The last week of the Tainan residency is coming to an end. We’ve started the packing and wrapping up of projects, ideas, and connections.
It’s been a time of many things. One such thing has been the wonderful opportunity to be based in a single location, a home-base if you will, where we can settle to concentrate on projects, as well as use it as a launchpad to tour from. A place that we can travel away from for shows over weekends and then return to familiarity to rest, reset and regather.
It’s a privilege to travel to play shows. It asks a lot from locals to spend precious time and energy on the committed organising and hosting events. We always aim to make it worth their while. Sometimes we were able to jump on an already existing show, and other-times a show was initiated in response to our interest in an area. To all those people (Lars, Fang Yi, Immanuel, Rex Chen, Reuben, Deng Yao) we offer up our thanks and gratitude.
The moving around has also provided a snapshot opportunity to witness what is happening with experimental music in Taiwan. It seems healthy and burgeoning scene. There are stable venues (as stable as a venue can be) that offer space for regular performances, there’s people on the ground with ongoing energy to organise, people with musical curiosity to draw upon to perform, and people who hold the important role of ‘appreciative audience’.
From the early stages of our organising, it quickly becomes apparent that Taiwan is well-networked. Various people freely shared information on who we should make contact with in other centres, and often the crossover of names and emails was frequent. People across the cities and regions seemed to have a current handle on who was organising elsewhere, interconnection is a healthy sign of an active and vibrant community.
Included in our tour schedule was our end of residency show at Ting Shuo. We spoke about our history of music making, through mr sterile Assembly to the current projects. Chrissie facilitated a drawing workshop, based on a practice by US illustrator Lynda Barry. Check out Chrissie’s drawings at Picture This, she’s beautifully captured to paper some of our most memorable moments. To wrap up the evening, DSLB/vma presented a joint performance to the good people of Tainan. Thank you Ting Shuo for hosting us!
In our last week, we met up with musicians Fangi Yi Liu, Chen En He, Ooonie, and Nigel at Ting Shuo for an afternoon of improvised goodness. A full afternoon of sound-making with new friends, audibly solidifying the beautiful connections we’ve made over the last seven weeks.
And finally, Kieran had an opportunity to present vegetable.machine.animal at TNNUA, the Tainan National University of the Arts. Over two hours Kieran discussed, demonstrated, and performed v.m.a to students from ethnomusicology and music departments. Alice, from Ting Shuo, brilliantly supported with interpreting skills. The performance became very cosy as the students got closer and enveloped the stage. It felt like a mutually lively and interactive conversation spanning from mycelium, punk rock, Mad Max, Bruno Latour, and tips for students wanting to explore musical improvisation.
Many thanks and gratitude to everyone we’ve met over theist two months. You all made us feel so welcome, you freely offered suggestions of things to do or places to eat, you stopped and wanted to chat, and you took interest in the projects and sounds that we brought to Taiwan. Our experience would have been so much less for not having had met you. Till the next time. And finally, our immense thanks to Alice, Nigel(and Esme) of Ting Shuo Hear Say for enabling this trip to become a possibility. It will certainly be one that remains in our memories with great fondness. Gratitude galore!!! xxx
We leave early in the morning. We came Hualien to play a show at a cute cafe called Night Cruising, at an event called 電路萬段 Electric Road. We met wonderful people and felt welcomed by their enthusiasm.
From the train window, evidence is still visible from Typhoon Ragasa’s recent visit: A super-typhoon that slammed into the Taiwanese east coast, Hualien County, only weeks ago, in September.
There are tears on the hills from slips, some of the scars are massive. Roads built on the side of river banks are broken at right angles, as the force of the wash undermined any idea of structural integrity. There’s also human-made assemblages of rocks, boulders, and concrete structures waiting in place to be used to repair some of the damage. There’s also spontaneous hillsides of elephant-sized stones washed down from torrents, thrown violently as if weightless to the might of water.
The riverbeds are occupied by machinery. Diggers and graders assemble to remove and distribute the debris. They look like tiny toys in these causeways of dry braided rivers. But Typhoon Fung-Wong is on the way, and it will blow the dry away.
The news yesterday says the super-typhoon has just left the Philippines, with nearly one million forced to evacuate, and a shit-tonne of damage left in its wake. It is the 25th typhoon in 2025 to impact the Philippines.
Typhoon Fung-Wong in the Phillipines
Hualien County is on high alert from incoming Fung-Wong. Less than two months ago, Typhoon Ragasa smashed the region, bringing death, injury, and destruction. Entire neighbourhoods were submerged after barrier lakes, naturally formed obstructions (think dam) in the mountains, breeched, sending water, mud, and rock at all that lay in its path.
