EARS HAVE EYES // Episode 33
Airing Wednesday, November 13, 2024 at 8 pm MST
on CJSW 90.9 FM, NAISA, & Golden Co-Op Radio
MORE THAN HUMAN:
voices beyond our understanding
ARTISTS:
AnimaeNoctis
Ben Gaunt
Daria Baiocchi
Doga Unyaylar
Johannes Christopher Gerard
Lananh Chu
Manoah Epp
Matt Shenton
Stijn Demeulenaere
Una Walker
This program is co-hosted by Caitlind r.c. Brown & Wayne Garrett, and curated and edited by Caitlind Brown. Thanks to CJSW, Golden Co-Op Radio, and NAISA (especially Kaamil, Claire, and Darren) for supporting this show!
EARS HAVE EYES is a monthly sound art radio program airing on CJSW 90.9 FM in Calgary/Mohkinstsis, Golden Co-op Radio in Golden, BC, and NAISA Radio in South River, Ontario. You can listen to podcasts of previous episodes here.
This month, we’re listening to the voices of animals, plants, and ecosystems outside our normal human understanding. From the barking of street dogs, to the whispering mycelial networks of forests, to the soundscapes of marine life in the world’s busiest sea, we’re sharing sound art that amplifies the “more than human” world – a phrase coined by ecologist-philosopher David Abram in 1996 to describe the living world beyond human beings.
Thanks to the participating artists and our friends at CJSW, NAISA, and Golden Co-op Radio!
AnimaeNoctis
AnimaeNoctis is a multimedia duo: Silvia Marcantoni Taddei (1994) & Massimo Sannelli (1973). Music is the very core of their activity since 2019: they keep on publishing their sound figments with NN Records, Beached Records and their own label AnimaeNoctis. AnimaeNoctis experiments with music, filmmaking, dancing, performance, post-porn art, e-publishing, photography/modeling, activism.
About Humanythm + Interference:
“Human + rhythm = Humanythm. Plus some interferences. This piece sums up sounds from easy instruments (a recorder for tourists, a toy keyboard, a kazoo) and Silvia’s voice singing and speaking “HUMAN”. Human is a concept but is also an adjective, a word: if you repeat a word, you will make a “more than human” item. The gist is repeating with variations.”
Ben Gaunt
Ben Gaunt is a composer, sonic artist, and improviser. He has written for the London Symphony Orchestra, London Sinfonietta, Grimethorpe Colliery Band, and many other lovely people. He has been nominated for an Ivor Novello Award, a British Composer Award, and is Professor in Composition at Leeds Conservatoire.
About German Canine Waltz Time:
“In 2023, I was recording some material for another composition of mine, just outside Köln Cathedral. There were two dogs yapping at each other; I loved the sound, but it just didn’t fit the piece. In 2024, I was asked to perform a piece for the Music Patron launch event at the Groucho Club in Soho, London. I decided to make a new work, using a tiny snippet of the discarded dog sounds.“
Daria Baiocchi
Daria Baiocchi is the main Professor of Harmony and Music Analysis at “G.B.Pergolesi” Fermo Conservatory of Music and Sound Design Professor in Macerata Academy of Fine Arts.
About Theta:
“This audio work is based on the context of life. Life forms, from the simplest single-celled organisms to complex ecosystems, appear to defy the tendency by maintaining and increasing order within themselves organizing, structuring and maintaining system’s processes in a state of low disorder-entropy. Theta grows as a sound that takes care of itself, takes energy and transform it, changes shape, moves towards entropy but returns on its centrality as a founding element of its acoustic life. The path that it takes could be direct or indirect but the thing that characterizes it is the return to life.”
Doga Unyaylar
Doga Unyaylar is an artist and musician. She lives in Istanbul. Ünyaylar’s work explores the relationship between sound production and its different contexts, as well as experience, space and contemporary visual arts practices.
Air, Water, From the Ground was created by combining sound and visual medium. The artist aimed for us to feel the world of animals in the three different layers with a hidden empathy.
Johannes Christopher Gerard
Born in Cologne, Germany, Johannes Christopher Gerard lives in The Hague, Netherlands. Studied at the Cologne University of Design, Germany, and at the Dun Laogharie School of Art and Design (IADT) in Dublin, Ireland. In 2021/2022 he participated in the Acoustic Interiors Project in The Hague, Netherlands. As part of this project, he began to work regularly with the medium of sound.
R.5 is a composition and compilation of sounds of animals, birds, insects, flowing rivers, wind, distant thunder, forest, rain forest, rain and raindrops hitting plants and ground. Back and forth in rhythm before it starts to rain, the moments in the rain and after the rain.
Lananh Chu
Lananh Chu is a Vietnamese writer and maker who wants to listen with their flawed ears.
Birds Observation is an assemblage of field recordings in the Marine Park, Brooklyn. How many kinds of birds can you hear?
