Eco-pop: Songs in the key of life
What does a plant sound like? A new breed of eco-pop artists is making musical 'soundscapes' that get closer to nature than ever before. Alasdair Lees reports
Of all the myriad absurdities of last year's Live Earth concerts – the absence of world musicians, the sponsorship by DaimlerChrysler, Chris Moyles as a host – the one highlighted by the environmentalist George Marshall was among the most glaring.
Marshall, director of the Climate Outreach Information Network, noted that "the music will contain virtually no mention of climate change, and will lack the anger, fear and aggression needed to galvanise change". With the exceptions of David Gray and Damien Rice's misanthropic cover of "Que Sera", and Terra Naomi's YouTube sensation "Say It's Possible", there was a dearth of songs about the issue at hand, and none with the muscle of say, Pixies' "Monkey Gone to Heaven".
"That's where we're different from Live Earth," says David Buckland, the director of the Cape Farewell Project. "Most bands at Live Earth didn't know squit about climate change. We're taking a whole lot of people from the music world to this extraordinary place, a tipping point of a planet that is changing incredibly fast, with a fantastic science team on board, and we're going to see if they can really engage with climate change."
Since 2004, Buckland has been taking artists such as Rachel Whiteread and writers such as Ian McEwan to the North Pole alongside scientists from the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton. The only musicians to have made the trip so far are Manchester singer-songwriter Liam Frost and the singer and percussionist Aminatou Goumar of the Touareg band Toumast. This year's expedition, to Disko Bay in west Greenland, though, will be dominated by high-profile pop, rock and classical musicians, including Jarvis Cocker, Ryuichi Sakamoto and Led Zeppelin's bassist, John Paul Jones.
The Cape Farewell Project is not alone in its vision of a fruitful exchange of ideas between the worlds of popular music and science. In September, as part of Liverpool's European Capital of Culture celebrations, the Hive Collective, comprising some of the city's experimental electronica musicians, has organised four audiovisual events under the title Hive Twilight City. For the third event, it has commissioned Chris Watson, the wildlife sound recordist, to "document" Antony Gormley's Another Place, the sculptor's installation of 100 life-sized iron casts of his own body on Crosby Beach.
Intriguingly, researchers from the University of Liverpool have discovered that the statues host a colony of barnacles, Elminius modestus, a cross-fertilising hermaphrodite native to Australia. "The statues are providing an island for this species amid an inhospitable environment," says Dr Leonie Robinson.
Once Watson has finished recording around the statues, he will hand over his tapes to the house-music producer Matthew Herbert, who will then perform a live "sonic experience" of Another Place based on Watson's findings. Herbert is best known for his production work with Bjork and Roisin Murphy, and for his innovative use of samples and found sounds on albums such as Plat Du Jour, a polemic about the science of food production, which features a chicken being killed.
How Watson and Herbert will make music from statues is anyone's guess. But collaborations between the worlds of art and empiricism are vital in the context of global warming, believes the composer David Dunn. His The Sound of Light in Trees, a soundscape that tracks the devastation of pines in New Mexico by bark beetles that has been used by forestry managers and the chaos scientist James Crutchfield to look at how insect-driven defoliation is adding to climate change and how sound might be used to control it.
More accessible instances of such collaborations can be seen in the work of musicians such as the electronica artists Mileece and Mira Calix. In 2006, Mileece was commissioned by the London School of Economics to develop a "generative plant biofeedback system". She discovered a way to make sounds out of the electromagnetic impulses of plants and is now creating a website to host data-streams from specimens all over the world.
Making music from plants is also being explored by the Edinburgh band Found in a project in May at the Scottish capital's Royal Botanic Garden. Dialogues of Wind and Bamboo will involve the five-piece improvising around a midi-controller "operated" by plants, turning the electrical resistance generated by flora into beats and bleeps.
Scientists are increasingly reaching out to musicians to engage the public in their work. In 2002, Mira Calix, who is signed to Warp Records, was commissioned by Geneva's Museum of Natural History to compose a piece of music from the sounds of 150 different species of insects. The result, Nunu, was performed live with the London Sinfonietta at the Royal Festival Hall. She is now working with David Rothenberg, Professor of Philosophy and Music at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, on a "remix" of the songs of beluga whales.
David Dunn sees such strategies as the way forward. "We require a merger of art and science – as a dance between metaphor and mechanism – that encourages both to contribute to a collective environmental activism."
