very exciting!

Soon, we’ll begin assembling the next issue of Ecoes magazine and we’ve started to think about how we can activate our vast archive which contains 30 years of recordings of events, performances, lectures, interviews and more.

As part of the Biennial, we welcomed two interventions by sound artist and researcher KMRU and Dutch DJ/producer The Social Lover, who both dived into our digital storage. We plan to open the archive more, inviting artists and researchers to create and work with its content.

Alongside this, we’re also engaged in developing the Spatial Sound Platform. During the Biennial, the platform was physically manifested via The Listening Room and now continues online through Sonic Acts Radio, where you can listen to various sound pieces from our archive in a spatialised, three-dimensional format.

Cover photo credit: Anthea Caddy and Marcin Pietruszewski - Love Numbers. Biennale Musica 2023 x Sonic Acts. Courtesy La Biennale di Venezia. Photo by Andrea Avezzù

Lawrence English begins our conversation with an apology. He has a cough. More specifically, he has a lung infection, picked up on a recent visit to Indonesia where he spent too long too close to an erupting volcano. Standing in a rice paddy, accompanied by a chorus of frogs, he watched as Mount Merapi emptied itself onto the surrounding landscape. "It was a real living earth moment,” he says. “You are getting this new landmass constantly forming. To see it was really quite sobering, because you recognise the Earth is changing and it’s alive."

As a musician, composer and artist, English’s work has engaged increasingly with large-scale environmental events. Field Recordings From The Zone was made in Queensland, Australia, following the devastating bushfires in early 2020, as the world went into its first Covid lockdown. ‘Oseni responded to the Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai volcano eruption in January 2022. He has worked with recordings of Antarctic wind (Viento, 2022) and the Amazon rainforest (A Mirror Holds the Sky, 2021), while acclaimed albums Wilderness of Mirrors (2014), Cruel Optimism (2017), Lassitude (2020) and Approach (2022) have charted personal and sonic terrains that variously engage in ideas of location, memory and perception. Prolific and inquisitive, for over 20 years now Lawrence English’s work has followed where his curiosity leads.

In recent years, English has found himself drawn increasingly towards collaboration, working with David Toop, Lea Bertucci (who was previously interviewed on Through Sounds), Loscil, and most recently, the Japanese pianist and composer Akira Kosemura, with whom he released new album Selene on Temporary Residence earlier this year. And while the first iteration of their collaboration was prompted by another terrestrial, tectonic event in the form of the Noto earthquake on 1st January 2024, Selene hears English turn his attention from earth to sky, and the universal mythologies of celestial connectivity.

Covering such a diverse body of work, conversation with English is kaleidoscopic, and although we started by talking about Selene, it wasn’t long before thoughts and ideas began to refract in other directions. (Aside from his own creative practice, English’s label Room40 has become a beacon of creativity for a huge range of artists, but we hardly have time to touch on it.) Instead we find ourselves discussing shortwave radio, listening practices, and his most recent art installation Proximities, for which English cast a 712-kg bronze bell. At one point I apologise for asking a question about Japanese water sculptures that seems like a tangent too far, but English is there for it. “This whole thing is tangents, so don’t worry about it,” he says. “Constellations are more interesting than single objects.” In the context of Selene, it’s hard to disagree.

You’ve always worked in a very collaborative manner, whether that’s with your label Room40 or your recent musical projects. What is it that draws you to working with others so closely?

Collaboration for me is absolutely about the exchange. I've drawn a great amount of pleasure, but also a great amount of inspiration from it, and I learn something every single time. There's not been one collaboration where I haven’t come out of it either having some new technical craft, some compositional craft, or some way of approaching material that I either hadn’t come to before or hadn’t really had a chance to consider. One of the great things about collaboration is this offer from your collaborator to reconsider parts of your own practice, and the generosity of ideas that goes with it. And in that process of exchange something else occurs that ideally that is in excess of the both of you.

How did you come to work with Akira Kosemura?

We had talked about it for a while and this celestial idea - this idea for Selene as a concept - came in quite early and I think that helped anchor not just the potential language of it, but also the kind of atmosphere that sat around the work. I love that sense of place that you build in music, that sometimes is an imaginary - or unimaginable I think in the case of Selene - environment that the piano and the other electronics exist in. I think that, for me, is where the linkage to things like field recording come into compositional practice. You’re trying to world-build essentially.

With Selene exploring the celestial realm, I suppose you're removing the place-based specificity of a field recording and trying to realise the space in an imaginative sense?

Yeah, it's partly thinking about the material content of those things. There are markers that suggest a certain quality or place or environmental timbre or however you want to describe it. With the Field Recordings From The Zone piece, they are all field recordings, some of them very direct and some of them slightly transformed. And the ones that feel most alien are often the ones that are really most direct.

Were there particular atmospheres or environments you imagined the music of Selene to exist in?

You know, strangely, I'm not sure they're existent spaces. I think I wanted more qualities of an atmosphere rather than an atmosphere itself, if that makes sense? So it was much more about the kinds of ways that sound moves in a place, more than the kind of the place. I think that, production wise, that was a big driver - to try and sense that idea of things floating away. Your mind goes to those images of the International Space Station where you see liquid moving in those environments, or whatever the case might be. There is a sort of unnatural naturalness to it.

Akira is such an amazing pianist in that way, using very simple but effective motifs that he just works through. There's no rush, there's nothing more than what needs to be there. He has an amazing ability to just let the instruments speak, without having to force them to say something they don’t want to say.

What kinds of compositional approaches did you employ to compliment this?

I used a lot of short-wave radio on this record, which is actually something I've used a lot in the last five or six years. I really like it as a tool because it's sort of like field recording, but on a different spectrum. What I like about it is that blurriness of signal that you can sense. When you fall in between signals there is sometimes this incredible electronic tonal thing that happens where you’ll get these strange ghost frequencies where it's trying to find the signal but the signal is just not there.

That sounds like it connects with a line in the Selene press material which talks about the “lingering desire for that which sits beyond”.

Definitely. And I think that's really - I was going to say holistic, but not holistic in the spiritual sense - in the very practical sense, that is what keeps you going. Or at least that is what keeps me going. I'm more interested in developing better questions than I am in answering them, because I don’t think any really valuable question ever fully gets answered. You can return to questions and deepen the interrogation that they hold.

Rather than the environmental events or ecological themes that have animated your previous work, something about the premise of Selene feels quite universal and also quite hopeful. Is that something that you ...

Am I hopeful?

Yeah... I think back to the Aurora Borealis that captivated people across the world in May and the collective sense of wonder that it created. This album feels suggestive of that universal experience.

I don’t think it's necessarily hopeful, but I do think it's a nice recognition of the self. There's a kind of grace that can come with realising how small you are, as long as you’re willing to overcome the anxiety that turns into aggression for some people at feeling reduced by something.

I have to say, this experience of watching the Merapi volcano erupt was humbling, because you recognise that you are totally at the will of the mountain, and should it just decide to erupt, that's it! That's the end of the time that you have. But at the same time, watching it you are filled with a sense of awe and wonder which is like the creation of the Earth.

I’ve got a very cheap telescope, and I have little babes here and we often go out and look at the moon. To gaze upon it with that sense of magnification… How can you be anything but filled with wonder at that experience? The story of the Seven Sisters has connections all across the globe for first nations groups and for us too, and that's something that ties us all together, because it's beyond or above or in excess of our everyday.

Do you have a personal relationship to the night sky?

I remember very clearly watching Haley's Comet. I went on a school camp in '86 - I would have been about 10. I remember being woken up at 3 in the morning to go out and look at Haley's Comet and being simultaneously filled with wonder and disappointment, because these things are always tiny.

A couple of years ago I did a project in LA at the Mount Wilson Observatory and one night we got to look through the telescope that Einstein looked through, and I remember looking at Jupiter and having a similar feeling. It was so distant and so minor, but still completely captivating. And I think that's actually part of the deal. Not everything needs to be in sharp view. Sometimes we need to imagine that thing, and in doing so we unlock something that's meaningful for us. It's not necessarily the answer, it's my experience of Jupiter through that device, and there is value in that for a whole bunch of reasons, some of them scientific and some of them poetic.

The subjectivity of active listening is also very central to your work. What challenges do you face in articulating ideas about something both as concrete and abstract as sound?

It might be a semantic separation, but I draw that distinction between hearing and listening, as a way of recognising that just because it all goes into the holes attached to the sides of your head, it doesn’t mean that the same thing is going on in there. I think hearing is this ongoing, at times unconscious process that is a muted filtering of the world acoustically, and then listening is that moment that you’re tapping into those things around you, reaching out, or reaching in as the case might be, and trying to absorb something. It's more directed, it's more rich, and maybe in certain kinds of listening situations like concerts, it's recognising the physiological and psychological impacts of sound in the same moment.

I do think it is inherently challenging to talk about, in the same way that almost any area of sense, once you start to drill into it, becomes quite a complex thing to describe, because it's ultimately a subjective terrain. I do think it's one of those areas where we've barely scratched the surface. Obviously it's a very different environment to where we were 25 years ago and sound studies has really moved things forwards, but I still think the philosophical implications that surround listening are really rich terrain. And I think that's why we see people still investing so much of their artistic practice in that pursuit, because there is a lot of room for expression there.

Do you find that your relationship to listening has changed over the course of your career?

Yeah definitely, and in some very physical ways. There are some pieces that I made at the beginning of my career that I can't hear any more because I've lost the top part of my hearing. It's weird because I spent so much time crafting these upper frequency materials and then it was sobering to recognise that the body does forgo certain experiences. I really like it in a strange way. I like the limitation and I like the permission that time gives or, or doesn’t give you as the case might be for me now.

Has your approach to making music changed over that time too?

I think I'm much more accepting of failure and chaos than I was initially. I remember times 20 years ago when I would make a recording I would be seeking a certain kind of impression of that recording. And I would be frustrated if that thing would not arrive in a way that I felt was possible. Now I actually quite like the unpredictability and the dynamism.

Akira Kosemura and Lawrence English’s Selene is out now on Temporary Residence.

“I’m more frog than human these days,” muses Berlin-based sound artist Pablo (Rana) Diserens in the book on becoming amphibian, written to accompany their latest release turning porous. Poetic, playful and speculative - concerned with ideas of metamorphosis and the shapeshifting potential of a more empathetic relationship with the natural world - it sums up Diserens’ attitude to a creative practice which uses sound to blur the edges between human and more-than-human experience.

Whether assembling recordings of water bodies for upstream ensemble, capturing the melting glaciers of Iceland on ebbing ice lines, or spending two months crouched at the edge of quarry ponds in Galicia for turning porous, Diserens’ work is united by a belief that listening can open routes towards greater presence and care for the environment.

It is a listening which - like the name of the label Diserens runs, forms of minutiae - rewards close and detailed attention. On turning porous, Diserens seems to invite the listener to lean in and get personal with the quiet yet insistent sounds of frog choruses, insect stridulations and hydroelectric hums that permeate the environment.

I have followed Diserens’ work for a while now - and previously featured some of it in this newsletter - so I was delighted when they agreed to answer my questions via email. Although I encourage you to check out Diserens’ previous work, the interview focussed primarily on two recent projects - ebbing ice lines and turning porous - the first of which began as an exhibition earlier and will be followed by an album in 2025, and the second which began as an album and will be followed by an exhibition this autumn.

What initially attracted you to working with amphibian sounds?

As a child I oddly developed a kind of fear, a disgust, for frogs, and other amphibians by extension. It all started on a warm summer afternoon as my cousin and I were rowing a small boat on the surface of a pond in the south of France. Out of nowhere a frog jumped into our boat igniting all of us (the frog included) into panic. We all frantically leaped around the vessel trying to avoid each other and find a way out. The boat swayed intensely with the threat of flipping over until the ranid finally reached the safety of the water. More fear than harm, yet it had been a difficult holiday, and today with some distance my hunch is that my response to the frog might have been a conduit for other aching emotions. From then on, I felt a revulsion at the sight of amphibians, something that saddened me as I had always been enamoured with animals. It is only years later, thanks to my field recording and listening practices, that this disgust turned into adoration. The sonic intricacies and beauty of frog calls is undeniable as one develops an interest in sound and begins to listen.

