Transmissions
Requiem For A Mother
Miri Berlin (DE 2023)
Miri Berlin (DE 2023)
9 min
This sound composition combines field recordings with electronic elements to document the acoustic and atmospheric character of various stages – from the intensive care unit to the vigil and on to the crematorium.
In the intensive care unit, the rhythmic sounds of the ventilator and the beeps of medical devices are the first things you hear. Afterward, we find ourselves in a Berlin courtyard where the casket, on a metal trolley, is transported from the mortuary to the room where the vigil takes place.
In the middle of the room, the casket is open. The door to the courtyard is ajar, allowing ambient sounds to permeate the space. The final stage is the crematorium, where the sounds of powerful ventilation fans and a relentless drone dominate. The furnace door opens with a loud mechanical sound as the casket glides on the rails. The fire becomes visible, hissing and crackling before the door quickly closes again.
Produced by: Miri Berlin
Ghost Wolf
Joan Schuman (US 2023)
Joan Schuman (US 2023)
13 min
The sovereignty of bodies is conjectured through a shuffle of voices across the scaffold of hollow spaces—the mouth, pelvis; curled fists and open heart.
These voices spin and blur into an invitation to listen beyond the exacting stories we find comfort in. Imagine the wolf, hunted almost to extinction across centuries in the U.S. and their ever-strident returns. We fear them as we conjecture dreamscapes from their howls.
These spectral creatures and their autonomous nations fiercely compel some communities to seek their annihilation; others strive for management.; some are satisfied in the certainty of their hidden slinking. It’s a mirror to contemporary political dogfights over bodily dominion, of conviction and control. In a poetic mix of voices, in the barely sung utterance, in barking and yipped snarls, there’s a swirl of imaginary wolves inside the body’s cavities.
There’s also an urgency to stray across landscapes of narrative around fears and survival. We contend with a tension of opposites. The same person who absolutely values the sovereignty of reproductive rights for women might be the person who falls easily to the sway of another faith—a solid belief in government control of disease and culture, bodies and politics, scientific literacy and objectivity.
Like the metaphor of unseen wolves, there is a trope of hysteria that is palpable depending on the bodies and the faith in them. Can these disparate stories about sovereignty be open to debate? Felt in the body itself? Formed in another kind of skulking, a striding low across the loamy, forest floor?
Written, vocalized and composed by:: Joan Schuman
Generative Engine
Joan Schuman (US 2022)
Joan Schuman (US 2022)
10 min
Sounds and stories, like dreams, elude our grasp towards a future deemed to be untouched, untarnished.
Along a series of voiced ‘book pages’ echoing from Joan’s creative sonic archive of more than 20 years ago, comes an intersection generated with material lifted up from the unconscious. Collisions of narrative are reconsidered along the timescape of dreams. It’s very much of the now and of a past that appears in the present. What is spoken and whirled emits a barely linear story accessing the cycles of death, but also the collective symbology of end-times and freedom.
This melding is driven by an energetic stirring of borrowed lines from the poet-theorist, Nicole Brossard, and the theorist-philosopher Gilles Deleuze—from texts produced in the early 1970s (A Book by Brossard and Negotiations by Deleuze). These ‘pages’ comprised a sonic engine originally played in a gallery space and ceded over to the machine’s shuffle mode. Now, in present time, both a past and a future unfurl. The ship of the night floats through turgid waters. A neat continuum of story is interrupted within itself swirling like an invertebrate, horizontal and regenerate. The underworld knows no time. Sounds, like dreams, elude our grasp towards a future deemed to be untouched, untarnished.
Vocals + mix: Joan Schuman
Texts + Words: Nicole Brossard + Gilles Deleuze
Composition: Joan Schuman derived from Creative Commons licensed freesound
In The Dark: The Everything Is Fine Forecast
Ewan Cameron (UK 2022)
Ewan Cameron (UK 2022)
7 min
The Shipping Forecast but it's you having a panic attack.
Produced and performed by Ewan Cameron as part of an ongoing podcast called Randomly Generated Thought.
Selected as part of a new producers listening event be In The Dark
In The Dark: The Everything Is Fine Forecast
Ewan Cameron (UK 2022)
Ewan Cameron (UK 2022)
7 min
The Shipping Forecast but it's you having a panic attack.