David Chapman
The Marsh

The Marsh works with material filmed and recorded on wetlands around Christchurch Harbour, Dorset. These patches of nature exist side by side with residential occupation and high levels of leisure use. They are refuges for both wildlife and those seeking pleasure from it.

In The Marsh sound and images are recorded separately. The relation between the two is associative, not temporal. The images offer no spatial continuity. Rather, they suggest that through close attention to small patches of habitat a sense of wildernesses can emerge amidst the commotion of human activity. In this sense the film is perhaps Arcadian in intent, reminding us how familiar landscapes can become places of exploration, imagination and memory. However, this idea is tempered by knowledge that some of the species recorded for the film have only settled in the area during the last few decades, drifting northward due to climate change and habitat loss. The pleasure of hearing these species is off-set by the realisation that they are also symptoms of largescale destructive changes.

Laura Denning
Oxidental Bodies

A duet with the red soil of South Devon. Using moving image, sediments of sonic imagination and live performance, Oxidental Bodies is a sensory exploration of our relationship with deep time, with a focus on the 380 million year old ocean mud that covers this region. The colouration of the soil is due to iron chemicals only found in deserts. The chemicals were leached out of the overlying desert rocks, which moved around over the surface of the globe, pushed around by convection currents of hot semi fluid rocks rising and falling deep within the earth’s interior. The Devonian rocks were originally in the tropics of the southern hemisphere.

This intimate, sensory performance compresses time and wears it on the body, as wet rust and earthly memory.

Sonia Levy
For the Love of Corals
Artist film

Behind the scenes, in the basement of the Horniman Museum and Gardens in London, a team of marine biologists and aquarists have initiated Project Coral, a leading endeavour to breed corals ex-situ, in specially designed tanks. By mirroring the climatic conditions — seasonal temperature changes, solar irradiance, and, lunar cycles — of the Great Barrier Reef within custom-built mesocosms, the team has become the first in the world to induce corals to spawn in a laboratory

Levy has followed Project Coral as a case study of new paradigms for multispecies living, restoration ecology and natural history emerging in the wake of environmental breakdowns. For the Love of Corals is a cinematic inquiry that focuses on the daily labour of caring for endangered beings to resurrect them from their imminent extinction.

Soundtrack and located sound by Jez riley French.
Music by Georgia Rodgers.

For the Love of Corals: An Ecology of Perhaps
Performance for voice & tuba

For the Love of Corals: An Ecology of Perhaps are polyphonic writings taking as their starting point Derek Walcott's famous poem, The Sea is History (1979), to weave together Levy's research at the Horniman Museum for her film For the Love of Corals, with ruminations by the philosopher Martin Savransky on the precarious lives of corals in the ecological hold of a perhaps, of the faint possibility of inhabiting the Earth otherwise.

Text in collaboration with Martin Savransky.
Music by Georgia Rodgers. Partial Filter performed by Alexander Glyde-Bates (tuba).

http://www.sonialevy.net

Music and Other Living Creatures is a series at Cafe OTO (curated by OTO Projects) dedicated to music about, with, or by other living creatures. Birds, tigers, chickens, insects and many other living creatures are explored through sound-walks, listening sessions, commissioned performances, live responses and discussions.

EnCOUnTERs is a series of inter-disciplinary events that reside at the intersection between inter- and intra-species encounter and the sonic imagination. Events direct attention to curiosity, the speculative as well as the scientific, and to notions of multiplicity of being, experience and philosophy surveying creative and research-based practices that reference aspects of ecology, ethology and other creature-ologies, bioart and bioacoustics, sound/scape studies, zoömusicology, ethnobotany, critical plant studies, and related fields.

EnCOUnTERs is curated by Helen Frosi (SoundFjord).