To mark World Oceans Day 2021, we partnered with Concentric Records, TBA-21-Academy and Ocean Archive for a full day of broadcasts based on and inspired by sounds from the oceans.

 The incredible Ocean Archive is a sound library of the seas and harbours of the world, from Galapagos to the North Atlantic. It includes many types of whale, fish, earthquake, seismic explosions, methane seeps, tectonic plates and deep water drilling.

 The artists invited to make broadcasts based on this archive are Jake Muir, Izabel, Beluga, Carl Michael von Hausswolff / Dark Morph, Baby Vulture, Terrence Dixon, Jana Winderen reporting live from the seas, and finally Refuge Worldwide programmer Richard Akingbehin.

World Oceans Day - Jana Winderen

inter-spatia (2020/22)
Catherine Lamb

performed on March 18th, 2022 at Nykirken, Bergen, Borealis Festival

Microtub (Robin Hayward, Martin Taxt, and Peder Simonsen), Rage Thormbones (Mattie Barbier and Weston Olencki), with MO Abbott and Henrik Nørstebø

tuba trio + trombone quartet

recorded by Weston Olencki

inter-spatia (with Microtub and Rage Thormbones)

In this episode, we are joined by Jol Thoms, a London-based artist and researcher teaching the MA program Art & Ecology at Goldsmiths, University of London. Thoms is the founder of a multi-year sound project called Radio Amnion, commissioning artists and researchers to stream sonic composition from the depths of the Pacific Ocean. Radio Amnion explores the magical spaces of intersection between cultural and scientific cosmologies and also joined the STARTS artists-in-residency for their final showcase event at Ocean Space in Venice on the summer solstice in 2021.

In a conversation with Elisa Resconi, an astrophysicist from the Technical University of Munich, and Dwight Owens from Ocean Networks Canada, an initiative of ocean observatories monitoring the Canadian coastline, this episode delves into the deep world of ocean science and compassionate ecological art, departing from the smallest and perhaps most elusive particles described by physics. What happens when science opens up its depths to the transformative potential of art? 

"Magical Fresh & Salty Conversations is produced by TBA21–Academy with the support of STARTS, an initiative by the European Commission." 

Special thanks to our guests: Dwight Owens, Elisa Resconi, and Jol Thoms 

Editor at large: María Montero Sierra	
Sound edited by: Elena Zieser 
Introduction and credits voice-over: Nathan Johnson
Music by horizonsnd and underwater sound recordings of the Venetian Lagoon by Sonia Levy and Jez Riley French

Produced by: Miriam Calabrese, María Montero Sierra, Katarina Rakušček, and the artists.

Hear more episodes at ocean-archive.org or subscribe with your podcast provider.

Magical Fresh & Salty Conversation: Radio Amnion

This episode of Magical Fresh & Salty Conversations features the artist and STARTS resident Sonia Levy in conversation with Erika Balsom, a London-based scholar and critic working on cinema, art, and their intersection. During their STARTS residency, Sonia Levy and her collaborators, environmental anthropologist Heather Swanson, ecologist Meredith Root Bernstein, and landscape architect Alexandra Arènes, looked at the Venetian Lagoon through the lens of nature-based solutions to mitigate flood risks. What issues arise from Venice’s long history of taming its waterscape? With a shared commitment to noticing more-than-human worlds, the group strived to forge their own understanding of the controversies arising from the lagoon’s water management.

In Sonia’s eyes, lagoons are fascinating places to think about the meeting of different bodies of water - fresh and saltwater. Filming underwater became a way to get to know the ephemeral world of the lagoon and its processes of transformation in the hope that this submerged perspective might also bring about speculative approaches to policy change.

Magical Fresh & Salty Conversations is produced by TBA21–Academy with the support of STARTS, an initiative by the European Commission.

Special thanks to our guests: Erika Balsom and Sonia Levy.

Editor at large: María Montero Sierra	
Sound edited by: Elena Zieser
Introduction and credits voice-over: Nathan Johnson
Music by horizonsnd
Underwater sound recordings of the Venetian Lagoon by Sonia Levy and Jez Riley French

Produced by: Miriam Calabrese, María Montero Sierra, Katarina Rakušček, and the artists.

Hear more episodes at ocean-archive.org or subscribe with your podcast provider.

Magical Fresh & Salty Conversation: More-than-Human Underwater Filming

LIVE SET AT TRACK COULD BEND 02.08.23

9 November 2013: This fin whale song segment was recorded by an Ocean Sonics icListen low frequency hydrophone in Cascadia Basin. Fin whale vocalizations are very common at this location. This recording was sped up by a factor of 10 to make the calls audible to the human ear.  Original filename: ICLISTENLF224_20131109T204938.479Z_20131109T205938.532Z

www.oceannetworks.ca

Fin Whale in Cascadia Basin

Karen Power
wondrous worlds within/without: interspecies gossip (2024)

Karen Power is a Cork County–based composer, performer, and educator. Her compositional approach engages with the natural world through sound. The works challenge the distinction between what we consider ‘music’ and all other sonic existence.