Ragasa in Hualien, September 2025
We met a teacher/artist in Fenglin in a super-friendly coffee shop. She tells us how her school was devastated by Ragasa. Classrooms clogged by mud, resources ruined and destroyed in the aftermath. The clean-up is ongoing, and nothing is normal. Classes haven’t resumed, but the teacher returns to work to continue with the clean-up. She also shows us some of her artwork, illustrations for a book she is writing to help children manage and express the intense emotions they may be feeling. Her attention to care is evident. And finally, more personally, she shows us a video on her phone, a clip she filmed after they had evacuated upstairs, of the torrential floodwaters surging down the streets past her family home six weeks ago. She points out cars, appliances, and other items that float past in the deluge.
“Don’t Rain Anymore” Shizaodai– thank you for letting us share your art
We also hear the repeatable story of civic mobilisation and mutual support post-disaster. Ordinary people who voluntarily head into damaged zones to help out with cleaning, repairing, and bringing essential skills and compassion for others. Ordinary empathy is an incredible resource, worth more than all the gold and riches.
Video of Ragasa impact in Southern China
This will be my first experience of a typhoon, but here, it is an ongoing and seasonal experience for Taiwan. That said it is now without question that the frequency and intensity of these storms is increasing. The meteorological projection, for this part of the world, is that the ongoing warming ocean will continue to exacerbate the extremity of the storms. And you can’t move an island.
I live on an immovable island at a safe-ish distance for most of these sub-tropical events – for the moment. But change has arrived whether we like it or not. The impacts are with us. Back home in Aotearoa, the recent fires of Tongariro are still smouldering. And the evidence says the fires are more frequent, as are droughts, the winds, and rains. To top this off, we have a government who are acting like a bunch of slap-headed fuckwits in relation to any policy responsibility towards the mitigation from the impacts of a locally, and globally, changing climate. The islands are fixed in place, the change comes to us.
Later: I’m about to press publish. The typhoon arrives in about 9 hours. Friendly folk we have met over the last few weeks are telling us to be careful. But when we look around the laneways it all seems quite relaxed. There almost nothing I can see that indicates that people are especially worried. The only precaution I spot is that a local joss paper shop has cover his merchandise with a single tarp, and then fixed it to the ground with plastic rope and a brick. But best I don’t get deceived, the locals are experts at living with these storms. We will see what the morning brings.
I’ve never seen them. But most mornings. I wake hearing them tear silence from the sky, heaven torn apart by winged chariots dragging wheelless trailers of thunder. Or, when I’m walking, the invisible echos roll down the shiny tiled walls of narrow alleyways, lanes of lives, livelihoods, and plants.
I’ve tried to write about this several times before, three or four times at least, but it felt naive, trite, an observation of a sheltered tourist into the everyday reality of somewhere else. I discard those attempts with distain, and with the decision to wait till some other item of interest appears.
But then I hear jets, I imagine purpose, sabre-rattling, preparedness training, a deterrence-dance or defensive manoeuvres. I come from quiet skies, where fighter jets are rarely seen, and the dominant use of the overhead is for commerce and passengers. These are the naive skies of home.
Yet, the story of the jet never leaves. I cannot shake its’ company. It returns again and again, a persistent interjection that I feel compelled to consider more.
I’m told that these war machines may be in the hands of pilots in training. But we’re not certain. There is a larger airbase northward that interacts on the geopolitical frontlines over the Taiwan Strait, the identity-crisis of contested waters, are they ‘internal’ to China or international? It is a geopolitics that I am painfully aware of being under-informed about.
In a conversation last weekend, we were told about the inconsistency between the local geopolitical realities’ vs the repetitious ‘Western’ media cycle. The sabre-rattle of print, the pundit and the podcast that gets rolled out with clockwork precision to meet some other agenda elsewhere. Not of the people down here in the laneways.
There is half a bottle of water sitting on top of the fridge in the kitchen, a captured millpond of drinking water. The sound-waves of the jets reaches into the insides of the container, we see the sound of the jet ripple the fluids surface. Like a tiny earthquake, but from above. Or not. Later I question this idea, maybe I’m just connecting dots to a story that doesn’t exist. Did I just rock the vessel by closing the fridge door moments ago?
Pattern recognition is when the brain imagines a line between two dots. The line doesn’t exist, but we believe it to be true. This act of recognition is evolutionalily useful in finding familiarity, but not fact. Bias will launch the brain in to all manner of inaccuracies and batshit cul-de-sac’s, media will have us believe all sorts of distractions via approximate associations. My naivety feels exposed. It’s good to spot it in action. The best response is to, first, be quiet and then learn.
My thinking turns to others’ airspaces. Recent scrolling presented videos of the celebration of silence as the Israeli governments, eventually fraudulent, ‘ceasefire’ came into effect. Palestinian skies minus the jets and drones, monstrous machines designed for one task, to deliver earthquake munitions with heartbreak precision. For a moment, the skies of Gaza are silent, songs rise from the earth. Weeks before, videos from within the apocalypse zone, video clips of teachers teaching students to sing in tune with drones. I can not truly comprehend such coexistent bravery and horror.
