5+ things to listen to this month

1970s eco-horror films, architectural soundscapes and the collective sound of water.

pablo diserens & the ocean comm/uni/ty

upstream ensemble

(forms of minutiae / TBA21–Academy)

Field recording and listening are often posited as individual acts, and recorded works the product of a single perspective on an environment. When you listen to a field recording, so the idea goes, you are listening to someone else’s listening. What happens then when a composition of found sounds is built from a multitude of perspectives? Based on an open call for water-born recordings, sound artist and forms of minutiae co-founder Pablo Diserens makes the case for a kind of dispersed, communal recording, drawing a sonic thread betweens the oceans, rivers, pipe networks, ponds, and glaciers of 35 contributors. With nods to Pauline Oliveros’ Deep Listening and Rachel Carson’s The Edge of The Sea, what I love most about this work is how clearly it makes the case for the interconnectedness of aquatic environments and water systems.

---

Ludwig Berger

Species Loneliness

(-OUS)

“I wanted to revisit the sound worlds of 1970s eco-horror films, a time of growing fears about environmental consequences,” writes landscape sound artist Ludwig Berger of his new work Species Loneliness. “Today, we no longer fear the revenge of frogs or insects; we are mourning their vanishing.” The sense of a haunting runs through the 6-track EP, and not just in the samples and field recordings that Berger draws on as his source material. Instead a feeling of alienation and nostalgia is shot through tracks like ‘Sea Of Decay’, ‘Apparent Heart’ and ‘Cocoon Death’, which seem to evoke both the toxicity of polluted landscapes and a kind of apathetic indifference which has defined the world’s inability to take any meaningful action. A dark and unsettling vision of a feeling approximated as “homesickness at home”.

---

Midori Takada / SHHE

MSCTY x V&A Dundee: Midori Takada / SHHE

(MSCTY_EDN)

This one has been out for 6 months, but following my recent post about Japanese environmental sounds, I couldn’t not include it. Just as many works of kankyō ongaku did in the 1980s, this album features compositions inspired by a piece of architecture, in this case the new V&A Museum in Dundee. If you’ve not come across her work before, Midori Takada is one of Japanese foremost ambient and experimental musicians (her 1983 album Through The Looking Glass was rediscovered via a quirk of the YouTube algorithm a few years ago), and here she takes the natural materials of Kengo Kuma’s design and construction as her inspiration, using her favoured wooden marimbas on three tracks that evoke the fluidity and tranquility of water. Takada’s work is backed by a 45-minute composition from Scottish-Portuguese artist Su Shaw, who also lets the rhythms of the waves, tides and the nearby River Tay run through the work.

---

Maria W. Horn

Panoptikon

(XKatedral)

Vita Duvan was a panopticon prison located in the town of Luleå in northern Sweden. Translated as The White Dove, Vita Duvan operated for more than 120 years, from 1856 to 1979, and it is within its decommissioned walls that Maria W. Horn first presented the sound works collected here. Taking compositional cues from the sense of isolation, surveillance and confinement the central panopticon structure was designed to impress on its prisoners, Horn positioned individual voices on speakers in different cells. On record, these compositions have an uncanny, Baroque quality that speak of the use of space to control and subjugate individuals. Four years before Vita Duvan was shut down, Michel Foucault invoked the panopticon as a metaphorical device in the disciplining and ordering of contemporary society - a silent mechanism of power that preys on the fear of surveillance and is more prescient now than ever.

---

Angus Carlyle, Chrystal Cherniwchan & Craig Tattersall

Non Mountain

(Umbrella Publishing)

Recordings made in the Picentini national park south of Naples in Italy form the basis of Non Mountain, which returns to two films Angus Carlyle made with Chiara Caterina, ‘Il Vertice’ (2013) and ‘Into The Outside’ (2015), and the field recordist’s previous work In The Shadow of the Silent Mountain. A collaborative and recursive project between Carlyle, artist Crystal Cherniwchan and Umbrella Publishing’s Craig Tattersall, Non Mountain reworks and responds to the original source material across mediums, accompanying the 10” record with an 84-page book. Taking its cue from René Daumal’s allegorical novel Mount Analogue, the sonics of Non Mountain fade in and out of focus as moments of densely textured, physical sound give way to an ethereal, shimmering haze where the air is thin and nothing is quite as it seems.

---

Additional Listening:

• Artist Gillies Adamson Semple is releasing a new album of compositions recorded in situ on the world’s oldest functioning pipe organ, housed in the Valere Basilica in Switzerland. The recordings on Volumes play with the materiality of the space - you can hear the stops and echoes throughout - and connect the broader ecological themes of Semple’s work. I spoke to Gillies for the liner notes that accompany the release, and you can find out more about it here.

• Leo Heiblum’s Encyclopedia Sónica Vol. 1 is the latest release on Language of Sound. An intricate and sensitive engagement with the sounds of earth, Heiblum uses the rhythms and melodies of the natural world as both his vocabulary and source material, seemingly erasing his own agency as a composer in the process.

• MINING’s new album Chimet is made from the data sonification of a storm sequence which passed across the north east of England over the course of a week in 2017. Structured by the weather front, the 74-minute piece is accompanied by Matthew Bourne’s piano, cello and synth improvisations, to provide an extra layer of drama to the score.

• Scientists are experimenting with playing the sounds of healthy coral reefs from underwater speakers to lure fish back to degraded ones. There’s a short segment on the research via NPR which you can listen to here. Thank you

  Jon-Marc Seimon
  for the tip.

• And finally… You know you’re onto something when David Attenborough gets on board. The latest series by the grandfather of ecological hyperbole is called The Secret World Of Sound and is currently airing on Sky. (You can watch the trailer here, which sounds more like it’s been scored by Hans Zimmer). Not to be outdone, Apple TV also has a sonic series on the go, this time narrated by Tom Hiddleston, called EarthSounds. Must be having a moment.