Listening is at the core of Power’s methodology. Her field recordings, made in remote locations around the globe, unearth and reposition the environment’s sonic qualities. Through listening, Power practices an expanded sense of wonderment and appreciation for nature.

Power interrogates and seeks to transform our uneven, often extractive relationship with the natural world, and thereby advance a more equitable human-nature association. Her sound databank might be considered a form of environmental activism, preserving as it does a natural world ever more deeply impacted by climate change.

Power presents her compositions as staged orchestral and/or ensemble pieces, solo instrumental pieces, installations, and happenings, among other arrangements. Her process often involves collaboration with other artists, including filmmakers and dancers, putting sound in dialogue with moving images or bodies in movement.

wondrous worlds within/without: interspecies gossip is a composition presented in the form of an installation. It features a ‘collage’ of sounds Power has collected during her travels over the past decade to the Arctic, the Amazon, the Namib Desert, the Australian Outback, New Zealand, and Antarctica – scenarios as much removed from human existence or interference as possible. The composition relates seemingly disparate sonic elements, for example the shimmering of Australian cicadas and the birdcall of an Irish wren. It also leans away from direct physical associations of sound in favour of new, more wide-ranging connections. The work ebbs and flows, as layered sonic elements interact via eight speaker channels distributed across a gallery.

wondrous worlds within/without: interspecies gossip also considers the architectural and social characteristics of its presentation site, the SIRIUS building in Cobh. The soundscape dialogues with that of Cork Harbour, which includes water, animals, and church bells, among other sonic elements. In this way, Power’s work establishes links between this place and other territories, bringing together local and faraway experiences and narratives.

Power has been commissioned by the National Symphony Orchestra, Dublin; RTÉ Concert Orchestra, Dublin; Klangforum Wien, Vienna; and Quiet Music Ensemble, Cork. She performed with Pauline Oliveros, David Toop, Mazen Kerbaj, and The Quiet Club. Her albums include is it raining while you listen (Farpoint Recordings, 2014) and Human Nature (self-released, 2020). She holds a PhD in composition from the Sonic Arts Research Centre at Queen’s University, Belfast, and lectures at University College Cork.

wondrous worlds within/without: interspecies gossip is Karen Power’s first solo show in a museum or gallery context. The work is commissioned by SIRIUS, Cobh, County Cork, through an Arts Council Commissions Award 2021. This exhibition is curated by Miguel Amado, director, SIRIUS.

wondrous worlds within/without: interspecies gossip (2024) - Stereo Extract From 6min In

A Dawning

We Didn’t Know We Were Ready (feat. Niamh Regan & Ye Vagabonds)

This is an excerpt from the 5.1 Dolby Surround Sound Piece for cinema.
Premiered at film festival Copenhagen PIX in 2014.
Duration 42 min.
Available for performance, either in cinemas or using my Dynaudio 5.1 transportable audio setup. 
Music by Morten Svenstrup
Sound Design and arrangements: Peter Albrechtsen
Additional compositions and voices: Maja Ratkje and Gry Bagøien

Barndom Og Revoultion EXCERPT

'Máquina de Vênus' 12'' (P033, September of 2020)
Orders: https://principediscos.bandcamp.com/album/m-quina-de-v-nus

BLACKSEA NÃO MAYA - Africanalidade

In late August 2015, I drove north then east from Toronto. Matt Rogalsky had invited me to visit a small church on Wolfe Island, traditional land of Tyendinaga Mohawk,  to record the continuum of voice and cello improvisations I had been circling around. It was a 3 hour drive to Wolfe with a 4 hour detour north, as my young daughter asked me to bring her along. After a brief star gazing moment in the woods, we said goodbye to my daughter’s father, then veered south east in the dark. Arriving in Kingston at dawn we slept for one hour in an old house on the shore of Lake Ontario. Then we took a short ferry ride across to Wolfe Island. Matt set up loudspeakers and microphones in the small sunlit church. It was hot. My daughter read comics lying down in the backseat of the car, parked in the shade. Various tradesmen would come and go with paint and ladders. At one point on the recording you can hear the car door slam and the workmen address the ladder. Matt placed two mics outside the church in the garden. Cicadas and birds came into the soundfield as I improvised by heart two parallel streams of voice and cello.




Composed and improvised solo of cello and voice by Anne Bourne 
Recorded, mixed and mastered Matt Rogalsky / Memory Device. 

[This track is performed within the acoustic of the 19th century Grosser Wasserspeicher (large water reservoir) in the Prenzlauer Berg area of what was East Berlin. The resonance of the reservoir, with an incredible reverberation lasting longer than 20 seconds, was recreated live by sound artist Matt Rogalsky, using impulse responses from the Grosser Wasserspeicher which he gathered during a Berlin residency.] 

This is one track from a full album of improvisations recorded on Wolfe Island, performed within the acoustics of various spaces and instruments, that is yet to be released .

Water/WASSERL'eau

Field recording in relation to non-human life and elemental belonging/  Improvises parallel streams of cello, voice and words/ believes creative expression is an opportunity to offer an experience of equanimity.

Water/WASSERL'eau

Anne Bourne

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