ODDKINS with Merche Blasco
ODDKINS is a live electroacoustic quadraphonic performance and ongoing collaboration between me and Merche Blasco. Together, we process and modify our field recording archives through sound design and Machine Learning audio tools to shape speculative biophonic hybrids of transformed landscapes due to environmental change.
Digging the Pedospheric vibes
Focusing on farmscape ecology and the important role soil plays in climate change, I have developed a new electronic music composition, Digging the Pedospheric Vibes. Assembling sounds created by flora and fauna of a soil’s ecosystem utilising a variety of bioacoustic techniques and microphones to capture seismic vibration from the substrate as well as hydro and airborne sounds – providing a range of frequencies, timbres and biorhythms to be used as instrumentation for composing electronic music.
This project was developed in Finland and Berlin. Starting with an Artist-in-Residence in June – July at Titanik Gallery, Turku, Finland. With support from the Berliner Arbeitsstipendien für Ernste Musik 2021.
In 2018, media artist Teemu Lehmusruusu invited me to undertake a micro-residency on the Qvidja Farm, Parainen, a pilot farm in the south of Finland, for his Tropic Verses project.
Sonic Acts – Night Air – Soil Samples
Soil Samples gathered artists and researchers on Saturday, 24 April, for an evening of performances, presentations, and discussions that addressed soil and its geopolitical, colonial, and bodily entanglements. The panel was made up of sound artist Felicity Mangan, researcher and ‘tiny miner’ Martin Howse, biogeochemist and critical ecologist Kunal Palawat, working in tandem with visual artist Dorsey Kaufmann.
Amphi’theater, Firefly Project, Floating University Berlin, August 29th, 2020.
The title Amphi’theater plays with the words Amphitheater – an arena designed with sloped seating for plays in Greek and Roman times. Combined with amphibian – the word for animals that can live on land and water. The sound installation located in the reeds presents a mix of frog symphonies recorded in different semi-natural habitats in Berlin. The piece explores the timbre and biorhythms of frogs that create natural symphonies during mating rituals and utilise auditory functions such as call and response, silence and movement, and sending sounds through the air, water and substrate (plants and fungus). While also capturing the different acoustic qualities of these semi-natural habitats by recontextualising an electro-acoustic composition that can be heard within the semi-natural ecosystem of the floating University site. The Floating University, a re-structured rainwater basin of the former Tempelhof Airport in Berlin. Since the airport was closed in 2008 the basic has become a unique ecosystem that has been transformed by architecture collective Raumlaborberlin into an inner city offshore-laboratory. To facilitate experiential learning and challenge routines and habits of urban practices.
Hexadeca’frogic
Hexadeca’frog’ic, a sound piece commissioned and developed for a sound installation in Cashmere Radio’s garden in Berlin-Lichtenberg, as part of the “Passage: Radio Garden” program, hosted by Lukas Grundmann.
Hexadeca’frog’ic features a mix of newly recorded field recordings made in gardens and wetland biotopes around Berlin, during the recent lockdown period. The piece builds upon Mangan’s previous work Stereo’frog’ic (Longforms Editions), a play on the word stereophonic, a sound piece crafted from found Australian wildlife recordings of frogs, insects and other ‘vocal’ animals wavering about in a stereo field. This time the piece is a play on the word Hexadecaphonic as the piece is made for 16 channels installed within an urban garden habitat.
Hexadeca’frog’ic was captured in binaural audio and broadcasted live, featuring a dense background soundscape of the urban surroundings: neighbour’s kids playing in the backyard, barking dogs, aeroplanes, electromagnetic interferences, phone notifications, bird calls, slamming car doors, flying insects, Berlin’s S-Bahn glissandi and many more. Listening via headphones is recommended to spot them all.
Riversssounds (online residency 2021)
Riversssounds acts as an online residency opportunity for sound artists worldwide; this interactive platform provides a sonic adventure. Combining an experimental artistic approach with elegant and simple web architecture, it is dedicated to rivers and their sounds. Thin lines and calming colours reflect a sense of intimacy with nature. The web special features archives of sounds of rivers from across Europe recorded by sound artists and allows users to listen to them virtually in an engaging, gamified way. Users can control the sound by moving the cursor over the grid of the respective river, whereby each motion brings forth a new sound from a particular river segment.
LUGLIO Sound and Dance project with Annamaria Ajmone
SULL’AZIONE SALUTARE DEL MAGNETISMO ANIMALE E DELLA MUSICA (ON THE HEALING EFFECT OF ANIMAL MAGNETISM AND MUSIC)
Conceived for some of the visitable areas of the Certosa Monumental Cemetery, the performance was born from the exchange of a series of suggestions that investigated the still, silent space of the cemetery as a place vibrant with particular forms of information. Among the figures observed, Anna Bonazinga D’Amigo and Pietro D’Amato, a psychic, somnambulist and healer, the founder of the Società Magnetica d’Italia, both renowned practitioners of mesmerism, have contributed to a cognitive approach based on the possible relationships and material transmissions between the different entities, mineral, vegetable and animal, that inhabit the cemetery.
In this context, the artists have invited the dancer and choreographer Cristina Kristal Rizzo to relate to the environment they have conceived, in an attempt to take their intuitions elsewhere, thanks to the language and body sensitivity of another authorship.
Special guest Cristina Kristal Rizzo.
Thanks to Caned Icoda.
Curated by Caterina Molteni, promoted by Istituzione Bologna Musei, MAMbo, Museo Civico del Risorgimento in collaboration with Bologna Servizi Cimiteriali
Supported by the Virtual Partner Residency, Goethe Instiute.
felicitymangan.org 