Slow Bells

political talk radio and Rockefeller Chapel carillon

Carillon

Transmission

36 morning chants of the Heart Sutra with Moktak

36 Heart Sutra Chants

Frame Drum, Cicadas, Airplane

Night at Huzzy Lake, Lawton Michigan. Crickets, Moktak, Wind Chimes, Frame Drum

Dholak with Airplanes, Geese and Sparrows

In September of 2019 I lived in a cottage on a dune near the Miller Woods section of the Indiana Dunes National Park as part of the Calumet Artist Residency program. 121 years after Cowles made his ecological observations at this same spot I decided to check in to make my own observations on how the succession has continued and how it has changed as a result of many factors, namely by way of anthropogenic alterations to the Calumet landscape. One hundred years ago the dunes were a contiguous collar at the southern shore of Lake Michigan, stretching from southeast Chicago to southwest Michigan. Today we have a patchwork of non-contiguous nature preserves that rub shoulders with steel mills, railroad tracks, housing developments, strip malls, strip clubs, sand mines, oil refineries, waste dumps, a municipal airport, etc. The Miller Woods today is very different than the one that Cowles conducted fieldwork in at the turn of the 20th century. However, it is still an incredible landscape that supports a variety of functioning ecosystems. The “struggle for existence” in the succession continues today, there’s just a few more anthropogenic challenges (and assistance) added to the fight.
The parcel of land that the National Park owns as Miller Woods is bounded by the lake to the north, the beach community of Miller – a neighborhood of Gary to the east, U.S. Steel mill to the west and three sets of railroad tracks to the south. Walking through the nature preserve one can clearly hear the sounds of change as one moves through the ecological succession, this also includes the sounds that have been added since ecologist Henry Cowles first defined this concept in 1898. Modern anthropogenic sounds mix with ancient natural rhythms to create a dizzying multi-layered soundtrack that at times blurs the distinctions between the sound sources (“Was that a motor or a katydid? Are those waves or blast furnaces from the steel mill?”). I documented these sounds by making field recordings of the different stages of the succession (beach, foredune, interdunal pond, ridge, marsh and oak savanna) at different times of the day (dawn, dusk and night) and combined them as successional sound-waves on one 35-minute track. By documenting the sounds of the preserve in this way I realized that the microphone doesn't discriminate which revealed just how squeezed in nature is against man's interests. How space is shared among all beings is telling in these recordings where not a moment goes by where one does not hear the hum, drone, whistle or rhythm of anthropogenic sounds wafting in from outside the National Park's boundaries.

Mike Weis (zelienople)

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