We recently played a show in a cafe in Taichung. On the walls hang an exhibition of posters of invitation and resistance from Palestine, organised by local DIY, punk, and communities of solidarity.
Published 1901
The oldest image, from 1901, is a romantic invitation to Cook’s Nile & Palestine Tours. Depicted is a lone human, on top of a dressed camel, beside a river, looking towards the setting sun. On the surface of still water are sail boats and a steamship of leisure. Across the water is a building to house hundreds in restorative comfort. Perhaps the skies are quiet except for dusks birds. An invitation to tourists and visitors alike. As the posters in the exhibition move toward our current time, the imagery becomes more desperate, painful, deadly. Posters are a silent format. But in this point in time, as in many previous, they aim to tear apart the silence, sending, like soundwaves, out into the future, connecting action to meaning.
During the NZSM/Toi Pōneke arts residency, 2024, I was introduced to SOUNZ– the Centre for New Zealand Music. To be honest, I knew about SOUNZ in the peripheral cul-de-sacs of my brain but I thought it was mostly for classical music. And it is, but it is also much more.
It says about itself that it “…champions and promotes the sounds and music of Aotearoa, New Zealand.” It contains a huge collection of music score and such, but I was totally unaware that it has a substantial audio/visual component.
SOUNZ offered to come and video a number of performance associated with the vegetable.machine.animal Guest album launch, as well as a couple of the performances attached to the accompanying exhibition being held at Toi Pōneke. For free! With multiple cameras! and they would do the grunt of editing etc! Quite an amazing offer. My tasks were to perform well, and be responsible for recording the audio – this is quite likely a barrier for many but less insurmountable these days as digital recording devices get smaller, easier to use, and more available.
The video work was completed by Chris Wilson, a production team of team of one. Amazingly easy to work with, and very considerate in the way he set multiple cameras around the stage in ways that did not seem invasive or impinge on the ability to perform. A terrific experience.
I wish again to offer many thanks to the other musicians who took part in these performances: Kedron Parker, Gemma, S. Thompson, David Long, Chrissie Butler, Timothy Morel, Sophia Frudd, Andrew Faleatua (unfortunately not filmed but an audio recording was collected) and Ruby Solly. They are all incredible music makers in their own rights and are worthy of your aural attention.
Maybe Humidity is a one-worded phrase saying that the air is an ocean, and my skin a shoreline where beads of waves break. A thickening, sweating, swelling tide, not drawn by that minion Moon, but the celestial furnace that claims the Day. In other words, it’s hot. But our host, as he ascended stairs, said it’s cooler now than it was, so lucky us.
Perhaps if I could sit on our orbital buddy, Moon, and with my big enough ears, I can listen in onto our shared rock. Across its face, over the globe, loaded into streets are the ones, tens, hundreds, thousands, millions, family by association, shouting out into space — ‘Free Palestine’. Drops, puddles, streams, rivers, and oceans of humans flow into, and onto, the sea. A rising tide that is calling ‘Free, Free!’. The earth becomes a speaker, amplified, more focused, a unison demanding to be heard. The shrinking corners of desperation and power refuse to listen. But the Moon hears.
Water finds the ways through the smallest of gaps in a seal, unless you live in a vacuum. I’m told that Nature Hates a Vacuum, and there are no poppies on the moon.
Arriving in Tainan, Taiwan, mid-week, we’re warmly greeted by humidity and our host Alice. We pack the car around the necessities of a child, carseat, floating board, spare clothes, and travel, with the gleeful disorientation of the lost, to Ting Shuo Hear Say Studio. This concrete and stone, fanned and air-conditioned, building will be home for the next two months. The building itself is hidden inside a labyrinth of laneways, whole worlds just getting on with it away from the busy main streets nearby.
To stay here we must prepare water daily. It’s advised the fluid from the tap is not for consumption. The city has a processing plant, so technically clean. But online stories talk of ancient pipes, poor infrastructure, maintenance irregularities with water towers, and other things like bacteria and contaminants. Consensus seems to be precautionary, and we’ll follow that line: filter, boil, cool, drink.
The actions to obtain the daily essentials: – fill the filter jug from tap: listen to it drip through, measuring time in grains of wet. – boil the filtered water: it takes two full vessels to fill the kettle once, its about 8 minutes of filtering to 6 minutes of boiling. – decant: let the boiled water cool before pouring into a third vessel into the third for storage in the fridge.
Circulate this process so there is alway one full vessel in the cold, and one in preparation. Drink for thirst, fluid replacement, and coffee.