Putting its faith in metaphor is The Blacksmoke Organisation, which is planning a multi-disciplinary campaign in the form of its Danger Global Warming Project, which has recruited the likes of actor Viggo Mortensen and designer Philippe Starck to "transform the world into an activist art gallery" . Its "Danger Global Warning Theme", written by Hugh Cornwell of The Stranglers, is being remixed by acts including Goldfrapp and Coldcut to highlight "the art of the remix as an allegory for recycling", with film directors such as Tony Kaye creating the promos. Blacksmoke uses a Jack Kerouac mantra as its slogan: "Don't use the telephone. People are never ready to answer it. Use Poetry."
But, believes David Dunn, it may be time for poets to start working the phones. "The art world needs to ground imagination in a deeper understanding of the natural world."
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/nature/ecopop-songs-in-the-key-of-life-794840.html
Friday, March 14, 2008
Four poems written in March so far
Mirage
The dream so real
She felt she was there
Walking in the scorched desert
A softness of sky rimming the dunes
Making a bowl
To carry a wealth of scarcity.
How thirsty she was
Weak from it
She ached for water
Like lovers long for each others’ bodies.
The mirage shimmering
Just beyond her reach
Oil-glossy, thick,
Promising coolth,
Satisfaction.
A sticky anticipation of delight,
Ebbs into an emptiness of disappointment,
As the water eludes her,
No matter how fast she moves towards its glittering promises.
040308
Conduit
For long now
It has been blocked
The tunnel full with ragged plastic bags, dead branches
Washed down from the townships.
The water tainted with faeces.
Stagnant as oil sludge
It pools,
Dirty,
Like unresolved pain.
The concrete hollow sticks out over the beach
Into the shallows of the sea
A barrel of a gun
Facing down the waves
that lap at its mouth
Years ago,
The girl walked there with her mother
Speaking of who she might become.
Now she walks there alone
Wondering, in the shadows
How she will ever know, let alone say,
What it is she needs to say.
Poisoned water bleeds out of the conduit
Fanning the sand beneath it
Into delicate patterns,
The woman holds a glass shard,
smoothed by the sea.
Stands indeterminate
At the edge of the stream
Waiting,
For the clear water to come.
080308
Paul’s art
In the cool bank vault
Of the exhibition space
the wave splices the TV monitor
and the surfer in endless summer loop
abseils down its two faces
over and over,
carefully, gently, tracing the water’s warp,
its weft.
The meditative metaphor
Is too contained.
She wants to see
The sluice-gate in the dam wall open
And the water ejaculate beyond it.
In a sheer plume.
She wants to abandon herself
To the work,
Drown in its turbulence,
Find
Fury.
110308
The Dead Zone
‘For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind...’ ~ Hosea 8:7
In the online media
she reads of a Southern Baptist preacher in the US
who said: harming the environment is like ripping pages from The Bible.
She reads too of the Dead Zone
In the Gulf of Mexico
Where algae blooms on nitrates
Pushed downriver from factories
Beautiful flowers
Starve the fish swimming in the water below of oxygen.
Now biofuel crop pesticides will make sure it gets worse, not better.
It’s a litany of loss
What she learns every day
Examining pictures of the fragile Earth
Taken from space
Trying to decode before-and-after pics,
Chinese deltas eaten into by industry
like X-rays of a wound -
Topographies transformed
By greed.
Red rivers bleed into sick oceans.
She remembers
Walking next to the lagoon with her father at night,
Chris Rea’s song from the eighties
The Road to Hell,
Blaring from a parked car.
How prophetic it seems now.
Which page
Shall we tear out next? She wonders …
The one where it says:
Love your neighbour as you love yourself?
- Climate change will create millions of environmental migrants –
The wars over resources are here already,
Darfur scorched,
The Sahel burning.
Or perhaps, the one with these words imprinted on it:
‘you shall go out with joy,
And be led forth with peace,
The mountains and the hills shall burst forth before you?’
A memory of
Of a vision she saw as a child from the kitchen door of her father’s friend, the woman priest -
The green trees of her garden
Incandescent, merging with the sunlight,
Like grace,
As beautiful as a melody,
Just there, immaterial.
Heartbreaking.
Going, going, gone
Irretrievable
An acre of rainforest a day razed,
For burgers.
Will it be the gold-edged page
(she is holding her grandmother’s King James Bible)
Which says
“For now we see through a glass, darkly, but then
Face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as I am known?”
It is the knowledge of what is to come, almost certainly now
That she fears, more than the binding darkness
The fearful anticipation
Of the fires, the floods, the plagues,
Waiting in the wings,
Weary villains.
‘There is nothing love cannot face;there is no limit to its faith?’
