Scrying the Landscape - Mutant Radio

Scrying the Landscape w. Elina Tapio & Hannah Pezzack. The uncanny haunts these encounters. ‘Scrying' is the act of gazing into an object to ignite the unconscious mind. It’s a psychic attunement into one’s second sight, revealing knowledge often concealed. Hannah Pezzack and Elina Tapio ascribe this ocular practice to the potentially mystical nature of Deep Listening. In the landscape, through ecologically-charged compositions, they hear sentient slime mould, oceans of language-bearing micro-plastics and cybernetic entities arriving from the future.

Scrying The Landscape w. Elina Tapio And Hannah Pezzack [02.04.2021]

We’re happy to welcome Elina Tapio and Hannah Pezzack with the new show Scrying the Landscape.
Tree roots fuse to the cracks of pavements, spores germinate. In the compost, tracing the spiral bodies of animates, Elina Tapio (@elinatapio) and Hannah Pezzack (@hanapezzack) present a love song to growth and (re)generation. Here, molecularized textures of sound sing back – splintered voices in dissonance utter forms of hallucinogenic glossolalia. The second instalment of 'Scrying the Landscape' features Turner Prize winner, Tai Shani's (@taishani) The Neon Hieroglyph (2021), a composition inspired by ergot, a fungus that grows on rye and other grains from which LSD is derived. [Image: Tai Shani, The Neon Hieroglyph (still), 2021. © Tai Shani. Courtesy of the artist and Manchester International Festival]

Scrying The Landscape II w. Elina Tapio & Hannah Pezzack [28.05.2021]

Scrying the Landscape III w. Elina Tapio & Hannah Pezzack
Flowing, seeping, leaking, cascading, shaping, 𝘴𝘶𝘣𝘮𝘦𝘳𝘨𝘦𝘥. Displaced from terrestrial-based ways of knowing, Elina Tapio (@elinatapio), together with Hannah Pezzack (@hanapezzack), plunges into oceanic depths. Immersed in this alien milieu, the weight and opacity of water transmogrify perception. To the human ear, noises appear muffled, foggy. But sound waves actually travel five times faster underwater than in air. Far from being a silent abyss, waterways are cacophonous: an orchestra of barnacles, sonorous wails and echoes.
The third instalment of 'Scrying the Landscape' features Markus J. Buehler (@profbuehlermit) and Jenna Sutela's (@jennasutela)𝘞𝘦𝘵-𝘰𝘯-𝘞𝘦𝘵 (2021), a sonic toolkit amplifying the emotive molecules of liquids. For 𝘈𝘯𝘢𝘵𝘰𝘮𝘺 𝘰𝘧 𝘐𝘤𝘦 (2020) Hannah Rowan (@rowanhannah) utilised a hydrophone to capture ancient air bubbles – pockets of planetary deep time – escaping from melting icebergs. And synthesist Stan Litjens' (@todaysstan) 𝘙𝘦𝘸𝘢𝘵 (2021) is an ambient interlude composed of field recordings; the lull of rocking boats and seabirds.
[Image: Hertta Kiiski (@herttakiiski), 𝘚𝘯𝘢𝘬𝘦 𝘚𝘱𝘪𝘳𝘢𝘭 from the series 𝘗𝘳𝘪𝘮𝘦𝘷𝘢𝘭 𝘚𝘰𝘶𝘱, 2021]

Scrying The Landscape III w. Elina Tapio And  Hannah Pezzack [28.07.2021]

Scrying the Landscape IV w/ Elina Tapio & Hannah Pezzack!
For Freudian analysts, dreaming of horses is a sign of a phallic fixation – a symbol of carnal, unbridled desire. In 1973, Peter Shaffer published Equus, a play about a young man whose pathological obsession with the creatures drives him into mania: from erotic fascination to violent possession. Yet for feminist writers like Elspeth Probyn, the act of riding embodies euphoric lines of flight. Stables are distinctly feminine spaces in which women and girls form close bonds with each other, and with their equestrian companions. The fourth episode of Scrying the Landscape is inspired by a trip Elina Tapio and Hannah Pezzack took together to Oostvaarders National Park in the Netherlands. There, the wild Konik horse – descendants of the extinct Tarpan - has been introduced to roam through this fenced territory. Indebted to this re-wilding experiment, the biopolitics of species scarcity and Celtic rituals, they present a soundscape of horse music; pagan folk, experimental noise and Welsh choral singing.