How does preparing water act as metaphor for starting a sound residency? I cannot yet find the reason why I’m fixated on, fascinated by, this simple and essential process of water preparation. Maybe it’s something about having basics in place? I find the coolness of water soothing when everything is a new sensory experience, the heat, tastes, smells, language, the physical adjusting to a new environment. The sink becomes an oasis.
The main plants in the space are Zamioculcas zamiifolia, ZZ Plant, or Eternity Plant. I’ve wrestled with these species before. They are not the most giving of their voltage, positively hesitant. Maybe some evolutionary thing is going on. an internal process that contributes to their robustness?
I set up my gear and plug them up anyway, just to let it play in the background. That’s when I spot it, sporadic action. I notice first the fluctuation in sound. Paying more attention I then see that there are flashes of voltage, the SCÍON lights up in response to the quality of input voltage, and a shift in sound takes place. It’s calm inside the leaves till the lightning strikes. This realisation turns a challenge to a feature. Many times I have contemplated trying to slow things down the input signal in order to create aesthetic space in the generated sound. This plant provides exactly what I’ve been looking for, but been unable to achieve by technical means.
Later, I record all the constituent parts of preparing water, the four fillings of tap/filter/kettle/jug, and the boiling and decanting. I make modest tweaks to the recorded files, a little eqing mostly, and then load them into the onboard sampler. The samples are activated by Zamioculcas voltage. This becomes my first recorded piece, Prepared Water by ZZ Pot.
Alas Bontempi, you did not travel well. Even with all that padding keys broke, valves snapped. And to top it off, your ancient power requirements are incompatible with the local technology. Even with a transformer to accomodate performance is not possible. There were puffs of life but they were the barest of gasps.
The loss of this key instrument is a challenge. The table of Chrissies toy gathers new items. It also creates a space for previous ‘backing voices’, instruments that may have been secondary to a piece of music, to move front and centre.
There is an adventure in limitation, how much can be made from so little? For instance, just how many ways can two oxygen atoms and one hydrogen take shape?
Monday was Moon Festival, a mid-Autumn public holiday. A harvest festival of sorts, where family reconvene and tend to barbecues late into the evening. Down the lane from where we’re staying, two families gather, celebrating and detonating firework as the day gives way to the full moon.
Fighter Jets from the local airforce circle multiple times during the day, most days of the week. But on this day of family gatherings, I notice that the sky is quiet.
We are hours away from hoping onboard a metal bird to wing our way to the island of Taiwan.
We are very fortunate to have the opportunity to spend two months in Tainan, a southern city in Taiwan, in residence at Ting Shuo Hear Say. We have a bunch of projects to explore and experiment with, and we look forwards to sharing these with you in time as they revel themselves to us.
And for added excitement there’s a bunch of show in the middle of the stay. The 7th is tentative, perhaps we go to Hualien, but they have just been impacted by the typhoon. We shall wait and see. The shows will be a combination of playing together as a duo, as solos, or in collaborations with local musicians.
Home again after four weeks on the road. Unpacked, reassembled, and now time for minor maintenance, repairs, and reflection.
It was a first to embark on such an extensive local tour. One that spanned both islands and explored venues from house gigs, chapels, record stores, bars, galleries, and community spaces. There were a bunch of new towns and venues, and a few familiar favourites. This tour also felt like a grand opportunity to get an update on what’s physically happening in other centres, build new, and reconnect with older, networks, and to experience a bunch of active musicians and bands around the motu. 13 shows were booked, two fell through but picked up a improv show in Lyttelton, and a Live-to-Air on Radio One in Ōtepoti/Dunedin, so, luckily, 13 remained. The log offered zero complaints.
Now in this post-tour-state, I am left with my optimism uplifted. There are strong pockets of community interest and activity who seemed to be interested in experiencing fungi-impregnated and log-powered music. Loads of fascinating conversations happen after the shows. I certainly had a brilliant time and feel confident that the many-varying audiences enjoyed the spectacle as well.
Many thanks to: Sam and Glory [especially for the log!], Tonamu and the Kirikiriroa/Hamilton crew, Jeff and AF, Mark and the rest in Heretaunga/Hastings [unfortunately didn’t get to play but seems like a great network and hope to go there soon], Campbell, Sarah, Snails, Porridge Watson, Ben and Hanna, Zac at Common Ground, Matt/George et al in Te Waiharakeke/Blenheim, Matthew Plunkett, Ruben Derrick, Te Atamira, Fi and the crew of Radio One, Mads & Liam of Hōhā, The Crown crew, Jordan/Matt of Murgatroyd and Threes and Sevens Records – Waihōpai/Invercargill. Also, to Radio Control, Ben at IN sessioNZ, Mark Amery at RNZ, and Radio One, for the radio interviews. Extra special thanks to Fergus Nm for the image for the poster. And to all the bands, bedding, and bonding, it was very much appreciated, let’s do it again sometime soon.
