Michelle Helene Mackenzie, Stefan Maier, & Olivia Block
Orchid Mantis / Breach
Another belter from the Portraits GRM camp, this one pairs Michelle Helene MacKenzie and Stefan Maier's psychoacoustic study of insect intelligence with a politically fanged field recording/synth dialog from Chicago's Olivia Block.
Canadian sound artists Maier and MacKenzie looked towards 1970s Taiwan while developing their GRM commission, focusing on the Sanzhi Pod City, a futurist set of brightly colored UFO-shaped buildings that was abandoned in 1980, just a couple of years after it had been started. Rumored to be haunted after tragic accidents had blighted the construction work, it was left to the local insects - prompting five separate species of orchid mantis, tiny pink arthropods that mimic the camouflage themselves by mimicking the shape and swaying motion of the orchid, to take residence there. Billed as a conversation with Benjamin Bratton's short story 'The Orchid Mantis of Sanzhi', 'Orchid Mantis' contemplates a post-human environment that's teeming with life. Using modular synth with digital instruments, processed field recordings and amplified bells and chimes, Maier and MacKenzie revel in the alienating near-emptiness of the imagined space, playing with our perceptions by alternating between organic and digital sounds. Scratchy insect chirrs are muddled with tweezed, buzzing oscillations, while bells are stretched into hollow, resonant drones - it's utterly hypnotizing.
Block's piece, though, is the chase. Basing 'Breach' on recordings she collected in the San Ignacio lagoon, a breeding ground for eastern Pacific grey whales, Block faces up to the reality that the species' existence is threatened by human activity. How might that be represented sonically? It's remarkably incisive: Block uses otoacoustic emissions, the soft clicking sounds generated from within the inner ear, to suggest the Anthropocene sound saturation that's driving the whales from their home, muddling these outbursts with evocative environmental recordings. Listening from beginning to end, it's as if we're coaxed into an experience that's like the whales' own, lulled into a false sense of security by lapping waters and assaulted by tinnitus-inducing high-pitched squeals, sine wave deployments and ruptured synthesized bird calls. Now that's power electronics.
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Another belter from the Portraits GRM camp, this one pairs Michelle Helene MacKenzie and Stefan Maier's psychoacoustic study of insect intelligence with a politically fanged field recording/synth dialog from Chicago's Olivia Block.
Canadian sound artists Maier and MacKenzie looked towards 1970s Taiwan while developing their GRM commission, focusing on the Sanzhi Pod City, a futurist set of brightly colored UFO-shaped buildings that was abandoned in 1980, just a couple of years after it had been started. Rumored to be haunted after tragic accidents had blighted the construction work, it was left to the local insects - prompting five separate species of orchid mantis, tiny pink arthropods that mimic the camouflage themselves by mimicking the shape and swaying motion of the orchid, to take residence there. Billed as a conversation with Benjamin Bratton's short story 'The Orchid Mantis of Sanzhi', 'Orchid Mantis' contemplates a post-human environment that's teeming with life. Using modular synth with digital instruments, processed field recordings and amplified bells and chimes, Maier and MacKenzie revel in the alienating near-emptiness of the imagined space, playing with our perceptions by alternating between organic and digital sounds. Scratchy insect chirrs are muddled with tweezed, buzzing oscillations, while bells are stretched into hollow, resonant drones - it's utterly hypnotizing.
Block's piece, though, is the chase. Basing 'Breach' on recordings she collected in the San Ignacio lagoon, a breeding ground for eastern Pacific grey whales, Block faces up to the reality that the species' existence is threatened by human activity. How might that be represented sonically? It's remarkably incisive: Block uses otoacoustic emissions, the soft clicking sounds generated from within the inner ear, to suggest the Anthropocene sound saturation that's driving the whales from their home, muddling these outbursts with evocative environmental recordings. Listening from beginning to end, it's as if we're coaxed into an experience that's like the whales' own, lulled into a false sense of security by lapping waters and assaulted by tinnitus-inducing high-pitched squeals, sine wave deployments and ruptured synthesized bird calls. Now that's power electronics.