My life and my relationship to the world really took a turn the day I witnessed with my own ears the mesmeric calls of fire-bellied toads (Bombina bombina) for the first time. It was as if the entire pond was vibrating and humming an intoxicating song. Countless breathy, pipping tones forming a droning music. Moved, I spent hours listening, recording, and feeling a strong sense of entanglement and belonging. “Earthlings”, I thought, while some part of me began to change. This spellbinding encounter was deeply grounding and sparked my fascination, my love, for the anuran world. But what a vulnerable world that is.

In the face of this peril, my work attempts to bridge human and non-human realities; form ways of creating emotional, existential, connections in the hope of inspiring lasting change in the way we think of ourselves in relation to the Earth and its dwellers. Out of commitment for the planet’s health, I try to share with others what listening offered me: a gateway to presence, environmental awareness, and earthly kinship. And what better way of doing so than hearing what some of the most impacted beings out there have to say?

I imagine you must have spent a lot of time crouched down by the pond. Could you describe the environment and how it felt to be out there recording?

Slimy. Humid air entering myriads of lungs. Reed-bordered waters cradling numerous species. Eardrums overwhelmed by boisterous songs. Skins percolating with porosity. Ponds are lush goo! I have indeed spent a lot of time by them in various regions. In Galicia it was no different, I dwelled many nights in old, abandoned quarries that in time morphed into ponds. Experiencing scarred environments being reclaimed by a plethora of species as they turned these spaces into thriving habitats is a pleasurable sight. There is hope!

A quarry next to Chantada struck me with its abundance of water frogs (Pelophylax perezi), tree frogs (Hyla molleri), water beetles, bats and insects. Standing for hours by the moonlit pond surrounded by dozens of aroused amphibians calling at the top of their voice was one of the loudest and most immersive soundscapes I had the chance to experience. Frogs seemed to omit my presence, or tolerate it a least, as many of them kept calling very close to me. I could see them inflating their vocal sacs less than a meter away, it was fascinating. Above us bats were dotting the darkness with their ultrasonic clicks, and beneath us the murky shallows buzzed with water beetles’ stridulations. As I listened and recorded for an extended period of time I began to decipher individual acoustic signatures amongst the chorus. To each frog their voice. My sense of self gently blurred, as if I was dissolving into new semantics. And that’s how it ultimately felt, bathing in a slimy togetherness made of a language I didn’t understand.

Were there things that surprised you about the sounds you were recording?

These listening and recording instances triggered an unlearning process. Water frog and tree frog calls weren’t new to me (they are kind of the “classic” sounds that some people immediately link to frog acoustics, at least in these parts of the globe), yet despite that the more I listened the more my understanding of their vocalizations renewed. And that’s where the surprise lay: the familiar became foreign again. It felt like a process of unlearning, or perhaps re-learning. Listening to water frogs at different times of the day made me realize how diverse and complex their vocalizations actually are. In the middle of the day when the sun is at its zenith their exchanges sound entirely different than at night. The nocturnal cacophony of quivering croaks is replaced by short bubbly accents which surprisingly reminded me of apes. (These differences can be heard in the album’s two “herpetophonics” tracks: ‘ponderings’ being the diurnal and ‘arousal’ the nocturnal.)

Field recording is at times so wrapped up in a chase for novelty and exoticism, but the sounds we know are as precious as any other. Familiarity isn’t a bad thing, on the contrary, something extraordinary can happen when one gets to exist with these sounds and know them on an intimate level. In my view, it can enable a profound relationship with our neighbouring ecologies.

Listening to turning porous I was struck by the attention to the feeling of scale, and how through the minimalist composition of ‘alytes’ I had to readjust my expectations in order to come down to this level. To what extent can playing with scale in sound alter the perspectives of the listener?

I find it fascinating to engage and work with the minute. To place ears in spaces they usually can’t access through the means of perspective or technology (hydrophones, contact microphones, etc). Something occurs when we listen to small or imperceptible sounds from an extremely close perspective and/or amplified. It draws us in, like an acoustic zooming in. Our sense of space alters and listening becomes a playground for discovery and curiosity which in turn extends our understanding of what is already there, around us.

So much of turning porous is about that: the Alytes, the underwater recordings of water beetle stridulations on “permeable skin”, the wind-borne tones on “mirage in motion”, the site-specific music of the dam structures, etc. It is all about playing with acoustic perspectives to change our own on physical, temporal and existential levels. It’s like an invitation: “how might it feel to be one of the Alytes or water beetles?” Playing with scale is a gateway for listeners to transform by embodying other realities while perceiving environments in new intimate ways.

In the press release you are quoted as saying “I’m more frog than human these days” - could you expand on that a little more?

This quote is taken from the little book (to be published in the fall) I wrote during my two-month stay in Galicia, a poetic travelog which also acts as an extension, contextualization, of the album. This sentence perfectly captures the feeling of gradual metamorphosis I experienced as I spent days and nights listening to frogs while inhabiting their homes. These encounters were so powerful and bewitching that I found myself and my relationship to the world shapeshift. There was a sense of human alienation accompanied by a desire to entirely dive into another existence. For some time there, I felt like I understood other species better than my own, and even felt a greater empathy. Still today, I sometimes catch myself looking at the structures and ways of living we have built for ourselves and think: “what are we doing?”

Ideas of the “permeable” surface throughout this work. What does the word mean to you and in what way can this idea impact the way we relate to the environment?

In the continuity of the shapeshifting I mentioned above and highly inspired by amphibians’ skins, I think of permeance as ways of embodying other forms of existence, other realities. Through somatic positioning, such as listening, I believe that we can attune to the world around us in gestures of presence. Presence allows us to let the world in and pour ourselves out in a continuous percolating conversation—a porosity of some sort. In my view, being permeable is soaking up, thus understanding, the multifarious truths and life experiences around us. It’s a way of slowing down and going against the preconceived notions of our societies that tend to create a divide between culture and nature, humans and animals, cities and environments.

Instead, permeance is a window onto interspecies kinship and interdependence as well as planetary thinking. I believe that this post-humanist approach is crucial if we are to overcome the challenges that our planet’s health faces. It is a de-centering of the self, a shift of perspective towards interconnectedness. It is considering life with others, rather than next to. And over time, the sense of self becomes much less singular, turning me into we.

You mention the fact that frogs are indicator species - in what way does the work engage in the border questions facing amphibian biodiversity and freshwater ecosystems?

Ponds are some of the richest environments on Earth, making them key habitats for protecting freshwater biodiversity and ecosystems. They are cradles for an enormous variety of species, and part of some the rare places in Europe where you can still experience animal calls spreading across a wide range of frequencies, from bats’ ultrasonic clicks to the low booming calls of bitterns (which are the loudest birds in Europe). They are reminders of how rich and diverse life in Europe used to be and how quiet it has become.

turning porous and other of my works celebrate these habitats and the life within while also engaging with the ways we have impacted them sonically and physically. There is a fine line between showing a thriving environment and the sad reality of the consequences of human endeavours. It is difficult to stimulate action if we believe biodiversity is already doomed, therefore I find positive reinforcement, paired with an awareness of the state of things, to be much more efficient than the contrary. If we tune in and care for our local ponds, thriving amphibian communities could mark a path of hope for our planet.

Moving on to some of your other work, earlier this year you presented an exhibition at the Vysočina Regional Gallery in the Czech Republic called ebbing ice lines, which draws on a completely different geographical location. Could you tell me a little bit about the intention behind this work?

When we think of a glacier’s sound it is often the thundering ice calving process that comes to mind first—the roaring birth of icebergs. Yet a glacier is a remarkably active environment and is home to a multitude of architectonic and sonic gestures. As temperatures rise, the thaw carves the glacier into a vast system of sinuous arteries, an expanse of earthly memory, a trickling archive spreading over eons, a cold and wet ever-changing landscape, melting away exponentially.

ebbing ice lines is a tentacular project that investigates these vulnerable soundscapes within the Low Arctic’s melting zones and the life they foster. Materializing as an audiovisual installation (and an upcoming album) that weave glacial gurgles, thawing squeals, avian vocalizations, hydrophonic acoustics, and anthropogenic hums, the work sheds light on the minute sounds produced by these environments as they retreat under warming climates.

Recorded in and around Iceland’s glaciers and Finland’s tundras, these animals and melting voices tell a story of disappearance. The title plays with the existing tree line terminology—the edge past which trees do not grow—to imagine ebbing lines beyond which ice cannot exist. Beyond the thundering booms of calving glaciers, ebbing ice lines offers a different perspective and brings ears into the odd and beautiful intimacy of the ice in an attempt at nurturing emotional tethers and ecological actions.

How did you go about translating the “earthly memory” archived within the ice and give it sonic form?

It turns out this idea of earthly memory is somewhat audible. As glacial ice melts it releases strings of bubbling air trapped inside for centuries, even millennia. As the bubbles burst and swim to the surface, the Earth’s old atmosphere carries its history back into the air. This process creates bestial growls and multi-pitched oscillations that resemble the sound of algae photosynthesis, critters and avian calls, or even … flatulence at times (one could argue that we are listening to geofarts). Smaller chunks of floating ice are actually called “growlers” thanks to this sonic phenomenon. These sounds can be heard with our own ears but are much more vibrant and loud underwater which we can listen to thanks to hydrophones.

ebbing ice lines features this time-traveling air with various recordings made in the proglacial lakes and on the surfaces of Icelandic glaciers such as Sólheimajökull, Svínafellsjökull, Fjallsjökull, and Breiðamerkurjökull. I find these sounds extremely engaging as they create an intimate positioning with glaciers, instantly changing our perspective on these melting giants and giving us a window into geological time. Teeming with sounds, the labyrinthine ice acts as a portal, a fading temporal bridge, past and future.

You can listen to one of these recordings in the “Sound of the Year” and “Disappearing Sound” categories of the Sound of the Years Awards 2022.

There’s an interesting line between the beauty of glaciers and the tragedy of their melting that is also present in lots of artistic work that addresses loss and climate change. How do you play with that tension in your work?

I like to create a conjunction between the beauty and strangeness of the soundscapes birthed by glaciers and the anthropogenic impact we have on these environments. In my compositions I often merge bio- and geophonic sounds with human/machine-borne hums found in the habitats I’m recording in. For example, unwavering boat engines appear in ebbing ice lines, creating a sense of heaviness and sonic displacement. For me, these sounds hint at the current assault of naval industries on the Arctic, and the capitalist opportunities they see in receding ice.

To my drone-music-loving ears, there is also a site-specific music in these found hums that I find really interesting to work with. Sustain tones are alluring, and they often highlight the acoustic differences between the mechanical and the organic - the second being much more unpredictable and rich than the first. If you compare the sounds of glaciers and their neighbouring species (or any other biomes for that matter) with the ones of human-made apparatuses, the monotony of the latter is flagrant. Glaciers are in constant flux, in perpetual momentum, something images hardly convey. Yet if we decide to listen, glaciers and their thaws speak volumes.

Given the breadth of locations and habitats in which you work, is there a binding principle that connects your approach across projects?

Listening, presence, curiosity, and tenderness. And stimulating sensitivity to counteract apathy.

Have you always been a keen listener? And has a professional engagement with sound changed the way you experience the world around you?

I’m not entirely sure, I might have been, but perhaps sound wasn’t always the main medium through which I listened (if we think of it as a form of attunement). I have always been absorbed and inspired by my surroundings, ecologies, and animals, one way or the other. But discovering field recording, acoustic ecology and listening practices definitely marked an important pivotal moment in my life and the way I experience the world.