It’s been a fair while since I hit the road. And with that said, I’m really excited for the coming months of shows around the length and breadth of this motu. I still think live is such an essential way to experience music. Information is conveyed in the moment that can never be captured to record. There’s a bunch of place I’ve never played and it’s a real privilege to get back out into the provinces.
Immense thanks at the outset to all those that have helped out with practical efforts and encouragements.
Massive thanks to the wonderful artist Fergus Nm who is the creator of this brilliant image on the poster. [By his stuff]
I have a nice swag of merch with me, the new album, the book SOUNDBITTEN, and a bunch of other skirted releases.
July Thursday 17 – House Party, Patea – with Jack Tamakehu & Unknown Rockstar Friday 18 – Last Place, Kirikiriroa/Hamilton – with Moon Hotene and Halcyon Birds Saturday 19 – Instore – Flying Out Records, Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland, 2pm Saturday 19 – Audio Foundation, Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland – v.m.a with Taekyung Seo, O/PUS and Oksen Ox Thursday 24 – Common Room, Heretaunga /Hastings – with Invisible Plain Friday 25 – Snails, Te Papa-i-Oea./Palmerston North – with Powers, S.D.W. Saturday 26 – Porridge Watson, Whanganui – with XRVR & ROC///OPT/ Sunday 27 – Common Ground Presents, Pae Tū Mōkai/Featherston – with indigogue browne Thursday 31 – Brayshaw Park Chapel, Te Waiharakeke/Blenheim – with Twin Rudders
August Friday 1 – Space Academy, Ōtautahi/Christchurch – with Cuticles, and Haunts Wednesday 6 – Te Atamira, Tāhuna/Queenstown – solo Friday 8 – The Crown, Ōtepoti/Dunedin – with HōHā, Sewage and Murgatroyd Saturday 9 – Threes and Sevens Records, Waihōpai/Invercargill – with Murgatroyd and Hattford
The followin,g texts formed the body of the – held at the GUEST exhibition on Saturday 14 July, 2025.
I was thrille d to be able to facilitate this conversation. It had actualu ly been something I’d been wanting to do for some time, to hold a public discussion regarding ongvuzBoing interspeciesness at the intersection of my creative practice, as well as from an anthropological, and scientific ecological perspective. It felt like we were all ta lking about something very similar, but from widely differing perspectives.
Immense thanks to Julie and Eli for letting me share their texts here. kieran
Kieran Monaghan The moment this journey really began for me was when I read the 2012 article “A Symbiotic View of Life: We Have Never Been Individuals” by Scott Gilbert, Jan Sapp, and Alfred Tauber. The piece, published in the Quarterly Review of Biology, proposed that the human body isn’t a singular entity, but a collective—more like a city. For example, bacteria. Elsewhere, certain bacterial groups may enhance our immunity, sterilze my immune system of all these organisms, my immunity fails, and my demise quickly follows. These organisms don’t just livqe in us; they’re part of us,. inversely, we are part of them. The idea that “I” need them—that identity and health are inherently co-created—shifted my thinking.
Working as a nurse at the time, this concept of interconnected health echoed strongly with the holistic approach integral to the Primary Health Care facility I was employed with. It validated the view that personal, local, cultural, and environmental factors interact constantly with wellbeing and illness. The implications extended beyond healthcare—it challenged the individualistic framing of the self, so prevalent in capitalist thinking. People are not just as individuals, but beings shaped by a web of interactions and relationships.
At the same time, my main creative outlet was performing as a drummer and vocalist in the duo *mr sterile Assembly*. While I had these nerdy fascinations with biology and interconnected systems, I had no idea how to merge that with my art. The worlds felt separate.
By 2021, my life was shifting, certain events had disrupted any assumptions I held about my future. I found time to dig deeper into the idea of blurred boundaries between human and non-human lives. Thinkers like Donna Haraway, Karen Bakker, and Timothy Morton expanded these ideas for me. Haraway’s 2016 book Staying with the Troubleparticularly stood out, merging technology, anthropology, science, and art. She introduced the concept of *Worlding*—a process of collaboratively making the world with others, emphasizing interdependence and co-creation. It resonated. It felt like a conceptual framework for how to live, think, and maybe even make music. It’s a bit like living with a gut-biome.
By total accident, I stumbled across an album called Worlding by Eryk Salvaggio, who named it after Haraway’s idea. Salvaggio created the album using a modular synthesizer and mushrooms. Salvaggio referenced research suggesting that mushrooms communicate through voltage spikes—an underground electrical language with repeatable patterns. He directed these signals into a synthesizer, letting fungi “speak” through sound. “Sound is just what happened afterward,” he said.
