Recording today of a container full of thousands of Maggots squirming in wet mud. I buried two H2a-XLR hydrophones below the surface (in the mud), and placed two DPA-4060 Lav microphones on the top surface and let the maggots call all over the place. All 4 channels are unprocessed, unedited 24bit-96khz captured with a Sound Devices recorder.


Hydrophone/Lav Recording of 1000 Maggots in sticky wet mud.

New EP Systik now available: https://richarddevine.bandcamp.com/

Bookings: mia@lb-agency.net

Amber Vistein (b. 1984) is a composer and sound artist who delves deeply into the poetics of timbre, texture, and gesture. Praised for her conceptual “acuity” (Big, Red, and Shiny) and “blooming phrases” (New Music Box), they draw upon research in affect theory, phenomenology, aesthetics, sonic materialism, historical musicology, and psychoacoustics to compose music filled with storied textural details, shifting temporal effects, and affectively charged atmospheres. Their style is defined by the juxtaposition of a visceral gestural vocabulary alongside evocative textural constructions; cross-cutting registers from the autonomic to the atmospheric. This highly tactile approach to composition works to unearth invisible events, networks, and histories by introducing expressive imperfections—dysfluencies—into the musical sentence. These sites of rupture (a suspended trill, stutter, or broken-record loop) expose the submerged complexities of sound, the labor of its production, and its fragility.

Amber has recently had the pleasure of composing for the International Contemporary Ensemble, Talea Ensemble, Chartreuse, Ensemble Dal Niente, Russel Greenberg of Yarn/Wire, and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project. She created site-specific sound installations for the deCordova Museum in Lincoln, MA and collaborated with video artist Justice to present the multi-media work Landscapes at the Peabody Essex Museum. They were an artist-in-residence with ArtsIceland in Ísafjörður, Iceland. And participated in NYU's Summer Film Scoring Workshop, EMPAC's Spatial Audio Workshop, and soundSCAPE composer-performer exchange in Cesena, Italy.

From 2017-19 Amber was a Composition Fellow with the American Opera Project’s Composers and the Voice program. They were commissioned by the Washington National Opera to compose a 20-minute chamber opera in collaboration with librettist Rebecca Hart as part of the American Opera Initiative program. This work, entitled The Barrens, premiered at the Kennedy Center in April 2021. Man Will Not Outlive the Weather—Amber’s first chamber opera for mezzo-soprano, ensemble and electronics—premiered in 2017. Their full-length opera-film, entitled Dark Exhalation, for four voices, ensemble, and electronics premiered in Spring 2022. Dark Exhalation is also a 2022 OPERA America Discovery Grant recipient in support of a lab production planned for 2023.

Amber holds a B.A. in Music & Philosophy from New College of Florida and an MFA in Sonic Arts from Massachusetts College of Art. They recently completed their PhD in Music and Multimedia Composition at Brown University, where their scholarly research focuses on sonic materiality, embodiment, posthumanism, temporality, vocality, affect theory, and autonomic poetics. https://ambervistein.com/

I'm getting shorter as I age - life's so sad.

Irish field recordist, now residing in Sweden. I have a deep interest and background in birding, which is reflected in my sound recordings. Follow my podcast, Wild Bird Acoustics, on all podcast providers!

Hydrophone/Lav Recording of 1000 Maggots in sticky wet mud.

RichardDevine