So to answer your second question, professional engagement didn’t change anything, listening did. Actually for me, the thing with working professionally with sound and listening is that there is a risk of altering, damaging even, the precious relationship I have with them. While having to exist within the systems in place, I don’t want these priceless tethers to fall prey to capitalism. Tread carefully, as some say.

Pablo Diserens’ turning porous is out now via forms of minutiae

Born in Mexico in 1970, Leo Heiblum grew up hearing rhythms in the world around him. Whether produced by the engine of his mother’s car or the rolling ocean waves, the patterns, tones and textures he encountered were of equal fascination to Heiblum, both as a form of meditation and an escape into the surrounding environment.

Studying composition in Mexico City and recording engineering in Florida, Heiblum’s path into music was in part determined by an internship he took at Philip Glass’s Looking Glass Studios in 1994. Heiblum subsequently collaborated with Glass on several albums and soundtracks, paving the way for a career in composition that has seen him work on over fifty films, including Frida (2002), Maria Full of Grace (2004) and Birds of Passage (2018). Heiblum has since produced three albums with Patti Smith and Soundwalk Collective and become friends with Laurie Anderson, who invited him to perform his latest project, Encyclopedia Sónica, in New York in 2023.

The year that Heiblum began working with Philip Glass is also the year he started making the recordings that form the basis of Encyclopedia Sónica Vol. 1, an album that condenses a lifetime’s listening into 12 chimerical tracks. Charting a bold and inventive path between field recordings, soundscapes and composition, the album is an expression of Heiblum’s belief that “every sound that we hear can be heard … felt and understood as music.”

With Encylcopedia Sónica Vol. 1 out now on Language of Sound, I asked Heiblum a few questions about the making of the album and how his experience of the sonic environment transcends divisions between what is considered sound, noise and music.

What are your earliest memories of sound?

The first memory I have of anything is being laid down on the passenger’s seat of my mother’s car listening to the engine and finding rhythms as beautiful and complex as the ones I heard in my house. My house was full of music - my brother listened to a lot of ‘60s Brazilian music, my sister to rock and American and South American folk and my mother to all kinds of classical music, and the rhythms I heard that day from the engine of the car were as beautiful as everything else I was hearing back home.

Tell me about your experiences with field recording - what is it you enjoy about it?

It is my favourite thing. I feel like the planet is this amazing studio or this amazing artist that is constantly creating beautiful music and when I record I feel in the presence of an amazing moment. I don’t know if it can be called art, but I experience it like that. I almost don’t breathe. I just witness and try to record it in the best possible way to be able to share it and to combine it with other moments and create yet another piece of art with it.

Does recording change the way you listen to the environment?

100%. It makes me be more respectful and appreciate more what is happening around me. It’s also a kind of meditation - I almost get out of myself, or out of the moment and become the audience of that moment.

Are there sounds that you are more or less attracted to use as a musician?

No, every sound can be used and every sound can be beautiful.

I’m interested in your appreciation of human-made as well as natural sounds. What do you make of the aesthetic value often afforded to the latter over the former?

This is something very important for me - on the one hand, to give as much importance to the sound of a mosquito or a fire as to the sound of a violin or a guitar, but also to give as much importance to the sound of a factory or a car as to that of the jungle or the ocean. They are all sonic material that can be used to create music. I want to focus on non instruments, because I think these sounds are overlooked and I have a feeling that our disconnection to the world around us is related to this oversight. We are so focussed on what we do that we don’t pay attention and we don’t care for what the planet is doing. I think and I hope that by listening to the world with a different attention, we can learn to see and relate to the world with more attention and empathy.

Is there a line for you between sound and music?

There is a very interesting book by Alessandro Baricco calledThe soul of Hegel and the cows of Wisconsin that talks about this and concludes that for sound to be called music it needs to have a few characteristics. A memorable melody, a rhythm you can relate to, harmony that creates an expectation and then fulfils, or does not fulfil, this expectation. He then says that the logical evolution of Western classical or academic music after [Igor] Stravinsky and his mastering of the harmonic modulations, and [Claude] Debussy and others with all the different kinds of harmonies and chords, was [Arnold] Schoenberg and [Alban] Berg and the end of harmony, the end of melody, the end of something you can remember, something you can expect. Then he concludes that we should have realised sooner that it didn’t quite work, that audiences were disconnected from this music and stopped filling the concert halls. I don’t agree with that last part, I think this is also art, but maybe a different kind of art. This is a very controversial subject and to answer your question, I actually don’t think there is a big difference between sound and music. Maybe it’s this that Baricco talks about in the organisation of the sounds in a “musical way”. I am not sure… Maybe there is no difference.

Tell me about the origins of Encyclopedia Sónica - how did the idea come about and what were your intentions with the project?

I knew I wanted to make this music since very early in my life, this is why I studied composition and then recording engineering, to be able to record sounds and create music with them. Nobody was doing the music I wanted to hear, so I realized I had to do it myself. The name was Philip Glass’s idea, when I showed him the music and explained the process he immediately told me that I should call this the Encyclopedia Sonics, and it seemed perfect to me.

Could you break down your process behind making the album? What is actually happening and how did you bring these tracks together?

After I record sounds, I go through a process of listening that could last all my life. I listen to any piece of recording - it can be in the street or in a forest - and I start to look for three things: interesting rhythms that I can convert into loops, interesting melodies that I can use as they are, or interesting sounds that I can transform into instruments by sampling them. Then I start to play around combining all these sonic moments of my life. The sounds just start to flow with each other.

I started to record in 1994, but in 2016 I was a member of the SNCA which is a grant that the Mexican government gives to support projects for three years. I used this time to compose 28 compositions and then selected and reworked the ones that are on this volume 1 of the Encyclopedia Sónica.

In what way has working with film inspired your work?

Film has freed me from musical forms, rules and expectations. When you write music for film I think you are no longer making music, you are making film, you have to become a filmmaker. The film needs to work, not the music. This has taught me to break many rules and combine things that might not be OK to do if it was just a musical piece. I think this has helped me listen to these sounds with even more possibilities of the ways they can be used.

You have worked with musicians like Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson and Patti Smith - what did you learn about sound and music from these encounters?

I learned a lot about sound and music, but I think the most important thing I have learnt from these amazing human beings is the dedication, the intensity, the absolute commitment to the work. All three of them are a bit like monks that devote their life to their art. This is a wonderful example for me and I try to live with that commitment and that love and passion for my work.

To what extent can sound tell political stories as well as environmental ones?

I try not to think too much about that, even though I think every act is a political act. I try to create from an abstract, emotional place which will then find a political or environmental place. I also think environmental stories are political. But I am not trying to convince or to show or to explain anything to anyone, I am just trying to create music using sounds and maybe this will generate something in the people that hear it. I am very curious about the experiment. I am using sounds that might come from a very “negative” or stressful origin, such as dog fights or people crying or a mosquito buzzing and make music that is not telling that story or sharing that energy, but making music that can be joyful, danceable or memorable. I think maybe I am transforming the energy of that moment into a different kind of energy, maybe sublimating that emotion and transforming it into a different emotion.

What advice would you give someone to become a better listener?

Close your eyes and try to focus on every sound you are hearing, try to discern and name every one of them. I am working with the amazing Mexican writer Valeria Luiselli and with Ricardo Giraldo doing a 24-hour sonic piece about the border between Mexico and the US called Echoes from the Borderlands, and recently she did the exercise of listening to a one-hour storm and writing down everything she was hearing. She realised that the act of writing down the sounds as she was hearing them made her pay even more attention, and a different attention, to the sounds, so maybe this can also help.

What is it about listening that you think is most important or transformative?

The effect it has on your awareness. I think listening as opposed to seeing, or understanding, puts you in a different state of awareness.

All images courtesy of Leo Heiblum and Language of Sound.

If you've watched a natural history show on the BBC, Netflix, National Geographic or Apple TV lately, the sounds you’ve been listening to may well have been recorded by Ellie Williams. For the last twenty years, she has travelled the world capturing everything from the minute arpeggios of swimming scallops and the chatter of stridulating ants, to night-time frog choruses and warring elephant seals. Having camped out with Arctic foxes in Iceland and been hoisted into the Amazon rainforest canopy to record sounds from the perspective of howler monkeys, it’s not surprising Ellie says her holidays tend to feel quite underwhelming in comparison.

Most recently, Ellie has worked on two almost concurrent natural history series explicitly focussed on sound - Earthsounds, on Apple TV, and The Secret World of Sound, hosted by David Attenborough on Sky - something which in itself is rather new. “Microphones reveal layers of intricacy, intelligence and beauty,” Ellie says, reflecting on the recent increase of interest in the acoustics of the natural environment. “Sound is a way into worlds we could never imagine exist.”

For this latest Through Sounds interview, I was delighted that Ellie agreed to answer some questions via email, sharing her experiences of twenty years of nature recording and an ongoing attempt to pinpoint the ineffable feeling that accompanies the most profound moments of listening. Or in Ellie’s wonderful words, “The sound-triggered neurochemical cocktail of dopamine, endorphins and adrenaline!”

What are your earliest sonic memories and were you always drawn to sound and listening?

My early sonic memories are like hazy daydreams: The sound of wood pigeons in our garden ‘who stole those green peas… me’. Exploring fields of tall grass and wildflowers buzzing electrically with insects during a hot endless summer. Being driven at bedtime in our old mustard car to a common not too far from home and scrambling, yawning, through brambles at dusk to listen to nightingales.

My listening started with music. I’ve never been able to listen to a piece of music without focussing on the rhythm or melody of a particular instrument. As a child I was fascinated by layers of sound and how they play together. If I wasn’t playing an instrument, I’d be working out the pattern of the notes of a song with my fingers. I was drawn to pieces that gave me certain feelings and I’m still fascinated by how music and sound taps into emotions and surfaces memories long forgotten.

I spent 10 years working as a music journalist before I ever picked up a field recorder. It was recording a stream up in the Hebrides that was a kind of ‘a-ha’ moment with sound. Was there a moment when you realised that you wanted to do this professionally?

I think it was more of a volcanic-style build-up than a single moment for me. It reached its peak when I was living in New Zealand. I’d been sent there by the BBC to set up a filming base for a series called South Pacific. I’d been working for the Natural History Unit for a few years but in a different role and I had what can only be described as a burning desire to become a field recordist. Location sound recording combined everything I loved: nature and the outdoors, working with kit (I’d been a gigging musician and dabbled in studio sound before the BBC), being in the action of filmmaking and having my own creative autonomy. Part of the series filming kit was a gorgeous SQN4 mixer. At the time, I was living in a wooden house surrounded by bush on the edge of the Waitakere Ranges with its own wild acoustic panorama of birdsong (tuis, fantails, bellbirds) and that was pulling at my soul. So, you can imagine, it was all coming to a head and soon after that I began to record.

To what extent has sound and recording been a way into learning about the natural world?

I think recording the natural world has really changed me, especially in what I notice and value. When I started out, recording on location was a much simpler task: capture the sounds of a place to build into a soundtrack. Then I began to work on more niche projects alongside wildlife biologists and my eyes really began to open.

Working with scientists has this wonderful symbiosis - I gain access to new sound worlds and learn about the meaning of the sounds and animal vocalisations I record. In return, I can use my kit and techniques to record perspectives and data that they may only have had theories about. Handing my headphones to someone who has a complete specialism in a species and for them to hear something they have never heard before is the best feeling. 

But with these connections comes an increasing weight of awareness of the fragility and state of the natural world and not a day goes by when I don’t think about this. The era of being passive documentary filmmakers is long gone in my eyes. If we can help, whether that’s through collaborating with scientists, or making conservation part of the main narrative, then that’s the mission. We’re all in this industry because we have a deep love of the natural world and, as a community of filmmakers, we see the realities on location and want fiercely to help protect it.

