EXPERIMENTS IN BIOREGIONAL LISTENING
VARIOUS INSTITUTIONS: Walker Art Center, Askeaton Contemporary Arts Ireland, Los Angeles County Arboretum, Berkeley Art Museum.
A radio broadcast from a holy well. A heavy metal guitarist learning bird song. The patter of three-hundred people playing baseball with lemons.
All music is intimately tied to the places it is made. In many ways, we find a place to make music and then design a work to fit it - “oh this concert hall looks inviting” with its crispy acoustics and ritzy finishes, the contemporary concert hall is one of many places where careful listening could occur - but is only one. This series of works aims to liberate listening from euro-centric spaces like the contemporary concert hall and cultivate attention in rural hollows, holy wells, drought tolerant gardens, farms, and fields. When we find presence in the everyday pedestrian spaces we are more likely to bring it home - the softness that music cultivates - the slowness that leads to kindness - the poetry poetry poetry of places.
RURAL AMBIENT BROADCASTING -
LIVE ENVIRONMENTS FROM WESTERN IRELAND
ASKEATON CONTEMPORARY ARTS, Co Limerick, 2023
LIVE ENVIRONMENTS FROM WESTERN IRELAND
The holy well at Barrigone is positioned down a set of stairs on the shore of the Shannon - a tidal estuary flowing across Ireland east from Connla’s well - the source of ancestral wisdom and the portal to the otherworld in Irish mythology. From the well, you can observe bird life, a small quarry that goes back a thousand years, and in the distance the Aughinish Alumina plant with its dystopian smoke stacks and reddish fields of discarded industrial waste. Situated in this landcape is the Éist Machine - a radio transmitter that could broadcast live sounds from this remote sacred well back to the town of Askeaton.
I hoped that the Éist machine could break space and time in its own way – situating us at the rim of the well in Barrigone, while we sit listening 10 kilometres away in the town of Askeaton. Similar to the ways that Irish wells themselves are thresholds from this world (ceantar) to the other (alltar or Tír na nOg). From our position in the Community Center, we can hear the birds, wind, and flow of water - a rupture where we can close our eyes and exist both in both places. This concept touches on systems and concepts such as regional biodiversity, the global climate crisis, and the water quality of the wells that dot this part of County Limerick in the shadow of contemporary life.
ÉIST
to listen,
to attend in stillness,
to stand where the sound can find you
to listen,
to attend in stillness,
to stand where the sound can find you
NEW COMMUNALISM
DIGITAL NATURE AT THE LOS ANGELES COUNTY ARBORETUM , 2019
A heavy metal guitarist attempts to learn bird song via modified naturalist recordings.
A project in interspecies communication & aspirational communalism with Matthew Setzer from Skinny Puppy.
PLAY CATCH, ALL TOGETHER
WALKER ART CENTER, 2014REGIONAL BASEBALL VIBES
LEMON
1. Buy a large basket of lemons
2. Place the lemons
3. Throw the lemons
Ken Friedman
1966
Disney Hall, 2022. Image by Ian Byers Gamber