Though I’d never really liked electronic music, this felt different. It felt organic, alive. I needed to understand how it worked.
Learning modular synthesis was a steep climb. It required new instruments, technologies, vocabularies, and expectations. Luckily, Te Whanganui-a-Tara has a vibrant experimental music scene. I was able to learn from others who had already gone down weird and wonderful paths in sound.
A pivotal piece of gear for me was the SCION, a biofeedback module developed by a small Scottish company. SCION converts voltage from living organisms—plants, fungi, even humans—into signals that interact with modular synths. While biofeedback in music isn’t entirely new, it’s mostly remained in academic or niche circles. A lot of what I found online was either too esoteric or framed as novelty—hippies playing flutes “with” plants or biosignals shoehorned into club tracks.
Nothing felt like a true dialogue between human and non-human sound-makers.
That’s what I was looking for: something mutual. “Mutual” might not be the right word, but it gestures at a goal—making music with living non-human things, not just about them. I wanted the plants or fungi to be participants. Their voltage rides on sound waves, and I respond in real time. The results are unpredictable, never the same twice. It’s collaborative, co-created, greater-than-human music.
I’m not claiming to give plants or fungi a “voice,” or to interpret what they’re trying to say. I’m not qualified to comment on their intelligence, either—others are doing that work. What I am doing is creating conditions where non-human life can appear in a shared sonic space, almost like a participation, where both of us—human and other-than-human— shape the music.
Three main reasons keep me coming back to this project.
First, I think of this as Anti-Dystopian music. It’s not naive or utopian. It acknowledges damage, but refuses to give in to doom. It’s music that suggests other futures—futures that aren’t built solely through human frameworks. It’s deeply responsive, unpredictable, and impossible to replicate. Unlike AI-generated sound, it requires aliveness. It’s not designed to mimic or replicate, but to explore what happens when humans and non-humans literally play together. It’s art that needs life to exist.
Second is the Climate Crisis. Listening is a powerful act. People on the margins often say their first demand is to be heard. Listening leads to empathy, which can lead to action. Many still see the “environment” as something external to humans. This project invites listeners to hear the presence of other lifeforms—not metaphorically, but materially. I hope that it may spark curiosity, and curiosity is a gateway to connection and care.
Finally, it lets me bring my science-nerd side into being. To me this is music that demystifies without becoming boring, holds uncertainty as a strength, and fosters wonder. I want to show that experimental sound can be demonstrable, legible, and meaningful without being obscure or elitist. I want to make art that destabilizes the charlatan, the doomsayer, and the gatekeeper—and opens space for exploration, connection, and growth.
–
Eli Elinoff
Listen, the forest. Ourselves
Shh….Listen.
What do you hear?
Wait. That’s not the right question.
Who do you hear?
A strange, perhaps profound question. Can a mushroom be a who? Does a forest have a subjectivity? Maybe that isn’t the right question either.
What might these strange vibrations mean? Might our capacity to hear the sounds produced by these always already vibrating, vibrant subjects rearrange our relationship to them? Can it?
These are the questions that Kieran’s project—particularly its efforts to listen and collaborate with non-human others—provokes for me. Questions I am keen to raise, bat around, and then leave for us to think about together today.
I am an anthropologist—an anthropologist of the urban environment, an anthropologist of politics, an anthropologist of citizenship and dwelling, an anthropologist engaged with something called the anthropocene and particularly the historical convergences of natural, cultural, and political forces that it generates and that are actively being generated by this planetary phase.
Lately, as I seek to develop something I am calling a speculative earth history of concrete in Thailand, I have been thinking of all kinds of subjects, human and non-human that occupy the margins of urban ecologies and urban ecologies that occupy the margins of other areas: Mangrove propules reaching for distant sediments, mudskippers hopping across tidal flats, trees poking through urban sidewalks and disrupting aerial electrical lines, monitor lizards traveling through underground pipes, small particles—pollution, viruses, and tear gas— traveling in and out of our lungs (see Elinoff 2024, for one example).
Across these distinct domains, I am not only interested in human forms of life but our constant exchange with these non-human others, often despite our quite strenuous efforts to assert our distinctness from them and their ecological contexts. Attention to these processes’ connection and disconnection and their specific qualities, I think, suggests something about our capacities or incapacity for co-existence with our planet and with each other. These are urgent questions.
Kieran’s work Guest is compelling to me because it not only amplifies the vibrations of non- humans to alert us to their presence, but because it actually engages with them in a partial collaboration through music. In this way, the work enacts a kind of generous cycle of acknowledgement that offers us an opportunity to think about what it means to live on a planet with non-human others in their (and our) most fulsome vibrant and vibratory selves.
1
These are questions that undergird my own work but increasingly pre-occupy me personally in this moment of ecological transformation and related startling political violence.