You’re involved in two new series focussed on sound. Why do you think there is an increased interest in listening and nature now?

This is something I’ve been thinking about too. Nature is the tonic to modern life, right? The faster and more technology-driven life becomes the more we need time out and that’s what being in wild spaces or watching wildlife films gives us, that much needed escape.

Natural history programmes are so popular across the world. There have been breath-taking advances in camera techniques and kit as a way of telling stories and showing new perspectives. But during this time sound has often been an afterthought, even something that can be created retrospectively (entire shoots can come back without any sound recordings at all).

But so much of the natural world is led by sound, with sound often being the most important sense. So if we’re going to really get into the lives of animal characters and tell their stories then recordings need to be accurate to truly reflect this. Microphones reveal layers of intricacy, intelligence and beauty. Sound is a way into worlds we could never imagine exist.

There are some fascinating advances happening through the decoding of animal communication using AI. We may soon be able to have ‘conversations’ with animals. I can’t quite get my head around the implications of this yet but I know film soundtracks need to be more authentic than ever in line with this. The natural world needs to be heard to be understood and with that understanding we can only connect and protect it further. And that is why capturing sound is as important as the moving image on location.

What’s it like to work with and record for David Attenborough?

Being with David is all you could imagine and more. Despite his extraordinary life, he is down to earth and the warmest company. He is accompanied on shoots by his daughter, Susan, and always wears his comfortable brown Clarks-style shoes. He’s full of good stories and enjoys filming, so we always have fun. The shoots can be intense as the crew are meticulously ready to capture his delivery to camera, which he prefers to only do once (‘a one take wonder’). When he started out in the ‘50s, alongside producing and directing, he recorded sound. There are some exquisite field recordings he made of indigenous music whilst on wildlife filming expeditions, so he’s quite the legend for me and I think he appreciates sound recordists because he’s been in our listening world.

What have been some of your most important, enjoyable or memorable experiences recording?

The remote places are the ones that stay with me. Recording arctic foxes in Iceland was one of those. We were based at the northern tip in Hornstrandir, just a few nautical miles from the Arctic Circle, and it was so peaceful and a joy to record there. The soundscape was very minimalistic: the dog fox’s barks, the vixen’s calls, the pups’ hungry yaps, the odd raven’s cronk and distant kittiwakes all reverberating off a huge natural rocky basin above the ocean rumbling far below. We filled our bottles from a waterfall and treaded carefully on the plant-rich ground, I’ve never seen so much biodiversity. The cinematographer beckoned me over at one point to look into his viewfinder as he’d framed up an iceberg on the horizon for me.

A shoot with Jill Biden was one of my most memorable. National Geographic had partnered with the White House to close off a section of the Grand Canyon for us. Before dawn, secret service officers checked our kit using sniffer dogs. After landing in Air Force Two, The First Lady arrived into the national park with an entourage in swish black SUVs. We had just two hours with her to record her pieces to camera and filmed with the most spectacular backdrop. It was intense and a complete adrenaline high.

There are a couple of other life-enriching (and mind exploding!) recording experiences too. Recording in a forest of noisy coqui frogs in the pitch dark with fireflies drifting around me whilst my levels danced brightly triggered by all the sounds, like a jungle disco. And a shoot I did in Liberia where we recorded some traditional artisan fishermen from Ghana and we went out, again in the pitch dark, in their boat carved from a single trunk. Phosphorescence lit up the wake which was wonder-filled enough, but then when they pulled in their huge, heavy nets they began to sing together to get a heaving-in rhythm going and to keep spirits high, and it totally took me by surprise. Magic! I’m not sure when I’d ever experience moments like those without the access my work gives me. When I go on holiday it’s often quite underwhelming in comparison!

What other sounds have taken you by surprise or made you feel something particularly special?

I’m very lucky as, with my work in natural history filmmaking, I’m sent to record sounds that constantly delight me. The most exciting are sounds that we wouldn’t normally know are there because they are just so quiet or outside of our hearing range. When I’m asked to record things like this it’s often to find out whether there will be any sound at all. On the Earthsounds series, I used contact mics to listen to delicate vibrations such as the wave movement of a starfish’s tube feet and the chatty stridulating conversations of leafcutter ants on the rainforest floor. The most delicate was an unassuming scallop which, as it propelled itself through the water, made a perfect arpeggio of ascending notes captured by a hydrophone. When I hear music in nature those are the stand-out moments as I find them just so beautiful.

There’s a great video on your Instagram of what looks like you being winched up into the forest canopy in Peru. What were you recording up there and what are the most unusual places you have recorded in?

That was such a fun shoot. We were in the Amazon to film howler monkeys. The cinematographer spent weeks up on a platform in the canopy filming at the height they liked to hang out. Meanwhile, I was recording their group calls (which sounded like a big stone mill wheel grinding). The researcher would track them (at a gentle distance) to bed then in the dark of morning I would set up at the same spot to catch the chorus as it began. I got some fantastic recordings of them from there but it felt strange to be recording from the forest floor when their world was up in the canopy, in a very different soundscape, and this sequence was, after all, from their perspective.

Our rope access expert had this marvellous swing with him and he (assisted by the rest of the crew) pulled me and my kit high up a giant fig tree. It was quite unforgettable. More people have been up Everest than hoisted up to the rainforest canopy. Being lifted up through the layers of sound and hearing the acoustics, which open up the higher you get, was quite magical. I heard bird and other animal calls ranging from close by to what seemed as far as the horizon, waves of breeze travelling through the canopy and everything up there felt unaware of my presence (apart from the sweat bees tickling my legs).

To what extent have advancements in technology played a role in what you can record, and are there things you are excited to be able to do now that weren’t possible at the start of your career?

My kit has grown over the years into a box of recording tricks. I’ve been building on it bit by bit so I can be experimental in the field. I want my mics to go where the human ear can’t and bring back the feeling of a completely different environment for an audience who might never experience places far from home. Kit has become smaller, lighter, more intuitive but often it’s about how playfully you use it that brings back the best results.

A simple technique I use now is a drop rig: I leave a mixer (in a dry bag) and a stereo pair of omni mics recording in a good spot then collect it some hours later. When a person (or recordist) walks through a wild space like a forest, the sound changes. Birds alarm-call, animals hide and go quiet. But if you can record without physically being there, you get that natural, rich, undisturbed soundscape (and you can pick out the best bits later).

One of my favourite mics is a Geofon which is an audio-adapted geophone designed to record seismic sound. Scientists actually use the most interesting equipment in the field but it’s when these instruments are converted to capture broadcast quality audio that new worlds open up to me.

There’s a lovely interview with you on BBC Radio 4 in which you described sound as being “really understated”. I wondered whether you could expand on that idea a little more. Why do you think people are less conscious of their sonic environments?

Humans are vision-led so our perception of an environment is dominated by what we see. We hear but are often not in a state of conscious listening. When we do listen we take in so much more of the world around us. We slow down, connect and think at a deeper, more inquisitive level.

Sounds can be very manipulative. An unsettling noise will send us into a state of high alert. A beautiful sound can relax and excite us. A soundtrack plays on this, using sound to make the audience feel wonder or tension. If the recordings, music and narration are done well and work in synchronicity then you can feel a chemistry - your brain accepts the story, the edges of the cinema screen disappear from view and you sink into the world of the film. The thing is, you might not be conscious that it’s the sound that is creating this magic. If the sound is wrong you notice it, don’t connect with or care about the story, but if it’s right then a film gets under your skin, it moves you. That is the understated power and importance of sound.

You also talk about the feeling you get when you’re listening and recording. Can you put your finger on what that feeling is?

When I listen, especially to birdsong, in a forest with the levels turned up I get ‘the chills’. I can only think that it’s a combination of the calm you feel in nature combined with the excitement you get listening to live music. A sound-triggered neurochemical cocktail of dopamine, endorphins and adrenaline. Alongside this, I get a feeling of hyperfocus and a slowing down of thoughts, I notice everything around me and it feels vibrant and textured. It’s a way of stepping out of the fast pace of daily life and it’s my soul food. I love it.

I also loved your description of sound recording as a combination of science, art and natural history. What are the most creative elements of your work and what are the most technical?

The technical elements for me are in the planning. After getting the brief for a shoot, I’ll spend quite some time working out what kit I’ll need to get all the elements and perspectives, and to cope with the environment. I might tap into the sound or scientific communities to bounce ideas if it’s something or somewhere I haven’t recorded before. Then I build the kit completely to make sure I have absolutely everything (the shoots are often remote so forgetting something would not be good) and pack it carefully to cope with the journey. When I’ve arrived and rigged the kit then I can relax into being creative which, when on a sync shoot (working alongside a cinematographer and director) means getting all the sounds needed to tell the story and match the perspectives being shot. I want to get into the world of the animal character so I imagine the role sound plays in their world and how that can be represented and the mics I need to do this. I don’t like to disturb wildlife so I tread lightly and work quietly. I might be up at dawn or find moments away from the crew to get those pure-sounding recordings.

Do you have any favourite animals or environments to record in or have developed a personal relationship with?

Sometimes the best sounds are the ones that connect you with home. I love hearing a dawn chorus anywhere in the world but the sound on a spring morning in the woodland on my lane has the most meaning for me. Could a song be any more pure than that of a wren? I challenge you to find one. And the most enjoyable thing is when I hear snippets of birdsong when I’m rushing through the urban landscape of Bristol, close to where I live. Blackbird, robin, bluetit, treecreeper singing from scraps of green between roads and buildings and the thrum of walking crowds. It kicks me out of busy thoughts and everything lightens. I listen so much that I never miss a sound.

Have you noticed any changes in the sonic environments you’ve recorded over the last 20 years, or ways in which climate change has shifted or impacted the sound of the natural world?

Other than a British woodland, I briefly step in and out of environments, so I don’t feel an expert in change. But I work alongside conservationists who do and are on the front line with this. I filmed in Costa Rica last year with turtle scientists in a national park on the Pacific side. The beach used to feel remote and was protected from development but in the last few years the building sites and bars have crept in. I was recording the sea using a geophone one night and through it picked up music from a booming sound system on the distant far side of the bay travelling not just through the air but through the ground. Female turtles return to the exact same spot where they were born as adults to lay their own nest of eggs and sound helps them to navigate back. Less and less turtles have been returning to this spot and I can’t help but think that human-made noise must be a major reason for this. My equipment makes me more sensitive to anthropophony and more aware of how hard it is to be somewhere free from it.

Sound is an indication of the health of an environment but sometimes it takes being somewhere unusually sound-rich to notice how quiet many of our wild spaces have become. I filmed in a rewilded valley close to home on a summer’s day a couple of years ago and the wildflower meadows were so delightfully rich and alive with insect calls. Resting in the grass, I was surrounded by that busy sound-electricity and I realised I’d forgotten what it felt like. It was like stepping back in time to the sound from my childhood again. The cameraman and I were so excited by this that we went back and made a film about the valley’s biodiversity. We wanted to share the story of how the valley had been revived. Moments like that give me hope. If we rewild, tread lightly and slow down, all the rich layers of sound will begin to come back.

All photos courtesy of Ellie Williams.

Almost exactly five years ago, Light In The Attic released a compilation collecting a number of important works of ‘kankyō ongaku’ – a strand of Japanese minimalism that emerged in the 1980s to soundtrack the architectural wonders and commercial advancements of the country’s economic boom years. Drawing explicitly from the rhythms and timbres of the natural world and designed to dissolve back into it, kankyō ongaku covers everything from site-specific compositions to audio works produced for commercial products, like Takashi Kokubo’s Get At The Wave, made for a new series of luxury Sanyo air-conditioning units.

In the words of composer Satoshi Ashikawa, “this music could be said to be an object or sound scenery to be listened to casually. Not being music which excites or leads the listener into another world, it should drift like smoke and become part of the environment surrounding the listener’s activity.”

