Un/natural Fields
May 24th, from 6-8pm at MoKS
entry fee TBC
Un/natural Fields is a new project in which Michael McDermott and William "Bilwa" Costa juxtapose two solo projects, the organic imagined landscapes of the McDermott'sEchozoo works in progress and Costa’s unnatural field recordings. Together they create an imaginary listening experience akin to magical realism.
Audio: https://soundcloud.com/bilwa/sets/un-natural-fields
(Un)natural Terrains
Composer / sound artist Michael McDermott is currently working on a multi-year sonic design project recreating the sounds of extinct animals and environment calledEchozoo. Part of this project has involved extended artist residencies in North and South America, Europe and Asia field recording biophonic and geophonic environments for use in sound designing Echozoo. His hope with this project is bring a deeper awareness and connection through listening by imagining the sounds of creatures that no longer live on our planet. Part of the process involves performing and presenting evolving landscapes of these recorded and manipulated environments. The processing of these field recordings implements McDermott’s “Sonic Photography” techniques which include: filtering colors / density, transparency, space, modulation (time based), pitch, shape (edges), duration, augmentation, perspective. For concerts these techniques are applied real-time in an improvised performance.
Un/natural field recordings
Un/natural field recordings are recordings comprised of man-made, digital, analogue, and mechanical sounds, as well as many other incidental sounds, which make up a city's soundscape on metros and in public spaces. The palette of sounds is ever changing, and include recordings from various cities including: Istanbul, Mexico City, Shanghai, Beijing, Tokyo, NY, Berlin, Vienna, Prague, etc. William "Bilwa" Costa is a Berlin-based sound artist, experimental musician, performer, and composer.
Travel for Un/natural Fields Tour is funded in part by Foundation for Contemporary Art / Emergency Grant.