To clarify what I mean by this, indulge me in a deviation for a minute to think with the anthropologist Eduardo Kohn (2013; 2022), whose landmark engagement with forests as thinking worlds in the Ecuadorian Amazon suggests that when we break from our sense that humans are the only beings that use signs, we might be forced to raise new questions about what the world is, what our ethical disposition towards it might be, and what politics such an ethics might inspire.
Without getting too far in the weeds (so to speak), Kohn argues (2013: 33-35), alongside his primarily Runa Indigenous collaborators, that if we accept that all kinds of beings are capable of engaging in the kinds of symbolic work that we typically reduce to language— particularly the capacity of non-humans to index, which is a specific sign making process based on the logical referential connection between specific symbolic markers and various things in the world (smoke indexes/points to fire)—then we can begin to reconstruct our intellectual apparatus so as to be capacious enough to begin to grasp at an understanding of forests as filled with webs of communication that bind together a range of actors in relations that exceed human comprehension.
A monkey, Kohn tells us, may respond to the sound of a snapping branch because they feel it give way under foot or because they perceive it to represent a coming predator. We do not know the specificity of their interpretation, but we can ascertain that the sound has a meaning (it is being interpreted) and thus, represents what Kohn calls a “living sign” (2013: 33). Signs like these, call together a range of interpreters using a host of methods to interpret all of which might be interpreted by humans but not entirely so. For Kohn (and the semiotician Charles Sanders Pierce), the capacity to generate and interpret meaningfulness in the world is the very basis for the composition of selves (2013: 29, 33).
There is a deliberate ambiguity or even agnosticism about what consciousness means in this expansive vision of the nature of what a self is or might be. That ambiguity is there by design. We cannot know these others and what ontologically is for them. The gap is too deep. But we can, Kohn suggests, give way to the idea that the world (a word, which, incidentally, his Runa interlocutors refer to as forest) is extraordinarily semiotically rich with meaning and meaning making in this expanded sense. It is rich with selves interacting in a collaborative and collective mesh. There is so more to this argument, but my time is short, so I’ll skip to the questions it raises.
The first sets of questions I have raised are ontological. Who is that you hear right now when we stop and listen? Who is that? What is their capacity to vibrate meaningfully in ways that we do not, cannot, understand? What might such vibrations mean or, rather, how might they mean something to others? What is a self and do non-humans have one. Rather than asking what these strange vibrations mean linguistically, we might rephrase this question, what world do these vibrations portend if we listen carefully to them?
A second set of questions that might follow from that first set of questions are ethical— What does it mean to live among others who think, even if such thought is profoundly different than human thought? Kohn (2022) suggests that forests think in ways that are emergent, distributed, imagistic, and general. Leafy mantids (leaf bugs), for example, index (point to) leafiness because non-human others have the capacity to understand what “leafiness” in its collective ontological sense means. Accepting the proposition of a thinking forest as a distributed total whole rich with meaning both irrespective of humans but also inclusive of humans, might ultimately force us to reconfigure ourselves and in so doing our relation with the world. This process of self-refashioning prompted by the idea of a living forest is, for Kohn (and others) the basis of ethical life. Who are we to be and how are we to act in relation with a living forest of selves? What kinds of refashioning might these vibrations inspire in us? What have they inspired for you Kieren as you work with them?
Finally, there is a politics here as well. The political theorist Jacques Rancière (1999) suggests that the political is, first and foremost, composed via an aesthetic schism between that which is noise and that which is language. The suggestion is that the composition of what we understand to be legitimate politics relegates certain kinds of claims as unintelligible because they are not interpreted as meaningful sound. This has all kinds of implications—particularly related to how the demarcation of others as non-humans as distinct species is essential to their violent exclusion. What then does it mean to listen to these sounds as more than noise?
Stop. Listen again.
Kieran’s work—its elaborate prosthetics of listening and collaborating—awakens us to the depth of this set of questions. It suggests that acknowledging the world’s vibrancy might also give way to an acknowledgment of our own, generating a compulsion to collaborate with it in such a way as to better grasp the world’s autonomous, multiform capacity for self- making. Its capacity to hold our ethical attention as we remake ourselves with it and, perhaps, our ability to act politically together to protect it and ourselves.
Tēna koutou katoa Ngā mihi o te ahi ahi He Ahorangi Tūhono O te Kura Mātauranga Koiora O Te Herenga Waka
Ko Julie Deslippe taku ingoa
Kia ora My name is Julie Deslippe I’m an Associate Professor of Plant Ecology At Victoria Univeristy of Wellington I’m really grateful to be here with you all to enjoy Kieran’s art and to be included in today’s discussion. And I “tutoko” Eli’s comments, particulary his framing Kieran’s mahi as an opportunity expand our perceptions of non-human “living signs”.