At their best, compilations such as these can open up entire ecosystems of music you may not previously have been aware of, drawing lines and making connections that you can begin to follow and explore further on your own. Kankyō Ongaku: Japanese Ambient, Environmental & New Age Music 1980-1990 [to give it its full title] provided me with one of those moments, and I have returned regularly to its musicians and the ideas which underpinned their work ever since.

Shortly after its release in February 2019, I interviewed the compilation’s curator Spencer Doran over email for a feature in The Vinyl Factory, the online magazine I was editing at the time. My questions came from a place of curiosity rather than expertise, and five years on, I thought it would be nice to share an abridged version of the interview.

The title of the compilation [Kankyō Ongaku: Japanese Ambient, Environmental & New Age Music 1980-1990] makes a point to delineate the music’s stylistic strands as ‘ambient, environmental and new age music’. What differentiates these genres for you and why were they grouped together?

It’s a good way of mapping the three different, yet overlapping, branches happening within the material represented, but in part the sub-header is also a way to separate the release from Light in the Attic’s previous two boxset compilations in this style – I Am the Center and The Microcosm. These compilations were made with the intention of mapping and re-examining the history of “new age” music in America and Europe, but it was the wrong viewpoint to approach most of this music from. “New age” generally pertains to music that was an outgrowth of the loosely defined Western spiritual movement of the same name, a movement which isn’t connected to the bulk of the material here. There is certainly a spirituality that can be felt within it, but it is far more deeply-seated and works in relation to a shared cultural history, not Western exoticism of the spiritual “other”.

Satoshi Ashikawa’s “environmental” ideas exists as an extension of sociological theory and architecture – it flows from the lineage of the ’60s/’70s Tokyo avant garde, Eno’s ambient, Satie’s furniture music, and much of this was coming from the art world or the extended universe of high-end studio pop music. Interestingly, the most traditionally “new age” material included here comes from artists that found careers in what came to be called “healing music”, who were previously involved in the 1970s psychedelic rock scene – folks like Fumio Miyashita and Akira Ito. It’s quite useful to articulate the different forms this music took, and their separate lineages as it shows that this sound wasn’t strictly a single uniform thing.

How did you choose what tracks and artists made the cut?

I wanted to tell the story of the scene and cultural landscape surrounding it – all the different permutations that the idea of ambient/environmental music went through, and the ways that it seeped into pop-culture and everyday life. There’s a very strong socio-economic dimension to a lot of this music, as it exists as a very clear extension of bubble-era hypercapitalism and the sense of lifestyle associated with it. I wanted the selections to reflect that. I decided to focus specifically on the 1980s, as the end of the bubble era in late 1990 was a pretty firm end to the financial support that helped this music flourish. Beyond that, I wanted it to flow well as a tracklist and tried my best to program it with that in mind – a mix I made in 2011 called Music Interiors was an early version of what became the compilation and a fair amount of the structure of that is still intact.

The idea of environmental sounds as music in public spaces, or for commercial/advertising purposes, could share similarities with Muzak. Why do you think this is being seen in a new light now?

Actually this couldn’t be further from the original intention of environmental music, as the movement’s conceptual architects (Kuniharu Akiyama, Ashikawa, etc) positioned the idea in direct opposition to historical notions of Muzak or Japanese BGM. For them Muzak was something excessive and deeply impersonal, whereas environmental music was deeply tuned to the space it was designed for, and devoid of a homogenised mood. It is specific, whereas Muzak is general – “other people’s music”, to use Akiyama’s phrase.

They envisioned environmental music as something that opens up a space for artistic expression, as something that affects the individual in a subtle but profound way – this is a really beautiful idea to me. There are lessons that can be learned from this distinction that we can easily apply to now, especially in Spotify’s neo-Muzak age of algorithmically-optimised non-music which permeates the modern city. We’re losing sense of the concept of music as something that is constructed for individualised experience and I think that re-examining your own internal relationship to sound in physical space is one of the keys to unravelling this.

Given that much was composed for physical spaces, context seems pretty important to each track, and many have wonderful stories behind them. Are there any stories that particularly resonated with you?

The story of Art Vivant – the record and book store that Satoshi Ashikawa helped run – is a big one that stuck with me. It was this small shop inside of a department store adjacent to a modern art gallery. In the late ’70s and early ’80s it was a huge hub for what would become the kankyō ongaku scene: they were the first place in Japan to import Eno’s ambient records and they had niche selections of avant garde and ethnographic LPs that Ashikawa would recommend to people, in addition to art and theory books. Yoshimura, Yoshio Ojima, Midori, Satsuki Shibano would all hang out there – Masahiro Sugaya sold his early demo cassettes there, Munetaka Tanaka (who co-ran Sound Process Design) was also a clerk there. I was with Yoshio, Satsuki and Midori one day when they were all reminiscing about it – “we are all children of Art Vivant,” Yoshio said. As a person who’s spent probably far too much of my life in record and book stores (on both sides of the counter), I relate with that dynamic a lot – the record store as a culture-accelerating social space, a marketplace for ideas. It was also pretty amazing to be able to hone the genesis of a movement down to such a micro level.

Do environmental sounds have any precedent in Japanese music history or was this something that was primarily imported through the music of Brain Eno and Erik Satie?

I get into this a bit in the liner notes, but there are ambient sound-design traditions like suikinkutsu (an Edo-period “water zither” found in outdoor garden design formed by dripping water in a resonant, underground pot, which is listened to indirectly as part of the garden environment) or the tradition of temple bell ringing (toki no kane) that was used to mark the passage of time in early Japanese towns. Suikinkutsu came back into favour in the ’80s after being largely forgotten for hundreds of years, and Hiroshi Yoshimura actually wrote a whole book on toki no kane, his argument being that it functioned as a prototypical form of public sound art. Also, it can be said that Eno’s approach resonated because of some inherently Japanese underpinnings: specifically, John Cage’s philosophies that were drawn from studies of Zen Buddhism. Similarly when Satie first arose in popularity in Japan, there was a sense that his musical approach already felt culturally familiar, though it’s hard to pin down exactly why that was.

Originally published in full on The Vinyl Factory. Some questions have been edited for clarity.

In June 2023 the skies over New York City turned orange. Smoke from wildfires in Canada had drifted south, settling over much of the north-east and causing air quality indicators to fall to their lowest since records began in 1999. It’s still on Lea Bertucci’s mind as we begin our conversation.

Growing up and now living in the Hudson Valley, Bertucci’s work has long been interested in exploring relationships with environments, whether natural or industrial. She has made site-specific work for the Marine A grain elevator at Silo City, Buffalo NY, (Terminus, 2017), played flute in a cistern in Gothenburg, and created sound installations for the hollow body of the Deutzer bridge in Köln, Germany (Acoustic Shadows, 2018).

In April 2021, Bertucci released A Visible Length of Light, which drew in equal parts on American traditional music and the country’s sublime topography. The album, she wrote at the time, channels “temperaments of dislocation and wanderlust, filtered through impressions of distinctly American landscapes – coasts, cities, prairie – and the sonic material of everyday experience, defamiliarized by crisis.”

Following a number of collaborations - with Lawrence English, Ben Vida and others - Bertucci released new album Of Shadows and Substance in December 2023 via her own Cibachrome Editions label. Described as “a brief glimpse into what it is to be human in what feels like these waning days of the Anthropocene,” Of Shadows and Substance consists of two long-form works: ‘Vapours’, commissioned and performed by Italy’s Quartetto Maurice; and ‘Of Shadow and Substance’, commissioned by ARS Nova Workshop and performed by Henry Fraser, Lester St. Louis, Lucia Stravros and Matt Evans.

Writing about the latter, Bertucci explained her intention for the piece to measure “the accumulation of events over glacial periods of time as a metaphor for social and environmental shifts.” Investigating how we perceive these shifts is a core concept in Bertucci’s work.

Coined by Rob Nixon in 2011, slow violence is violence which occurs and accrues gradually over time, resulting in environmental degredation and climate change. That it is rarely visible - or audible - means it is rarely addressed with the urgency of catastrophic events. The orange skies of June 2023 was a spectacular manifestation of the slow violence of a warming planet.

I began by asking Bertucci about how explicitly her work begins with an idea or a concept, such as the one she outlines for Of Shadows and Substance.

To what extent is your work rooted in a pre-existing theme or idea that you want to explore?

I always start with an idea. In the process of making it sometimes I realise what the piece is actually about. I would say with ‘Vapours’ that ended up happening. I think it's good to not cling to a too fixed idea when you’re making something, but of course you want to have a jumping off point.

Would you say the environmental undercurrents to this record constitute those jumping off points?

Yeah definitely. Sometimes it's nice to work within a conceptual framework like thinking, “OK, what's the nature of the way that a molecule changes from a liquid to a gaseous state?” Let me look for examples of that in nature, whether it's mist rising from the surface of a lake in the morning, or fumes coming from smoke-stacks in New Jersey. I think these kinds of scientific processes are really great metaphors for other things, and music is a good way to express those things.

Both of those examples feel similar to where we started talking about the smog of the forest fires over the summer. They all suggest a state somewhere between shadow and substance.

Absolutely. There is so much materiality in the world. Our world is changing so much. A vapour is that change, and that's also how that piece works. It's small changes over a long period of time. It’s mostly just two different techniques that the quartet [Quartetto Maurice] are playing.

How does your use of graphic scores allow you to communicate some of these ideas to the musicians?

I like to use a mixture of graphic and staff notation, but for the graphic aspect I really want them to see what the sounds should sound like. I have a background in visual art and so I have a drawing practice that is associated with my music, and it's baked into the process of how I make the compositions to begin with.

The graphic score you’ve included in Of Shadow and Substance does seem to evoke something glacial.

There's a kind of organic-ness to the mark making. It's gestural, in the same way that playing these sounds are physical gestures.

Picking up on what you were saying about evoking small changes over time, it seems to me that one of the main barriers to grasping the severity of the climate crisis is because it has tended to unfold in a series of small changes rather than singular events. It reminds me of the work around the concept of slow violence. Is that something that has influenced your thinking?

Yeah, you really hit the nail on the head with that because this has been a fascination of mine for quite a few years. I have this piece for trombone and tape [Our Collective Cynicism is a Product of Failed Revolution, 2016] which addressed that and the way people acclimate themselves to changes over long periods of time. It's basically a super low-pitched, rubbly trombone sound that is layered and looped on top of itself. It's like a big, overlapping glissando in a very low range. It comes up and is very sustained and loud over the course of about 25 minutes. It basically becomes like a wall of sound, a wall of noise, and all of a sudden it stops at the very apex of its volume.

The fact that it starts out soft and low and then, little by little, it boils the frog in the pot of water is absolutely a metaphor for what is happening with the climate and what we're doing to the earth. The lack of ability to grasp these changes over time has been really interesting to me. Do you know the author Doris Lessing?

Yeah.

One of her books is called The Memoirs of a Survivor and in that book she talks about this very thing, in ways that are much more eloquent than I could ever do, but which I try to do with sound. That's how I started to get obsessed with this idea.

Even though climate change and environmental concerns are often a theme in your work, you seem to avoid some of the sonic tropes often associated with these subject matters.

Well I do field recording, so you could say that that's a trope!

Does taking your field recorder out and recording a landscape change the way you interact with it?

Yeah definitely. I mean whether I make the decision to press record or not means that I'm calibrating myself in a certain way. If I'm out just on a trail looking for mushrooms then my senses are calibrated towards that. But I do tend to look for places that have that post-industrial charm to them, so I often make special trips when I go out to record.

For my last solo record, A Visible Length of Light, there's a track called ‘Threshes’, which is a recording of a dead corn field in Nebraska, and I went to that site because right next to it was a research prairie which is the last intact prairie in all of Nebraska. It was a research site for the university, and they would go and restore these few acres of land back to how it was pre-colonisation, to the degree that they would be plucking out the non-indigenous plants from this huge field. To me that was an interesting site and I wanted to go and see what was there sonically.

