Does Your Listening Misbehave?
strange encounters beyond the human
You’re Invited! Yes YOU! (and all your weird friends)
This fall I’ll be guiding a live series of listening encounters - Bodies of Listening - beyond the human. Let’s enter into a mode of becoming-with.
Imagine a collective research field lab where we experience entangled kinship and ecologies of disturbance - allowing our listening and attention to misbehave.
Add your info by clicking on the image below and I’ll keep you in the loop with more details over the summer.
It has taken me several weeks to type out this newsletter. Here in northern New Mexico it feels like summer began months ago. The heat is brutal, but more so it is the intensely parched land that has a particularly haunting sound.
A while back I bought a hydrophone, a type of contact mic that can be submerged in the water. A hydrophone can pick up the nuances of underwater sounds and I was excited to take it to the Pojoaque river nearby to listen. But there is no river running, it is completely dry.
What is the sound of a river that is no longer running?
I have been thinking a lot about how to be with what is, what gets disturbed, what doesn’t behave as we expect it to, and how not to rush in to fix and resolve the disturbance. How might we enter into this place of disturbance and become-with what is?
My thinking and meandering is influenced by the strange, by folks like Bayo Akomolafe, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Donna J. Haraway, Anna Friz, and mostly through non-human encounters such as the feral frequencies of the electromagnetic fields.
And for me, all of it begins with listening. There are so many ways to listen-with, to enter into place, not nature exactly because you are nature. But place, ecotones, the ecologies of disturbance as described by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing in her book, The Mushroom at the End of the World.
What becomes possible when we listen-with?
Listen to the Strange and Beautiful Sounds of the Magnetosphere
A few weeks back I spent an entire day listening to artists, researchers, and other nerds at the Electromagnetic Fields symposium. The work of Stephen McGreevy came up several times, specifically his Auroral Chorus recordings, and they are just so beautiful. Have a listen.
Field-recordings of Earth's "Natural VLF Radio" signals (audio-frequency natural-radio signals) coming from Earth's magnetosphere, recorded between 1992 to 1998 in the western US and western Canada and northern Alberta, Canada.
A Few Strange Links
Hide and Seek - a practice in re-enchantment. a refusal of purity, certainty, despair. Meredith Kaye’s writing has me nodding on repeat - and her incredible textile works are not to be missed!
The Untimely - Báyò Akómoláfé on the Long Now podcast. “There's something about the clock that produces something in excess of itself.” …“And that excessiveness is enlisting our bodies to do other things, to feel other things.”
Add something to my are.na channel Queer Ecologies and Postnature. I’m gathering materials for our fall experience (books, images, audio, pdfs, links).
A few more days to call in for June’s listening score!
A new practice will be up this coming weekend.
I’ll give you a hint, June’s practice is about memory, whispers, and something forgotten remembered.
And please let this be the invitation to make strange sounds when you press 2 to leave a message!
I’m getting ready to create the first composition with our collective sounds, don’t miss out.
Call: 505-557-2445
P.S. - Here is the link again to raise your hand and ears to hear more about my fall offering - Bodies of Listening
P.P.S. - A new sonic field trip assignment is coming your way in the next newsletter. Assignment #1 and Assignment #2