Ecomorphia

Trajectories

Ecomorphia is an original work, created for the +15 Soundscape Space at Arts Commons. Set in and around a forest, it is structured in three parts that together capture a metamorphic, cyclical journey through different perspectives.

In part one we explore a subterranean space. Hear the imagined sounds of the bedrock, soil and root systems beneath a great forest, a space where organisms sense each other through vibration. Nutrients, minerals and matter shift and exchange in a mysterious ecosystem of rumbles and murmurs. Trees stretch their roots deep, they whisper, grumble and sing in strange, ancient languages. This is the space that life springs from, and the space that life returns to when our bodies are ready.

Part two ascends to ground level, where we enter the minds of three human travellers moving through and around these woods, we hear what they hear - it's the present day, and here too there are elemental forces at play. A passing storm thunders on the horizon and disturbs the forest’s avian inhabitants. Later, a messenger zooms past on their motorbike, just as our travellers traverse a path under a bridge at the forest’s edge.

In part three, our perspective shifts again, as this time we travel towards the airy skies above, the birthplace of the wind that forms our very breath. Breath unifies us with all plants and creatures of this planet. We approach the upper reaches of the atmosphere. From up here, the forest feels so small, so far below. What are we missing down there? As the flight concludes, we dive back, back through it all, through time, down towards the subterranean space from where the journey began.

This work was primarily created using recordings collected in metal shops, beaches, and the paths of crow-filled forests in Struer, Denmark, during a residency at Sound Art Lab, using hydrophones, geophones, and field recorders.

Our approach started with us making shorter compositional experiments from these recordings. Accompanied with electronic and acoustic textures, the results are combined and layered, processed, and transformed such that the piece unfolds as an evolving, evocative journey.

Its structure draws from the nonlinear, circular, and cyclical nature of space-time, and plays with scale.

During its creation we imagined: how does it sound within an amoeba when it divides? How does it sound during the formation of a mountain? If we consider the common, but often overlooked strangeness of hearing our own heartbeats and blood flow through our heads, some of the subverted perspectives in this work become surprisingly familiar. If we could hear the spaces within the earth, next to or within tree roots, would they at times sound like those inner spaces, within ourselves? If we heard those spaces above the canopy, the swirling air and time itself, what might that sound like? In any familiarity that results from what we imagine when considering these questions, we grow closer to the very natural world that becomes us. 

The work means to initiate the ears of passers-by to immersive soundworlds that explore, then move beyond human scales and tell cyclical stories of metamorphosis and being. In Ecomorphia, we hear phenomena unfolding, we hear where sonic nutrients coalesce, where niches have formed as sediment shifts, where our human moments occur on these lands and beneath these skies, and we hear from the skies themselves: above, timeless and omniscient - in an experience that ranges from strangely familiar, to meditative and atmospheric to engulfing and elemental.