Thinking of this and ‘Terminus’, which was made for a decommissioned industrial grain elevator, I wanted to ask how you imbue your work with some of the history of the place that either inspired it, or in which it is performed? 

I've always found post-industrial spaces to be very moving. They're certainly very spooky. The qualities of the sonic phenomena are really amazing, so they become like their own worlds, and I think it's super interesting to be aware of the history. I called that piece ‘Terminus’ because that grain elevator was the terminus for all the grain coming in from the Mid-West in the early 20th century that was being processed and then being distributed across the eastern seaboard in the US. I am not super into being obvious about these influences and I wouldn't be so interested in bringing out archival recordings, but that's just a different way of doing it. It's more about an implicit knowledge of the history of the space.

People and their histories feel embedded in your work, which is a refreshing departure from the idea of nature as a pristine or separate entity. Where do you position yourself within the environment of your compositions?

I'm there! I think about the Anthropocene a lot and I think about the way that humans anthropomorphise nature, but I'm very much there and it's very much of the world of human emotion. I want people to be moved by what I do, and that's one of the cool things about working with music, which is to have the potential for this kind of emotional engagement, but still have concept and content.

I think I tend to avoid the more sloganistic way of making activist music because I think it's more powerful to ask someone a question or lay out something through metaphor that people realise after they've listened to it a couple of times, rather than telling them a way to think about something.

Lea Bertucci’s Of Shadows and Substance is out now on Cibachrome Editions.

Images courtesy of Lea Bertucci.

On a night in early spring, Kate Carr was in a patch of woodland in France with the intention, once again, of recording birdsong. Suddenly a large flock of migrating birds passed overhead, their wings whirring like a rolling wave. “It was one of the most incredible sounds I’ve ever heard,” Carr enthuses. “I will never forget it.”

If anything, 2023 has been bird season for the London-based sound artist. With hard drives full of dawn choruses recorded all over the world, Carr began examining her relationship to birdsong - an ever-present feature of city (and country) life, field recording workshops, and universal sonic shorthand for elegiac or pristine nature.

First there was False Dawn, released through Carr’s own Flaming Pines label, a Foley-inspired “experiment in artifice”, in which she assembled her own dawn chorus in the studio - or as she describes it: “a forest I have breathed and gestured into existence via horns and whistles, rattles and squeaky toys.”

In between finishing a PhD, working on Rubbish Music - her ongoing collaboration with Iain Chambers - and releasing an album in response to the fermentation process of sauerkraut, Carr also produced ‘Three Calls’, a contribution to Mappa’s Synethtic Bird Music - a 32-artist compilation of new music made in dialogue with the avian world.

Then in November came A Field Guide to Phantasmic Birds, a new album of what Carr calls “all the birds I never recorded, and some I did. Re-imagined. Stretched and stuttering, glitching and morphing, swirling and sputtering.” Embedded with the textural, layered and heavily processed sound are dawn choruses recorded in South Africa, Australia and the UK, which surface now and then like warped artefacts of a bird-less future. “I imagine them swooping and calling in these scaffolds of sound I have made for them,” Carr’s note on the album continues. “Gleaming amid technicolour jungles. Alive, unassailable; in a world we haven't ruined. In a field recording I never made.”

You’ve spent a lot of this year working with bird sounds – False Dawn, Synthetic Bird Music, and now your latest album The Field Guide to Phantasmic Birds. What is your relationship with birdsong?

I am not sure what my relationship is to be honest. I suppose I don't think of birdsong as separate to birds, or as a singular thing. For a long time I've been interested in birds. I've raised a few birds from chicks when they fell from their nests in Australia, and that probably got me very fascinated by them as creatures. But in my work I have been interested in performing, manipulating or re-staging natural sounds, and birdsong is a very prominent sound within our everyday environments. It also has a particular relationship with field recording, so these are probably some of the reasons I have focused on it.

One of the instruments listed on A Field Guide… is a “bird horn”. What is a bird horn and how do you play it?

A bird horn is an instrument used to mimic particular bird calls, often utilised by hunters. There are many different types. I have about 10 of them I think from owls to ducks to crows and many other types. I've used them for a long time in performance, but these days more and more.

Listening to A Field Guide… it felt a bit like you were looking back from the future to try and imagine what the dawn chorus might have sounded like. To what extent is extinction an undertone to this work?

Looking back from the future is an interesting take on the album. I can see how it might be experienced like that. As to extinction, I think it certainly is there as a theme, inevitably in our current situation. I think it is present in almost any recording of a non-human species, and in many recordings of humans too. It is a very bleak time in regard to the future of many species, including us, on this planet. I think this reality reverberates within my work, just as it does in my daily life. It is a sad and difficult thing to live with the destruction of the planet, its ecosystems, and peoples. I think some of the grief of that is part of the impetus for making this album.

What is the dawn chorus like where you live in London?

I have a traffic chorus I would say, rather than a dawn chorus. I live on an very busy intersection, and I can tell the time of day when I wake up by the intensity of traffic I can hear. There are some seagulls and pigeons that live around me, but I cannot regularly hear them over the sound of the traffic at dawn. Perhaps it is this lack which has led me to making my own dawn choruses!

The title of the album sets up a dichotomy between the taxonomical impulse and the emotional experience of nature. Could you tell me a bit about your idea behind it?

I think field recording obviously has a relationship, both historic and ongoing, to these taxonomic guides to different species, and this urge to collect, categorise, accurately record. So I was thinking about that, and what it might mean to play with that idea in the context of a wildly manipulated, distorted and in some parts performed version of birdsong. I have made a few works now focused on the fictions of field recording, and this album I think also is concerned with these sorts of themes.

False Dawn, an entirely performed version of a dawn chorus, I would position as investigating again some of fictions of field recording, and its relationship, particularly within nature documentaries, with foley work. I was curious about whether I could perform a dawn chorus, and what this might sound like, and it was that curiosity which produced that work, which began as a live performance. In a sense you could see that work as separating birdsong from birds, but you could understand field recording itself as doing that.

To what extent is A Field Guide… also actively challenging the assumption of field recordings as fact?

Most of my work these days is interested in thinking about field recording as a set of practices which produce a particular version of a location, experience or even species, and the relationships and practices which produce that recording and which also might be amplified or obscured within the recording itself. I think this sort of approach does clearly change how I think about field recordings. I find myself not so much asking, or not only asking, what is this I am listening to? But what relations and practices produced this recording? What can I hear of those? And what can't I hear?

Is there a danger that emerges when recording is treated as truth rather than perspective? Translating the idea of “seeing is believing”, do we also need to be a little more sceptical with our ears?

I think this is a good point. I would probably phrase it more as a need to think a little more deeply about what we are hearing. An obvious example of the constructed aspects of field recording come in the form of recordings of nature, and have an interesting analogue with photography when we think about what is cut out of the frame to render a particular version of the what is photographed. Recordings of nature leave a lot out, very often, and particularly they leave out the ubiquitous sounds of humans.

When I began field recording and going on field recording workshops the quest was to get a pristine recording of natural sounds without, for example, traffic noise, or aircraft noise. But of course the sheer effort involved in such a task underlines the fiction of it. There are very few locations where human activity cannot be heard for an extended period of time. I think there is value and interest in recordings without humans, of course, but I also think the ways in which unwanted human sounds are discarded presents a fictional version of the world in which live.

I guess on this topic I would be interested in exploring how we might take recordings which make more audible their selective and constructed nature. How might we record in ways where the circumstances of the recording might be hearable?

Something I’ve always really enjoyed about your work is its engagement with all the possible sounds that are out there waiting to be heard. Have you always been curious about the sonic world around you?

I think in my field recording work because I came to it, to a degree, via glitch music, I was always interested in a bad recording, undesirable sounds and what is often left out of recordings. So I think this for sure meant I was broader in the types of sounds I recorded and composed with than some other recordists. I love the layers of sound within a soundscape, the messiness of it, and the beautiful or strange or jarring moments that might emerge within that messiness.

I also hear a real sensitivity to materiality in your work – particularly that of human-made objects. There’s an image in Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter where she encounters objects gathered in a storm drain. Has her thinking been influential for you in how you approach the sonic possibilities of supposedly inanimate objects?

Even though I have not read Bennett's work particularly deeply her ideas are obviously very influential within the arts, and sound. I have only dipped into Vibrant Matter, although it has been on my reading list for ages actually, but I have been finishing my PhD, and she was not theorist I was using there so I know mainly the broad brushstrokes of her work, rather than the intricacies. Having said that, I can see the ways in which her ideas are very relevant to some of the work I am making, particularly as Rubbish Music. When I wrote the blurb which accompanied Rubbish Music's first album, which we called Upcycling, I remember thinking that the framing Iain and I had adopted for that project: our relationship to objects and their lifecycles, their transformations and reconfigurations, was one made more thinkable due to the work of Bennett.

Rubbish Music feels like it has an overtly political message about waste and what we perceive to have use value. Where do you stand on using sound to make statements and encourage change?

It is interesting to me the relationship between art and politics, because although I have been as an adult a very political person, and at points in my life devoted almost all my time to political activism, I don't think my work really has this overt political element within it. I don't think I would be very good at making this sort of work, although I think it is important and can be very powerful. I think you are right that Rubbish Music comes the closest to this, but even in this project we have focused on the soundworlds of rubbish just as much as on the issue of waste itself, and how much of it we produce.

In answer to your question, I guess I would say I think all artwork makes statements of one type or another, and in that sense all art is political whether overtly so or not. I think we are at a point in time when we desperately need to change, in so many ways, but I think creative work or sound work can play many roles in these much needed processes of change making. Not everyone can make or is responsive to artwork which overtly calls for change, just as not everyone finds value or comfort in work which might be seen as attempting to create a space of temporary respite from the world as it exists right now.

I don't place a huge amount of value on calls for people to make or like particular types of work, I don't think artwork should all be one particular way or another, or be experienced in specific ways either. But I do think it is critical right now for all of us to find ways to sustainably advocate for change, and the production or experience of art can play diverse and important roles in this process. 

A Field Guide to Phantasmic Birds is out now on Room40.

Synthetic Bird Music is out now on Mappa.

False Dawn is out now on Flaming Pines.

The first time I encountered Tom Fisher’s work in person was at an interactive installation of his called We Are All Grazing Limpets. No one was exempt. All present, myself included, had scanned a different QR code to play recordings Fisher had made of these stoical aquatic snails going about their dinner. We sat in silence as the limpets grazed from our smartphones, some chirpier and more engaged, others slower, sadder, perhaps a little more resigned to the routines of their labour.

As with much of Fisher’s sound arts practice, which he pursues under the alias Action Pyramid, it was a quietly unsettling experience, profound and unusual in equal measure. Whether amplifying the skittish strides of a water boatman or honing in on the synth-like drones of the hoverfly, Fisher’s work challenges the hierarchies and assumptions of our anthropocentric world view. As the name of his contribution to BBC Radio 4’s Short Cuts series suggests, his is “an acoustic acclamation to things tiny.”

In an act of what he calls “re-listening”, Fisher hopes an appreciation of these soundscapes will revitalise our conception of over-looked (or under-heard) spaces, from the Hebridean rockpool to the urban arteries of London’s River Lea.

For his latest project, Mardle: Daily Rhythms of a Pond (co-released on Mappa and Skupina in October), Fisher turned his attention to the humble pond, teaming up with freshwater aquatic biologist Jack Greenhalgh to translate the 24-hour sonic cycle of aquatic insect stridulation [the act of producing sound by rubbing two body parts together], plant respiration and photosynthesis into three evocative compositions.