Kieran’s compelling work is an invitation to engage with familar plants and fungi in a new way. It invites us to stop and listen -not just see or touch– these normally quiet and stationary beings: who are just doing their “thing”. But more than that, it invites us to think about how we might directly engage with plants and fungi in new ways creating new shared experiences.
Listening and responding to plants and fungi.
I’m a plant ecologist. A scientist who studies life – and how plants live in community – Together – and with others.
Plants and fungi are living beings, with identity, behaviour, even agency. From my perspective, the question of whether a fungus is an “it” or a “who” reveals only the anthropocentrism of the questioner – it suggests that humans get to decide who is a who and who isn’t.
Plants and fungi don’t care what we thing they are. So rather than passing judgement on beings that are so unlike ourselves, I would urge us to simply pay careful attention to what IS. I promise that if you study plants and fungi – watching, touching, smelling, tasting and even listening to how they behave – your experience and understanding of life will expand far beyond anthopocentric labels.
Plants and fungi are facinating creatures. They act and do things far beyond our wildest imaginations.
Evolution on islands has bestowed Aotearoa with a wealth of unique biodiversity. We are kaitaiki of more than 8500 indigenous plant species, a number that more than doubles when you include the introduced plants that now call te motu home.
Our species awe and inspire…
Take pua o te reinga, our native wood rose, a plant that has totally lost the ability to produce chlorophyll and can’t photosynthesise. It gains carbon by parasitising the roots of broadleaved hardwood trees like kapuka (broadleaf) and whauwhaupaku (five finger). These vigorous hosts shuttle copious sugars to pua o te reinga which it uses to make rich and odorous nectar that includes the mammalian pheromone Squalene.
Squalene is irresistible to Pekapeka, our short-eared bat, who cover themselves in wood rose pollen before moving on to their next sugary midnight snack, serving to pollinate pua o te reinga as they feast.
Or take Harore our edible native honey mushroom, which lives as a root parasite and decomposer on our giant beech and podocarp trees. In their latter days its mushrooms grow up to be as dull and plain as dry leaves, but they spend nights in their youth glowing psychedelic green -as if enjoying the forest disco- No one knows why they perform the complex and energetically expensive chemical reactions to break down luciferin and release light through bioluminescence. Perhaps if you listen carefully, they may tell you.
While many of us suffer from acute ‘plant blindness’ and by this I mean “Oh wow! look at the elephant!” In reality, plants and fungi profoundly affect our ecologies: shaping our landscapes, culture -even our economies.
A prominent example of this is the development of plantation forestry in Aotearoa.
Today 1.7 million hectares of land, nearly a third of all forest cover in the country, is used for plantation forestry. Of this, more than 90% is radiata pine. Native to California, radiata pine was planted as seed in Aotearoa from the 1850ies. However these early plantings often failed, or produced bushy trees with open canopies and multiple stems, suitable for shelter belts, but poor-quality timber.
Prior to the first world war, as our native forests were felled and burned on vast scales to make way for pastoral agriculture, fears of wood shortages began to shape public policy.
Research to improve tree performance was needed to fuel the forestry planting boom – And by the 1920s this involved the import of seedlings grown in Californian top soil –
Radiata pine is obligately mycorrhizal. This means that in order complete its life cycle from seed burst to the formation of fertile cones; its must form an intimate root symbiosis with soil fungi. Mycorrhizas are partnerships based on the exchange of resources. The plant provides sugar that it makes in photosynthesis to the fungus in exchange for growth-limiting soil nutrients, like nitrogen and phosphorus.
Pine forms mycorrhizas with a range of fungal species which were present in those imported Californian soils– many of which will be familiar to those of you who walk the Town Belt.
Of course, in their native range, pines and the mycorrhizal fungi co-evolved in a complex web of life.
And some of those species have also been introduced into Aotearoa’s forests.
It turns out that red deer LOVE mycorrhizal mushrooms and have no trouble at all travelling vast distances through pine plantations, into tussock grasslands and native forests, where they deposit the unharmed fungal spores in a tidy little package of fertiliser.
This facilitation of one invasive plant, not by another, but by a network of alien interacting species, is what has fuelled the degradation of more than 1.8 million hectares of farmland by wilding pine.
With a price tag of over $140 million dollars to control in the past decade alone.
We also know that once they get into native forests, some of these introduced mushrooms displace native mycorrhizal fungi on our native beech trees, creating a potential threat for to native biodiversity.
So while many of us are unaware of how plants and fungi have transformed our biodiversity and landscapes over time. There is no doubt that these normally quiet and stationary beings profoundly affect our economy, culture and identities.
Plants and fungi are not good or bad, selfish or altruistic, socialist or capitalist. They have evolved over million of years, in their facinating diversity, to interact in the complex web of life that we are all part of. Let us take the time to hear their music.
skirted Records 