Water, Big Water, Ocean Water

Presented at the Mills College Music Department, Mills College, Oakland, California December 11, 2017

The piece seeks to employ the formal resources available to sound art in order to explore the relationship between sound and territory. It will continue a trajectory that I’ve been considering for some time, predominantly the evocation of large spaces within the bounds of smaller ones. In this case, I want to ask what it takes to make the ocean that surrounds an island a felt force in, say, a room or perhaps a hallway. Through the transducing of acoustic objects found in the shores of Puerto Rico and the Bay Area with field recordings (the passing of Hurricane María through Puerto Rico, the incoming tide at the Sutro Baths, the hum of power generators accompanied by the croaking of Hispaniolan ditch frogs, and the sound of thunder and rain), I investigate the production of space by taking into account the multiple displacements, memories, re-imaginings, traumas, and negotiations that these objects and sonic materials convey by virtue of them being in relation with each other in a given space at a given time. Sounds continually migrate from their object of origin, creating a work that is constantly changing, never static. The work hopes to engage the undeniable material reality of colonial histories and violence as expressed in both diaspora and recent ecological catastrophe, but will also consider the possibility of creation, generation, and the emergence of the new, that which is not here or there, irreducible to the conditions that produced it.