Scrying The Landscape w. Elina Tapio And Hannah Pezzack [29.09.2021]

First up we have Scrying the Landscape w. Elina Tapio & Hannah Pezzack
Glossolalia is the act of speaking in tongues; a spiritual encounter whereby a mysterious entity infects the body with an alien language. For the fifth iteration of Scrying the Landscape, Elina Tapio (@elinatapio) and Hannah Pezzack (@hanapezzack) take the voice as their focus, gathering songs together which activate a neural network of vocal intelligence that is non-linear and non-grammatical. Words devoid of meaning, devotional chants and spliced-up utterances, are harnessed to connect with hidden parts of the world and ourselves, to reveal that which cannot be given an identity. How do we talk about what we don’t see? How do we understand that which cannot be said? The divine is pre-alphabetic; the ineffable that is a priori to signification or the arrangement of a symbolic order. Forsaking direct linguistic capacities opens space for interpreting pressure points; temporal turbulence in phonetic structures, and the attack of vocalisation to articulate that which can not be articulated.
Image: Petru Cruceru, The Nightmare of the Olympian

Scrying The Landscape  w. Elina Tapio  And Hannah Pezzack [11.11.2021]

SCRYING THE LANDSCAPE VI w. Elina Tapio & Hannah Pezzack!
Molecular thinking digs deep into the way in which realities emanate from different scales. Referencing the porousness of being subverting singular ways of existence; relating to agential cuts in protein formations and ribosomal activity; or considering unstable and unpredictable formation of identities of quantum particles. Accordingly, this episode opens with the sound of two black holes colliding, expressive of mutating landscapes those recorded electromagnetic waves have emitted in their cosmic-scaled genesis, containing alien memories in the crevices of their becomings: folds within folds, macrocosms within microcosms.
The sixth chapter of Scrying the Landscape features work by multidisciplinary artist Tuomas A. Laitinen (@tuomasalaitinen), who recently released his debut album Sapiduz under the name Tal on Öm-sound. His work deals with a broad-spectrum of approaches to symbiotic processes, ecosystems and multispecies entanglements, themes which are also explored on Sapiduz. The album presents celestial medieval singing reverberating with microbial worlds of past times and futures to come.
Image: Tuomas A. Laitinen, Protean Sap (still), 2020

Scrying The Landscape w. Elina Tapio And Hannah Pezzack [11.01.2022]

For Scrying the Landscape VII, Elina Tapio and Hannah Pezzack find orgasmic pleasure in the concept of Ecosexuality, a term originated by sex worker advocates, performance artists and environmental activists, Annie Sprinkle and Elizabeth Stephens. Against colonial capitalism's violent subjugation of nature, Ecosexuals instead treat the Earth "as a lover." Encompassing marriage ceremonies with mountains, crafting sex toys out of organic matter and climaxing under waterfalls, they centre desire and fetishism in order to protect ecological systems. The horniest iteration of Scrying the Landscape yet includes 'Morning Star-Red Glare- Sequoia Bridge,’ from Elysia Crampton Chuquimia’s ORCORARA 2010, an album narrativized through a romantic entanglement with a sentient plume of smoke, dedicated both to the prison inmates fighting wildfires ravaging California and the indigenous practice of prescribed burns. With great thanks to @fourchambers, a creative pornography project by @vextape, for the soundtrack from the film ‘Human Botany’ and the audio tour of the 'Ecosexual Bathhouse' exhibition by art-collective Pony Express.
[Image: Video still from Marina Abramović's Balkan Erotic Epic (Women in the Rain), 2005]

Elevating / Escalating

Scrying The Landscape w. Elina Tapio And Hannah Pezzack [17.03.2022]

Scrying The Landscape w. Elina Tapio And Hannah Pezzack [24.05.2022]