Rooted in Jack Greenhalgh’s sonic research on pond biodiversity, Mardle brings to the surface an ecology of otherworldly rhythms and alien hyper-sounds that feel more like early synth experiments than biological processes. In short, it’s one of the few pieces of music I’ve encountered that really needs to be heard to be believed.

Perhaps most significantly, the work underpinning Mardle represents a breakthrough in our understanding of how life is organised in the UK’s freshwater ponds, which will ultimately contribute to their conservation. “It's so exciting that we've discovered the woodland bird song dawn chorus equivalent for ponds, in the form of nocturnal aquatic insect choruses at night-time, and the whining of aquatic plants as they photosynthesise like busy factories during the midday sun,” Greenhalgh explains.

Never mind the limpets, we are all stridulating water boatmen.

How did you first get into field recording?

Like a lot of sound artists and field recordists I came from a music background. In my late teens I was already messing around with a home computer and production software and got really into electronic music and beat production. I've always been really into sampling, so I started trying to expand my palette of what I was making electronic music with.

I realised quite quickly how amazing it is to have a microphone outside of a studio context, and the complexity and revelations that can come along with field recordings. I've always had an interest in re-listening to environments and using hydrophones or contact mics at different scales. It's a nice way to rethink how we position ourselves as humans in the web of life around us.

Could you expand a little bit on that idea of re-listening to environments?

You can think you've noticed everything, like recognising the sound of a bird, but then realise that there are many layers of paying attention to what it is you're hearing. It’s the classic Pauline Oliveros difference between hearing and listening and thinking about the multitudes of realities you can tune into by listening carefully enough. Using these extended recording techniques [like hydrophones and contacts mics] is another way to interpret that. So you might be listening to what could otherwise be seen as a boring little body of water, but which with these techniques becomes quite mysterious and strange and exciting.

It sounds like this impulse to reassess bodies of water that seem mundane is central to your work.

Yeah, I've always found that quite satisfying. I remember in about 2013 when I was doing my first piece with hydrophone recordings from the River Lea. I presented it to an audience, and I just remember thinking how mad it was that I'd walked up and down that familiar space of the canal hundreds of times, and yet there were all these bizarre sounds I'd found there. I thought it was quite cool that experiences like that can also inspire other people to reconsider their environments. I think a lot of my work tries to convey some of the amazement I have in finding these things.

Your collaboration with biologist Jack Greenhalgh on freshwater ponds feels like the perfect example of re-listening to an environment that is often overlooked and then sharing your sense of wonder in what has been discovered there. How did that come about?

I had been doing a lot of aquatic recordings but had become quite mystified about what I could hear going on under the water. I started reaching out to researchers at UCL and essentially got invited on these field trips to north Norfolk where they were doing farmland pond restoration, and that's how I met Jack [Greenhalgh], who, at the time was starting his dissertation. He was using the sounds that I was recording and thinking about the ponds from a sonic data point of view and how that might be a gauge for levels of biodiversity, which is a fairly new approach to pond surveying in particular.

He has since gone on a bit of a trajectory to do with ecoacoustics in freshwater environments, but for me the album itself was a culmination of quite a few years of recordings, not just from these ponds. It was inspired by this encounter with the research and then from that I took a compositional cue from some discoveries that had been made. For example, there's an acoustic cycle within the pond, a daily rhythm of night and day. I very much take inspiration from the Jana Winderen school of creative approaches to real sonic data. The album is referencing real research but it's also very much a creative interpretation of it.

They’re not all one pond, are they? Are they all based in the UK?

No, exactly. It's many ponds into one imaginary pond. They’re mostly in Norfolk and in various freshwater locations around London and Bristol. There are one or two miscellaneous water bugs from somewhere else, though I can't quite remember where!

How does this creative interpretation of a pond’s daily cycle play out across the album’s three tracks?

At the beginning you're above the water and you’ve got the dawn chorus, and then as you're submerged into this completely mysterious world, you start to get these inklings of what's happening. Interestingly, dawn can be a bit of a quiet time. We found that, in some ponds at least, the solar noon and the middle of the night are the most acoustically active points of the day. The idea was to illustrate that with this gradual building towards the middle of the plant-focussed daytime piece, which culminates in intense activity. And then there’s a slow shift, there's a bit of lull and then you get this great chorus of insects which comes later in the album that illustrates the night.

I also wanted it to have a cyclical feeling. As the piece fades right at the end there's rain which alludes to the water cycle and the reasons ponds exist at all. And then you come up above the surface again. You've got early morning rain and you've got the hint of a robin singing, and the hint of the dawn chorus again, so it could theoretically play as a loop.

What is Mardle a reference to?

That's another little nod to the origins of the project. It's an East Anglian word for a small pond. I think it also means to chatter, which is perhaps linked to the fact that human life would have been centred around small ponds in that landscape in the past. It's quite an interesting etymological link.

The underwater recordings really sound like wild chattering, albeit somewhat alien. It doesn't sound like it could possibly come from a pond at all.

Yeah, I think a lot of my work is about that. It's about trying to get rid of that hierarchy of “this is just a boring pond and I'm a really clever human, and I think I know everything about what's surrounding me.” I like bringing that into question with these little audio discoveries and then put them on a bit of a pedestal.

What is it that we are actually listening to?

The main things you’re hearing once we get submerged after a few minutes are aquatic insects, mainly water boatmen and a few other species of water beetle. Then you’ve got this fizzing, whirring, buzzing sound, which is essentially when the oxygen level in the water rises to the point where the plants can’t just dissolve it, so it starts to make these really miniscule bubbles, depending on the pressure and the metabolism of the plant and lots of things that are not really understood yet. It's like cavitation essentially, which creates these pulses of sound. When the pulses become close enough together they start to create tones. It's a bit like playing with a Square Wave Synth. When it's at a very low frequency it's just like bup bup bup bup bup, and when you ramp it up it sort of goes bupbababababababeeeeee. That’s principle, but with bubbles.

Is there any sense that the underwater world reacts to the sound as well as just creating them? Do these sounds have a biological function?

I think that's completely unknown really. It blows my mind that there are ponds everywhere and yet there's so much stuff that no-one really knows. With the insects there is clearly a biological function relating to mating and territory, but the sound types have yet to be fully categorized to a species-specific level.

I also think there have been studies showing that plants react to the sound of running water, but I don’t know about reacting to the sound of themselves, and also I don't know about whether fish would be attracted to certain sonic things under the water for whatever reason they might need. There have been studies done in the oceanic field with reef sounds attracting other creatures, but it's pretty mysterious in that regard.

In that sense, it still feels crucial that the project is grounded in scientific research.

Yeah, I was quite keen to get that across and keep it in the liner notes. It's illustrating some research, showing the limits of what we know and showcasing it in a way that is demonstrating how strange and misunderstood it is.

What are you hopes for the album once it’s out? A role in conservation conversations or as a musical work or somewhere between the two?

I always really like it when things are showcased outside of the niche sound art world. It can be a really great way to engage people, capture people's attention and highlight these fragile and maligned habitats.

You mentioned sound artist Jana Winderen earlier. Were there any other inspirations you were thinking about while working on Mardle?

When I’ve played it live, there are some very subtle extraneous hyper-frequency elements that I like. They're the only things that have been slightly added to give a bit of a bed to these real, textural sounds and sometimes people have said, “I can tell you listen to sound-system music”. I think there's something about the slightly wild top end and then this bed beneath it which resonate when you hear it really loud. It's an interesting comment someone made, and I do connect to it. The distant King Tubby reference in there!

Did you have any particular epiphanies while you were recording?

I think the plant sounds are still quite hard for me to wrap my head around. We know plants are alive but to consider their living presence with direct sonic evidence can be quite profound. I’ve literally had it where I've been recording a patch of hornwort in the River Lea, and I could hear it changing as clouds were coming over. I could hear the environment affecting the plant directly. It’s in those moments where I think I can’t believe I'm listening to this.

Mardle: Daily Rhythms of a Pond is out now on Mappa / Skupina

Marcus Vergette is a sculptor and musician with a passion for bells and a resumé like no other. He lives on a farm in Devon which he maintains for the benefit of rare butterflies, is currently working on a project recording ant stridulation, and moonlights as a jazz bassist with some of the biggest names in the UK.

When his farm was caught up in the foot-and-mouth crisis in 2001, Vergette was presented with an opportunity. Emerging from their rural lockdown, he was taken up into the tower of the local parish church where he encountered three bells, from 1440, 1460, and 1520. Fascinated by their potential both as sounding and sculptural devices, he took a trip to Whitechapel Foundry to see the casting and tuning of a bell for himself. Interested in their harmonic potential, he began researching and developing his own moulds using an engineering software developed by the US military, and has been making crenelated bells ever since.

For many years Vergette has been working on a series called Time and Tide, in which bells are installed on beaches and coastal regions around Britain, rung by the approaching waves at high tide. A simple but powerful metaphor that sounds the alarm of rising sea levels, there are now eleven Time and Tide bells located across the country from the Outer Hebrides to the south of Cornwall, each existing as a democratic artwork owned by the local community. 

[In London, there is a bell on the Thames at Trinity Buoy Wharf, which I recorded at high tide and you can listen to below.]

When pianist and composer Matthew Bourne encouraged Vergette to make an album using some of this material, he was initially hesitant. But locked down once more during Covid, with 11 freshly cast bells in his back yard, Vergette began assembling a record that would become Tintinnabulation. Featuring three long-form compositions, the album collages sounds from these bells with Vergette’s archive of field recordings and instrumental improvisation.

The title track ‘Tintinnabulation’, which means a ringing or tinkling sound, explores the idea of a world with and without birds. In ‘Ferry’, a small group of instrumentalists respond musically to a projected film of the Torpoint Ferry in Cornwall. But it is on ‘Wax and Wane’ that the Time & Tide bells come to the fore, threaded into the fabric of the composition. Released earlier this year via Nonclassical, Tintinnabulation has blossomed into a series of live performances in concert halls (such as the Barbican) and night clubs across the country.

On a rare visit to London to play at jazz club Ronnie Scotts, Vergette joined me for a coffee in Exmouth Market to share his enthusiasm for bells and explain how they can encourage a more attuned listening to the world around us.

What was it that first interested you about bells when you encountered them in your local church?

I looked at bells and I thought here's a communication device - a static object that can say multiple things. It's the same bell that rings at weddings and at funerals, it's how you contextualise it that gives it its meaning. A bell is a thing that everyone understands, everyone has a story or a facet that they can relate to, and it had sound. Bringing sound and objects together is something I'd tried to explore in different ways before but never quite satisfactorily enough.

How did you begin to incorporate these ideas into your sculptural work?

Because I'm like the local artist, my neighbours asked me to make something to commemorate all the hardship of foot-and-mouth. The thing that annoyed me was that you had to be in the church to ring the bell, so I decided to make a bell that would be on the side of the road that any person could ring for any reason whatsoever. And that proved to be very interesting, because there's been an accumulation of laws through the centuries that make a democratic bell very difficult to do, because bells are a symbol of power. Big Ben rings the news and gives the authority to it. This relationship to power was the final key. I thought, here's this object that can say all these different things and is related in all these different ways. It was like an epiphany, and I’ve been making ever since then.

Can you ever get away from the sonic connotations of the bell as something tied to power and religion?

I'm definitely trying to get away from that. These bells don’t sound like church bells, so before people experience it, that is always a problem, because that's most people's point of reference. They're one of the oldest resonant object forms that people have ever made. They're right there back there with stone axes. I am not in any way spiritual but there is something spiritual about them. It works a magic, it's unbelievable. You just watch people's faces, as soon as they hear this metal thing ring. And it's not the strike, it's the sustain that is most interesting.

In what sense?

I've got a huge archive of field recordings, going right back to cassette, Super 8, mini disc, Walkmans, Discmans. It's always sounded like music to me. I find all that immensely satisfying, and very much a part of the idea with the bell is that people think it's the strike. It goes bang, and they listen for that. But then the sustain comes, and they're just listening, they're not thinking about it, they're just listening to the sustain. And as the sustain diminishes, they suddenly hear the sound of the world coming up again, and pretty soon they're just listening to the world, without making a judgement about it, without thinking. They're just listening.

