Beneath the dense noise of humanity, countless tiny critters fill the air with chittering, buzzing and clicking. Sparse atmospheres seething with intermittent bursts of activity. Vast geological scales cast long contours across space and time, imposing a silent, harsh indifference. The hollow sounds of failed experiments adrift in the effervescent flurry of progress. Intensifying densities and distances. The desert expanse is suffused with the murmur of matter transforming, expanding or disappearing, as dust storms gather in the wavering shadows of the Anthropocene.
“All is shadow mixed with dust, and there’s no voice but in the sounds made by what the wind lifts up or sweeps forward, nor silence except from what the wind abandons”
—Fernando Pessoa
credits
released September 23, 2019
Sound design and artwork by FoAM (Nik Gaffney & Maja Kuzmanovic)
Mastering by Frederic Stader @ MusicMattersMastering
Produced in collaboration with Desert Humanities and Center for Philosophical Technologies at Arizona State University (Ron Broglio, Stacey Moran and Adam Nocek). Supported by the Global Institute of Sustainability, Institute for Humanities Research and the Panpsychic Development Fund.
Recorded and resynthesised with the landscapes and inhabitants of the Sonoran, Mojave, and Great Basin deserts, in collaboration with a Sennheiser AMBEO VR Mic (and Deadkitten), a pair of RØDE M5s, Zoom-H6, various cellphones and computers, Ardour, Audacity, Supercollider, unnamed contact mics, their material substrate, and the myriad invisible products of human effort and ingenuity.
Thanks to all the animate, inanimate and partially animate participants in the field recordings. Thanks to the dawn and twilight choruses of Cave Creek, crows of the Grand Canyon, itinerant coyotes, guard dogs, javelina, and the geological formations of Coal Mine Canyon. Thanks to the creosote bushes, saguaro, nopales and barrel cacti, woodpeckers, rust, gravel, bats, rocks, a family of rodents, rain and dust storms. Thanks to the crickets, beetles, humming birds, wasps, Arcosanti bells, BNSF freight trains, helicopters of the 13th Marine Expeditionary Unit and assorted air traffic, cars and trucks, sirens provided by the Phoenix Police Department, several fences, and atemporal echoes from Navajo, Hopi, Tohono Oʼodham and “those who are gone”, the Hohokam.