SCRYING THE LADSCAPE VIII w. Elina Tapio & Hannah Pezzack
The history of sound in warfare and its application to control and exert violence has been most prominently explored by Steve Goodman in his seminal book Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (2012). The book maps out the political landscape of vibration that is routinely exploited with aims to generate domination, by utilizing the violence of sound through its ideological, psychological, or physiological threats. These threats take form as the affect of noise in its widest meaning, or sound technologies designed to conquer, such as “sonic booms”, previously hidden military techniques of torture, LRADs, and more. This episode of Scrying the Landscape aims to claim techniques of sonic warfare to retaliate with dissidence and agency found within the psychoacoustics of violence; its bass and noise magnified to infect the domineering culture, including many artists whose music amplify voices and stories of those standing against a prevailing establishment.

Image: Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Earshot (2016)

Scrying The Landscape w. Elina Tapio And Hannah Pezzack [26.07.2022]

Scrying the Landscape X w. Loma Doom!
Sirens. Mermaids. The Nereides sisters. Throughout mythology, there have been watery women seducing sailors to their deaths with the sweetness of their songs. In a special takeover of Scrying the Landscape, Loma Doom (@loma_doom) reimagines their enchanting voices, not as an aural danger symbolic of destructive sexual temptation, but as harmonious beings in their own right. Her mix glides through the sonorous beauty of women singing together, their voices full of longing, loneliness and desire. 

Recorded live at the Radio Tempo Não Pára studios, Amsterdam.

[Image: Nature's Mirror (edited), approx. 1920 by Arthur F. Kales]

SCRYING THE LANDSCAPE X w. LOMA DOOM [23.09.2022]

What is the more-than-human? Seeded in intellectual traditions that seek to destabilise anthropocentrism, Elina Tapio and Hannah Pezzack trace the resonance of ecologies and technologies that dismantle the notion of the bounded body. Since its inception, electronic music has stretched the limits of corporeality, elongating breath and vocalisations, creating machine-made rhythms which are impossible to humanly replicate. Featuring synthetic soundscapes crafted from field recordings and spectral visions of android women, the eleventh iteration of ’Scrying the Landscape’ finds itself entangled in a multitude of computerised, unrecognisable and hybrid entities.

[Image: Zach Blas, The Doors, 2019]

Scrying The Landscape  w. Elina Tapio And  Hannah Pezzack [06.12.2022]

Scrying the Landscape episode XII w. Elina Tapio and Hannah Pezzack. Roving, cavernous, stretching outwards. Elina Tapio and Hannah Pezzack dedicate the twelfth instalment of 'Scrying the Landscape' to the power of Drone and its adjacent, inspired genres. Composed of sustained notes or tone clusters, Drone is often categorised as “maximal” music because it tests the physical limitations of listeners, producing bodily, meditative or even hallucinatory effects. Within the excessive duration of elongated or repetitive chords, unexpected frequencies can arise as the mind projects utterances that aren’t there. Traversing the realms of psych, folk, dark and experimental variants, this mix oscillates across the spectrum of dronology, towards an endlessly extending vanishing point where sound and music converge.

[Image: Koes Staassen, Bindings II (K.B. reclining), 2020]

SCRYING THE LANDSCAPE  w. Elina Tapio and Hannah Pezzack [06.02.2023]

Scrying the Landscape XIII. Dedicated to particulate bodies, the thirteenth episode of 'Scrying the Landscape' features soundbites from cloudy and sandy fields, and sentimental music for wandering. From accumulated matter to big feelings and turbulent intimacies, this mix drifts beyond the human [at times] to think about 'the tidalectics' of falling apart and holding [it] together. Friends born out of late-night revelling and pandemic living-room rants, together they find respite and a field of inquiry in nearby shores or the memories of more distant ones. The quiet lee-side of the dunes by the North Sea provide shelter and a space to question and practice listening [attunement] and transmission.
[Image: Photograph by Alice Rougeaux]

Scrying the Landscape w. Elina Tapio, Hannah Pezzack and Alice Rougeaux [06.04.2023]