Manoah Epp
Manoah Epp is a BFA Music & Sound major at Simon Fraser University and is an aspiring musician/ multimedia sound artist. Raised in British Columbia, Manoah has a deep love for the natural world and finds many inspirations from the grand beauty of the mountains. Creating audio experiences that connect with listeners on a deep subsonic level. Manoah aims to touch the very fabric of the soul through the power of sonic works.
About Desperate Solitude In A High-Frequency Noise Floor:
“Desperate Solitude In A High-Frequency Noise Floor is a soundscape composition on the search for high-frequency noise and the craving for an escape from noise pollution. I spent 2 nights in Stanley Park Vancouver field recording bats in Beaver Lake. While trying to get the purest of sound. The noise floor of Vancouver even during the night is so loud that it is almost impossible to get completely isolated noise. This piece takes the ultrasound and field recordings I captured and manipulates them such that I transport the listener to a plane where the high-frequency noise floor melts into the darkness of the night. The spirituality of the act of field recording is what I am displaying in this piece. Most of the noise in this piece is recorded, edited and eq’d in a way where it would only display the high-frequency information. The moment when anything lower is heard is a representation of my spirit diving into the lake. During the creation process of this piece, I asked myself. If I could not capture the purest ultrasonic call of a bat. What can I do to recapture my experience? Melting into the forest floor of Stanley Park I invite you to allow your soul to dive as well into the marsh, and sink to the bottom of the lake.”
Matt Shenton
Matt Shenton is an experimental musician, sound artist and performer whose work explores the rural landscape of Suffolk (with a particular focus on the morphology of working class soundscapes). He also explores how conceived notions of the pastoral landscape inform and influence ideas of national identity.
His work under the moniker ‘there are no birds here’ uses manipulated field recordings, homemade instruments, music concrete and modified electronics salvaged from potential landfill to create textural explorations of timbre with instinctive, chance-based arrangements that mimic the rural soundscape.
About Two contact microphones capture the sounds inside an anthill:
“In July 2024, I discovered that ants had built an impressive nest rising up 30cm from the ground in my garden in Suffolk, England. I was able to explore and capture the sound of thousands of ants rapidly moving through the earth by carefully pushing two contact microphones into the loose soil at the top of the nest. The resulting recording reminds me of white noise often used for relaxation or as a sleep aid. I could listen to the texture for hours as it slowly drifts, crunches and pops.”
Rob Brinkworth
Rob Brinkworth works with sound.
Designed to evoke the experience of being imprisoned inside a confined space, Entrapped is a composition created in collaboration with the birds in an aviary. The artist draws a parallel between trapped birds and the prison cells and chambers of torment inside Cape Town’s Castle of Good Hope – the location where the artist captured part of this soundscape. The use of birds is particularly resonant in this context, as they are often associated with freedom and flight, making their confinement all the more disturbing. At the same time, this installation explores the theme of power and control, highlighting the ways in which these concepts are intertwined with the use of physical spaces.
Stijn Demeulenaere
Stijn Demeulenaere tries to understand places by listening to them. He is intrigued by how we give meaning to the sounds we hear, and how we use those sounds to give meaning to spaces and places.
Zijlijn / Linea Lateralis was originally a multichannel installation exploring the underwater soundscape of the North Sea, the busiest sea in the world. It’s also the loudest sea in the world. This is problematic for marine life, a lot of which depends on smell and sound to navigate, procreate, feed and communicate. “Zijlijn” confronts human noise with the sounds of natural life, inviting the spectator to create their own view on the delicate balance. 6 speakers stand opposite a broken line of water samples, coming from the places where the artist went to record the sounds for the installation. The North Sea is a perfect illustration of the global noise pollution problem. Human sounds are heard in all seas and oceans, from the remotest part of the Antartic Ocean to the Mariana Trench, the deepest point on the planet. The name of the installation refers to the lateral line of fishes, an organ with which they detect variations in water pressure. According to some theories, it evolved from the same proto-organ as our human ears did.
Una Walker
Una Walker is an artist and writer based at Flax Art Studios, Belfast, Northern Ireland, and has exhibited extensively in Ireland and internationally, making site and context specific installation and audio and video works. Site specific installation works have been constructed in diverse locations including military fortifications in Ireland, Scotland and Finland, a derelict factory in Poland, and cathedral in Wales. During the Covid lockdowns she became acutely aware of the immediate surroundings of her home in County Down, and started making ield recordings which have been used as sources for her audio works.
About Mycelium Sounds:
“I was reading about mycelial networks, how every fungal cell has the ability to become its own individual network and how the single hyphae create themselves in real time. The hyphae create the network and also carry the water and nutrients allowing the network to grow in three dimensional space. And I asked myself what this might sound like. Mycelium sounds is one of the outcomes.”
Thank you to the artists & listeners!
Special thanks to CJSW.
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