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.
skirted Records 