She is ashamed
To be seen by that shimmering world she knew once, as a child,
Her kind has betrayed it.
She does not want to be fingered as one of the species
Who thought it was Icarus
Flew so close to the sun,
Arrogant,
Unthinking,
Plummeted as the heat
Melted his wings of wax.
Sheer artifice, destroyed.
‘For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.’
The pages are falling
To the ground
Like handfuls of earth
At a funeral.
120308
The dream so real
She felt she was there
Walking in the scorched desert
A softness of sky rimming the dunes
Making a bowl
To carry a wealth of scarcity.
How thirsty she was
Weak from it
She ached for water
Like lovers long for each others’ bodies.
The mirage shimmering
Just beyond her reach
Oil-glossy, thick,
Promising coolth,
Satisfaction.
A sticky anticipation of delight,
Ebbs into an emptiness of disappointment,
As the water eludes her,
No matter how fast she moves towards its glittering promises.
040308
Conduit
For long now
It has been blocked
The tunnel full with ragged plastic bags, dead branches
Washed down from the townships.
The water tainted with faeces.
Stagnant as oil sludge
It pools,
Dirty,
Like unresolved pain.
The concrete hollow sticks out over the beach
Into the shallows of the sea
A barrel of a gun
Facing down the waves
that lap at its mouth
Years ago,
The girl walked there with her mother
Speaking of who she might become.
Now she walks there alone
Wondering, in the shadows
How she will ever know, let alone say,
What it is she needs to say.
Poisoned water bleeds out of the conduit
Fanning the sand beneath it
Into delicate patterns,
The woman holds a glass shard,
smoothed by the sea.
Stands indeterminate
At the edge of the stream
Waiting,
For the clear water to come.
080308
Paul’s art
In the cool bank vault
Of the exhibition space
the wave splices the TV monitor
and the surfer in endless summer loop
abseils down its two faces
over and over,
carefully, gently, tracing the water’s warp,
its weft.
The meditative metaphor
Is too contained.
She wants to see
The sluice-gate in the dam wall open
And the water ejaculate beyond it.
In a sheer plume.
She wants to abandon herself
To the work,
Drown in its turbulence,
Find
Fury.
110308
The Dead Zone
‘For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind...’ ~ Hosea 8:7
In the online media
she reads of a Southern Baptist preacher in the US
who said: harming the environment is like ripping pages from The Bible.
She reads too of the Dead Zone
In the Gulf of Mexico
Where algae blooms on nitrates
Pushed downriver from factories
Beautiful flowers
Starve the fish swimming in the water below of oxygen.
Now biofuel crop pesticides will make sure it gets worse, not better.
It’s a litany of loss
What she learns every day
Examining pictures of the fragile Earth
Taken from space
Trying to decode before-and-after pics,
Chinese deltas eaten into by industry
like X-rays of a wound -
Topographies transformed
By greed.
Red rivers bleed into sick oceans.
She remembers
Walking next to the lagoon with her father at night,
Chris Rea’s song from the eighties
The Road to Hell,
Blaring from a parked car.
How prophetic it seems now.
Which page
Shall we tear out next? She wonders …
The one where it says:
Love your neighbour as you love yourself?
- Climate change will create millions of environmental migrants –
The wars over resources are here already,
Darfur scorched,
The Sahel burning.
Or perhaps, the one with these words imprinted on it:
‘you shall go out with joy,
And be led forth with peace,
The mountains and the hills shall burst forth before you?’
A memory of
Of a vision she saw as a child from the kitchen door of her father’s friend, the woman priest -
The green trees of her garden
Incandescent, merging with the sunlight,
Like grace,
As beautiful as a melody,
Just there, immaterial.
Heartbreaking.
Going, going, gone
Irretrievable
An acre of rainforest a day razed,
For burgers.
Will it be the gold-edged page
(she is holding her grandmother’s King James Bible)
Which says
“For now we see through a glass, darkly, but then
Face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as I am known?”
It is the knowledge of what is to come, almost certainly now
That she fears, more than the binding darkness
The fearful anticipation
Of the fires, the floods, the plagues,
Waiting in the wings,
Weary villains.
‘There is nothing love cannot face;there is no limit to its faith?’
She is ashamed
To be seen by that shimmering world she knew once, as a child,
Her kind has betrayed it.
She does not want to be fingered as one of the species
Who thought it was Icarus
Flew so close to the sun,
Arrogant,
Unthinking,
Plummeted as the heat
Melted his wings of wax.
Sheer artifice, destroyed.
‘For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.’
The pages are falling
To the ground
Like handfuls of earth
At a funeral.
120308
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