Scrying the Landscape XIV. The exquisitely mystifying 1981 film 𝘐𝘯 𝘚𝘩𝘢𝘥𝘰𝘸 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘚𝘶𝘯 by Derek Jarman, sound tracked by Throbbing Gristle, offers a ritualistic journey into the English countryside. Inspired by the curious cinematography and sound of the avant-garde film, this episode of Scrying is our own iteration of its score in an attempt to capture similar narrative tools it uses to ascend into ancient worlds ever-present in the streets we all walk through: The slowing of frames skewing scenes of the (un)familiar landscape forsakes straight linearity and etches pathways to the mobility of experienced time. In the fragmentary nature of duration, consciousness shines through drawing out archetypal images of human existence in Jungian terms. For this, we reach out a sonic gesture to touch base with primaeval, inherited memories in a melting pot of pagan iconography and the mystery of the everyday.

Sun shadow

Scrying the Landscape w. Elina Tapio, Hannah Pezzack [02.08.2023]

SCRYING THE LANDSCAPE XV w. LA SERPIENTE ‘SEARCHING FOR THE SUBLIME’ [04.10.2023]

Through ocean mists, the sound of the foghorn is huge, rattling, and momentous. For the sixteenth instalment of Scrying the Landscape, Haron delivers a lament for the slow death of the monstrous, melancholy machines, evoking coastal folklore, shipwrecks, and the loneliness of lighthouses.

Scrying the Landscape XVI w. Haron [04.12.2023]

Scrying the Landscape w. Elina Tapio, Hannah Pezzack [07.02.2024]

𝘉𝘰𝘥𝘪𝘦𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘸𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘳, 𝘣𝘰𝘥𝘪𝘭𝘺 𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘳𝘢𝘪𝘯, 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘸𝘩𝘰𝘭𝘦 𝘣𝘰𝘥𝘺 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘭𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘯𝘴. The eighteenth edition of Scrying the Landscape explores the sensuality of sound. From devotional chanting to the chest-thrumming pulse of dub and power electronics, this mix contains music that serves as a reminder of our embodied presence in the world. Enter a realm of somatic rituals, where the thinking mind and feeling flesh meet, revealing their irrevocable inseparability.

[Image: La Venus Negra by Ana Mendieta (1981)]

Scrying the Landscape w. Elina Tapio, Hannah Pezzack [08.04.2024]

Scrying the Landscape w. Elina Tapio, Hannah Pezzack
Milan-based musician xàr num crafts his personal imprint on Scrying the Landscape with a mix delving deep into the crevices of the unknown.

Scrying the Landscape w. xàr num [13.06.24]

Scrying the Lanscape XX

Inspired by elemental forces, the 20th edition of Scrying the Landscape sets itself
alight, opening with a flint-spark before rising into an all-engulfing, uncontrollable blaze.
From the magenta heat of a torrid flame to the dying ember, fire is an unwieldy element
– simultaneously destructive and life-giving. In recent years, wildfires have decimated
landscapes in the Californian Sierra Nevada, the Australian coast, and the ancient
forests of Ukraine. Yet fire is also symbiotically implicated in all forms of existence. In
many places, controlled or prescribed burnings have been part of millennia-old cultural
practices, binding local communities to the land, clearing dead foliage to make way for
new life, with the ashes feeding the soil.
Fire has long captivated human understanding, inspiring myths and theories about its
origins and eQects. In the medieval hypothesis of phlogiston, a combustible, alchemical
entity was thought to be contained within bodies. This early theory points to Western
science’s struggle to grasp the process of oxidation, as well as a deep-rooted
fascination with fire’s power and metamorphic potential.
Scrying the Landscape XX is punctuated by exerts of Gregory Whitehead’s ‘Lovely Ways
To Burn’ (1990). The hybrid documentary play weaves together a witness account of an
execution by electric chair; memories of burns, fires and suburban oblivion; and an
imaginary philosopher contemplating the phenomenology of fire, neurobiology, and
ecstatic death.
[Image: video still from Eiichi Yamamoto’s Beladonna of Sadness, 1973]

Scrying the Landscape w. Elina Tapio, Hannah Pezzack [07.09.24]

Scrying the Landscape @mutantradio
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inquiries: eelina.tapio@gmail.com