And that is the real thing that I like about it. Getting people to engage in the present in the moment, because unless you start to listen and look, you don’t know what's around you and you can’t make choices about the bigger things we have to choose about. Whether it's about environment or the community, it all begins with that observation without judgement and really starting to notice what's around you, on every level. And bells can do that.

Speaking of the environment, the Time & Tide project addresses the issue of climate change and rising sea levels directly. How does it work?

This was a choice based on the power issue that we were talking about. I didn’t want these bells to be rung by somebody who had ownership of them. So in raising the money and developing the project, nobody gets to put their name on the bell. I don’t put my name on it, the funders don’t get to put their name on it. The Time and Tide bells are actually a pair of bells, a fourth apart, and that was so there would be a sense of harmonic movement. One facing upwards and one facing downwards, in an hourglass form. In the middle there is a pivot with a bar in it, and the bar extends below the bell so as the sea comes underneath it pushes the bar and that rings the bell.

Some have been installed for several years now. Can you already begin to hear a change in the way they're being rung?

No, I wouldn’t say that, because it's too infinitesimal and the sea varies immensely anyway. What has been revealing is that the energy in the water at each of the locations is distinct to that place, because of the geology of that place and the location of the bell. All the bells sound completely different, because the energy of the water is different in each of the locations.

The bell that's in the Outer Hebrides looks out into the North Atlantic. There's the Arctic out there, but there's nothing else, so the energy just comes in and it's got this clear, fresh, uncomplicated sound. The London bell however is a nightmare. The Thames has got boats and sticks and the walls of the embankment, and so in London there are a million different energies. We had to use something called the Venturi shape, which is basically an hourglass, two cones pulled together. It creates an area of high pressure and an area of low pressure, and that allows the bell to have a space to move into. It was actually the removing of energy that allowed the bell to ring in London.

What do you expect to happen to them? Will they all eventually be washed away?

Different bells again have different stories. I guarantee the bell itself for 25,000 years, but the structures will never last that long. In the very beginning I wanted them built really strongly, but then I thought that was mad because of the carbon footprint, and absurd because even if I built them as strong as I could, they’re going to be gone in 150 years anyway.

I've started using wood and ceramics, so the barnacles can attach themselves to them, and they become a living, welcoming thing to the environment. They’re also made of components. With the big steel structures, if they fail the whole thing goes, but in rethinking how we respond to climate change and the ideas of renewing and reusing, if they’re made of components and one component fails you just take it out and put another one in. And at that point they can go on ad infinitum if people wish to look after them.

Their fates must also be connected to the specific conditions where they are located.

There are three bells which are good examples. We’ve got one on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, where the rocks are Lewisian gneiss. They're 4 thousand million years old and they've not even eroded yet. The beaches on Lewis are just crushed seashells and the rocks aren’t going anywhere.

Then we're doing one in Happisburgh in Norfolk, installed on the 9th of July. It's on a wooden sled because it's going to have to be moved every couple of years because if you fixed it, ten years later it'll be 100 meters out to sea. That one has piles that can be driven into the ground to stop it falling over, and then when it is moved, we'll leave those piles behind so there will be these markers going out to sea, showing where it used to be.

And then, because of its geology, Par beach in Cornwall is an accretion beach. At the moment the bell is way out in the sea and gets completely submerged, so much so that it has to have a two-metre thing on the top of it sticking out the water so that a jet ski doesn’t go crashing into it. But then in 150 years it'll be underneath the dunes, because the dunes there are increasing. There are many different stories, because every bit of the coast is different. 

It sounds like this project has given you an intimate knowledge of the British coast in its various forms.

I know the coast of Britain very well, and in some senses these differences also influence how people think about things. The east coast is largely man-made and defended. It is low-lying, with sand and clays and small stones, whereas the west coast is mostly rocks, there's a few little beaches here and there, but it's mostly rock. The cultures and their relationships to the sea are very different. I do a little bit of research, but really all you have to do is go and talk to the people who work with the sea, and they tell you everything you need to know straight away.

You can find out more about visiting the Time & Tide bells here and Tintinnabulation here.

Images courtesy of Marcus Vergette and Nonclassical.

Rob St John is an artist, musician and writer interested in the blurring of nature and culture in contemporary landscapes. Earlier this year he released Örö - an artist book, 7” single and short film with Blackford Hill, drawing on his time spent on the Finnish island of the same name. A former military site first owned by Russia and then Finland, Örö had been closed to the public for 100 years before it came into the possession of the Finnish National Parks agency with the intention on turning it into a destination – or what St John calls “military ruins as modern tourism”.

Taking part in a residency programme on the island in the intervening period, St John visited twice – first in deepest winter, and then again at the height of summer, where the hours of stifling darkness had been replaced by near 24-hour sunlight. Using methods borrowed from the academic fields of biology and geography such as transect walks and sample squares, St John gathered visual and sonic material to tell nuanced stories of the island at different ecological, geographical and historical scales.

Working with field recordings, hydrophones, contact mics, data sonifications, and granular synthesis, the film and sound works offer his glimpse of a place where nature and human activity are in constant negotiation.

How did you come to be on Örö to begin with?

Örö appealed because a lot of my interests as an artist have been in these very muddled contemporary landscapes, where you get human and non-human, built and organic forms and processes all slipping in and out of one another. I think it's in those places that we can tell interesting stories about Anthropocene landscapes, and the inter-relationships and co-dependencies with which we can think about different futures. When I found out about this weird and wonderful island of all these crumbling structures and resurgent biodiversity, it seemed like a good place to experiment with.

The residency process was really interesting because they wanted an artist on the island in that transition period, and so I managed to get an initial month in January 2016 to go there. I didn’t really know what I was getting myself in for. It was really cold, really dark, felt so remote and you stayed in this converted military barracks house. That first month was a real challenge because I'd taken what you might term a tool kit of cameras and sound recording gear, but there was only very limited amount of light every day, it was very cold, and batteries ran down very quickly.

The combination of military ruins and resurgent biodiversity reminds me of this idea of the military-pastoral complex. What is it that particularly interested you in this?

In coming to Örö, it wasn’t an intentional thing of wanting to think with former military sites. But I do also think they’re really fascinating aesthetically, in terms of these built structures that are very much shaped by the landscape and geology and outlook and weather. There are all these subtle architectural detailings that are to do with command and control and mastery over the landscape, even though they themselves are shaped by what the landscape is letting them do.

And then I think the potential trajectory of where a landscape goes is probably my main interest in places like this. That openness to change and flux and possibility in how landscapes develop. I'm also interested in that in my own art practice and try to find processes that let me channel uncertainty and chance. How much can we guide landscapes towards what we might want them to be, and how much do we need to cede control? You see that in rewilding debates all the time. And I think it was this muddle of historical and archaeological and ecological elements on Örö as much as the military element itself that interested me.

Is that notion of controlling or ceding control of a landscape where this idea of patterning comes from which you refer to in the book? Of patterning the landscape through industrial and human processes but also in the natural patterns that resist it…

That’s exactly it. I became quite interested in thinking across those two categories. When you find visual and sonic resonances between patterns in built and organic worlds, what aesthetic strategies let you think across those categories? What happens when you look or you listen across these different worlds and are there new possibilities and new spaces for thinking, imagining and telling stories from that?

You first went to Örö in winter, and then again in the summer. Was there a difference in the way the island sounded at these two times of the year?

In the winter the island was very quiet. A thick blanket of snow, most of the sea around it was frozen, it was very deadened sound-wise, an occasion crow or buzzard. I spent time with hydrophones under the ice and got some OK recordings, lots of creaks and sloshes and things like that. I spent quite a lot of time putting contact mics onto fence wires that were strung across the island, getting lots of drones and crackles, and also I'd find my way into the empty and derelict barracks, for nothing else than that they looked a tiny bit warmer, and put the contacts on various surfaces as well. I had a little violin bow with me, so I'd be bowing the fences but I’d also go in a bow nails that were used for coat racks, and I suppose because there wasn’t a lot of sound available to human hearing on that trip that it became really a thing of trying to create your own sound palette from the objects and materials that were available on the island. So just lots of play really, very frozen play.

I knew I needed to go back again and that's why I went back in the summer, because I knew that for all that it was a really interesting experience in the winter, I hadn’t made enough sound and film to make the work that I wanted to make, but I also knew that that was only a very partial view of this island and I could have come away with a very arrow perspective on it.

So I came back in the summer and I can vividly remember getting off this little ferry and being on a quad to the military building and hearing this incredible surround sound of bird song everywhere and thinking this is not what I remember at all. Just a world away really.

Were there things about the landscape that sound and listening revealed to you that were harder to access through your visual practice?

On that second visit I was doing these transect walks. I'm interested in the way sound transitions across the landscape, the way it appears and disappears across scales of time and space. I'd draw these arbitrary lines and record every 100 steps, but I'd also spend a lot more time, especially with hydrophones, popping them in rockpools to hear shrimp snapping, insects stridulating, pondweed popping, sphagnum creaking. Really again with this sense of play but with a sense of inquisitiveness as well, of trying to find an aural window into these nonhuman worlds that are buzzing away at scales vast and tiny that are not usually accessible to our ears.

I also started getting really interested in the possibilities of sonification, in that same spirit of ‘how do I tell stories of change here in ways that are bigger than I can perceive myself right now?’ So I had the MIDI Sprout and would spend time popping it on various bits of vegetation and just sit there with my laptop. I think the one that ended up in the sound work on the film was 20 minutes sat watching the sun go down with this birch tree.

I'd have the laptop set up attached to this birch tree and you could really feel the slowing of the day as the sun went down. All these patterns and silences and rhythms ebbed away as the tree slowed its photosynthesis. You could feel this breathing out, this slowing of the day. And times like that you get this sonic record of a period of time. There's also something quite bodily about it as well, it's like an attunement and an attentiveness that you don't always plan for.

I also went hunting out data sets from researchers and government agencies and got data sets on things like oceanic parameters, surface temperatures, oxygenation, eutrophication and things like that. I essentially thought that with time, if the binaural recordings are recording in seconds, and the MIDI Sprout recordings are recording over tens of minutes, then these longer-term data sets are letting me think and express sonically over 100s or 1000s of years. Using them in the film, it's all part of that accumulation of different speeds and intensities and rhythms of processes on the island and trying to express that both visually and sonically.

Your work has often crossed lines between sound recording and composition. With this project in particular, were you using natural rhythms as compositional starting points?

There was no active composition in this sound work. It was all assemblage as much as composition. It was field recordings, hydrophones, contact mics, the sonifications and the synth granulations. I wanted to assemble them in a way that had this conversation back and forth with the film, and with the written work in the book. I would listen to these quite long sonifications and snip out and use the things that excited me or things that seemed quite interesting or unusual, tonally or melodically. Obviously there was a choice in the tones that I used for the sonifications. I used small synths and marimba and things like that, but the composition was really a process of editing rather than making.

Picking up on the idea of you being open to chance in order to witness changes at different scales within the environment, were there any outcomes or learnings that you took away from the work?

Yeah, that's a good question. I think it really helped me see and communicate this island as somewhere more-than-visual, or more than what it's now been branded as subsequently as tourist attraction. I kept coming back to this phrase of Anna Tsing's in The Mushroom At The End Of The World, where she calls a landscape "a polyphonic assemblage". I always thought that's a really nice way to get at the multiple forms of life, the multiple scales that are all going on in parallel above and below and around us, that shape a landscape. The non-human, the organic, the geological, all these shifts at different paces, different rhythms, different intensities. I hope to have achieved something of that in the work.

Watch and listen to Rob St John’s Örö film and sound recordings here.