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Micro-Landscapes of the Anthropocene

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Accompanying Playlist for Your Reading of 'Micro-Landscapes of the Anthropocene'

"It occurred to me that it would be a fine thing to climb one of the trees to obtain a wider outlook and get my ear close to the Æolian music of its topmost needles." - John Muir.

Inspired by our Week 10 reading of John Muir's 'A Wind-storm in the Forests' I have compiled a suggested reading playlist for the perusal of this Living Book. As Muir suggests, the non-human often has the tendency to reflect and refract the intra-actions it is intrinsically a part of; intra-actions that can be both visible and unseen to the human eye (but not necessarily to our ears).

Cultural theorist, Mark Fisher interrogates the futurity that music can often come to symbolise. Whilst drawing upon the idea of the future as haunting the state of present being, or the 'hauntological' nature of the future (Derrida, in analysis of Marx), Fisher investigates what he perceives as the failure of electronic music to ever herald the future that it so aspired to and envisaged last century. Rather than realising such speculative landscapes, electronic music began to embody a futurist aesthetics, one that "connoted a settled set of concepts, affects and associations" (16). The establishment of an electronic genre, with its stabilised set of conventions and motifs, instigated the sudden realisation of a cultural impasse - that the future, as it was envisaged, had failed to arrive. Thus, the 'mourning' was not of a temporality past, but of a loss of hope in the paradigm of social imagination that had previously fostered such a failed vision (16).

Perhaps then the Aeolian aesthetic that Muir describes is the best way to envisage ecological sonics (and music). Rather than 'create' music per se and have it fall into the particular conventions of genre, perhaps we should be more aware of the sonics that are enacted around us, as simply the by-products, causes and denials of life.

True to ecological form this playlist is not a list, but a web. A web of suggestions that is inherently incomplete, and truncated.

To Listen:

Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) Example - Idea of a diffuse synesthesic feeling, that enables an affective questioning of personal bodily boundaries, and sensory control. Watch below.

Spotify-curated playlist, 'Natural Concentration', listen here.

Ringing rocks are rocks that can be hit to sound like bells due to a high metal content, there are some in New South Wales that can be visited.

Felix Hess, 'Air Pressure Fluctuations', 2001, sound installation, 20’38”. 'Air Pressure Fluctuations' is a work by a Dutch physicist and artist who recorded the soundscape local to him over the course of a few days. Speeding the recording up to 360 times its native format allowed Hess to access infrasound that the human ear is usually unaware of. In doing this not only did Hess hear the fleeting rumbles of far-off jets, but also the sound of the Atlantic Ocean through the humming pressure changes created by air over water. The soundtrack is sold as a CD online.

At Thistle Cove, in Cape Le Grand National Park (Western Australia) there is a rock that 'sings' in the wind, and as such plays a significant part in many local Indigenous narratives.

Listening to the ocean and bird-life that surrounds us always makes for easy listening. Close your eyes and feel the sonic landscape around you. Can you isolate what is in the foreground and midground, what is in the background? Listen to the sounds native to yourself, your breath and digestion.

- CLICK PLAY -

Fisher, Mark. ‘What Is Hauntology?’ Film Quarterly, vol. 66, no. 1, 2012, pp. 16–24. JSTOR, doi:10.1525/fq.2012.66.1.16.

Hess, Felix. 'Air Pressure Fluctuations', 2001, sound installation, 20’38”.

Muir, John. 'Chapter 10: A Wind-storm in the Forests', The Mountains of California. The Century Co, 1894.

- Bridget