This audio piece was played as part of a Becoming the Forest x Addergebroed event at Het Bos to celebrate BTF IV and streamed live on We Are Various radio: https://hetbos.be/magazine/sylvan-re-searchers 

Mud, metal, researchers lost again, symbiosis and apocalypses, birds, mushrooms, folklore, the true genius loci, animist wisdoms, and maybe a moose. An audio journey of a trip gone wrong and an exploration of the latest Becoming the Forest zine.

Becoming the Forest is an open-ended publication and project which looks at our relationship to our surroundings, with a specific focus on the Northern hemisphere’s abundance of dense spruce forests, and how the aesthetic and philosophy of the musical subculture of black metal has become entangled with this topography. The foundation of this sonic experience is the latest and fourth edition of Becoming the Forest zine. This edition holds specially commissioned essays, interviews, and illustrations, by animists, philosophers, artists, and musicians, including an essay on panpsychism as a possible answer to the climate crisis; a philosophical-historical overview of the relationship between black metal and the forest; Researchers a Cliffhanger: a magical-realist account of a sylvan trip gone wrong, and an in-depth interview with Rune from Nordic Animism, whose project looks to Scandinavian folklore and customs for “hidden animist knowledge”. The symbolism of the primstav (a calendar staff used by the agricultural societies of old Scandinavia), runs through the issue. Its seasonally-based, cyclical view of time hints towards a worldview that was embedded in its environment, and which placed man as part of - and at the mercy of- nature, rather than above it. 

Tracklist:
By the Spirits - Ślęża
Occvlta - Eyes in Darkness
Mork - Marevisa
Invunche - el kalku
Invunche - tierra ancestral
Returning - False Light Sickening
Returning -  Bright Power, Dark Peace

Sylvan (re)searchers

An audio spell for the trees - one Ogham utterance recorded every day for the duration of the PLATZProjekt's Temporary Utopias residency. Exhibited at Niki Residency, 2a Weisenburger Strasse Studios, Hannover, August 2019

The work was inspired by the varied ecologies of Murray Schaefer’s Magic Songs, Pauline Oliveiros’ Sonic Meditations, Jeremy Narby’s The Cosmic Serpent and the Celtic tree script of Ogham.

A spell for the trees

Becoming the Forest at the edge of Epping Forest
Queen Elizabeth’s Hunting Lodge, Chingford
31 October - 3 November 2019
Multi-channeled sound installation

Around All Hallow's Eve, when the veil between the living and the dead was at its thinnest, Becoming the Forest invited people to take part in an audio journey populated by the voices of previous forest dwellers and visitors. The Lodge sits at the edge of London's Epping Forest, acting as a threshold between human civilisation and that of the forest’s non-human inhabitants. It was the stories, rumours and beings of this tree-clad piece of land that ran through the sound-based installation that filled the three storeys of the Queen Elizabeth’s Hunting Lodge. 

Audiences were invited to listen to past forest dwellers including Boudicca, Thomas Willingale, Jacob Epstein and Algernon Blackwood, as well as the voices of the trees themselves, and to expect incantations made up of Ogham utterances and tree DNA sequences, dark folk, beech tree divination, interviews with tree-biologists and foresters, black metal screeches and field recordings of the forest. Music for the piece was made by Primitive Knot, with vocals by Crown of Asteria. Chingford Ladies Inspirational Choir sang a reinterpretation of the folk song 'Poor Murdered Woman'.

This was a special commission for the People's Forest, a year-long programme of events for Waltham Forest London Borough of Culture 2019, which explored the complexity of our human relationship to Epping Forest – London’s urban woodland – and the myriad of meanings we place upon woodlands. Curated by Kirsteen McNish and Luke Turner.

More info about the voices present at www.unahamiltonhelle.co.uk

Una Hamilton Helle

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