This Website includes: A play including a sensual immersion experience of destruction and rebirth. Sound and video samples. Proposal for a book. Body movements. Thoughts on architecture. Notes from explorations of noise and the Anthropocene. Interviews. Futurists. Research on decisions by humans giving Mother Nature her voice.

The journey began when I picked up a copy of The Art of Noises by LUIGI RUSSOLO from the Los Angeles Art Book Fair, intending to connect my musical interests of experimental, industrial, and noise music. With bands like The Art of Noise, Einsterzendenuebatan, and groups that I had played that were considered noise and experimental as significant influences. I was studying dadaist and surrealist movements at the time, so I was also connecting with some ideas of futurists. My research went into a rest period as I began my studies at UC Berkeley in Theatre and Performance Studies.

Simultaneously I then burst at the recognition of all sounds and decided to split noise from sound and to write a play. I had long referenced the noise of humanity's progress as its form of destruction, often pondering if birds could hear one another's mating calls.

"In antiquity, life was nothing but silence. Noise was really not born before the 19th century, with the advent of machinery. Today noise reigns supreme over human sensibility. For several centuries, life went on silently, or mutedly. The loudest noises were neither intense, nor prolonged nor varied. In fact, nature is normally silent, except for storms, hurricanes, avalanches, cascades and some exceptional telluric movements." -LUIGI RUSSOLO The Art of Noises

I was attending a course designed to link similarities between Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manly Hopkins. The class was experimental in its design holding only eight students lead by Professor Claire Marie Stanchek.

In walked the Bobolink, a reoccurring bird song referred to often in Dickenson's poems.

The Bobolink is gone -- by Emily Dickinson

The Bobolink is gone --

The Rowdy of the Meadow --

And no one swaggers now but me --

The Presbyterian Birds

Can now resume the Meeting

He boldly interrupted that overflowing Day

When supplicating mercy

In a portentous way

He swung upon the Decalogue

And shouted let us pray --

I began to contemplate the sounds that existed in her backyard in Amherst, Massachusettes while she wrote her poems and observed her time alone, which is all too poignant as I write this in COVID quarantine. While I wrote responses to her poetry and of Gerard Manly Hopkins, I thought deeply of how the Bobolink was effecting her writing. I had been in Amherst before, and I then thought I wanted to return to record the sounds now and attempt to recreate how her yard would have sounded then. I went back and reread the Art of Noises and returned to discuss the possibilities with my professor. She returned to class the next week with sounds of the bobolink singing, and the next few hours were for us to write the words to what we heard within that song and write the scansion. We then regrouped and worked together to perform our poems of what we thought the bird was singing to us. I felt alive with magic because when I was a child, I would write poetry or songs to what I thought the birds were singing.

Simultaneously I then burst at the recognition of all sounds and decided to split noise from sound and to write a play. I had long referenced the noise of humanity's progress as its form of destruction, often pondering if birds could hear one another's mating calls.

The importance of inserting performance as part of the research for my work is to bring out an embodied visceral response to the cast and the audience. There is no way to predict who the audience will be and how the messages will be understood as perceptions are as varied as the humans experiencing them. It is a piece of radical theatre as it is an immersive installation, however as the tides shift in the wake of gatherings during pandemics, it may have to grow into new spaces for audience experience.

Why chickens? There are many songs and dances performed worldwide about chickens and chicken as food is one culturally binding ingredient world wide. Chickens are also a victim of mass consumption, the free market, capitalism, and ecological influences—images of chickens as symbols of bigotry, prejudice, toxic masculinity, and fertility exist worldwide. The male players in the script make racist references in their dialog, participate in ritualistic chicken dances, and consume mass quantities of fried chicken, all while singing familiar chicken themes songs that have roots in racism. The references to the chickens complicate an everyday food, bird, rituals, and songs to symbolize the cultural acceptance of animal torture, bigotry, and toxic masculinity. Their sounds and consumption are part of the ooze that creeps into the natural world of the play, and no longer is sound or music but noises that come with destruction and uncontrolled consumption.

As an online Live Event for the 50th International Earth Day, BIOTOPIA's founding director Michael John Gorman spoke with soundscape ecologist Bernie Krause about his fascinating work. During the current Covid-19 lockdown, our cities have become eerily silent, allowing us to reconnect with the sounds of nature. After working with big name music acts such as The Doors, the Weavers, George Harrison and other music legends as a pioneer with the Moog synthesizer, legendary sound artist and bioacoustician Bernie Krause switched his attention to the sounds of nature. To date he has recorded over 15,000 species on over 5,000 hours of tape, culminating in his Great Animal Orchestra. Michael John Gorman, director of the new BIOTOPIA museum in development in Munich interviewed Bernie Krause about the importance of experiencing biodiversity through the ears, and how tuning into the dawn chorus can alert us to the consequences of climate change, urbanization and deforestation.

Democracy ceased to exist when the Anthropocene was recognized and possibly before that. The idea of democracy can be existing without the resources left on the planet for nonhuman and human species to live healthily with dignity, and sovereignty is insanity. Capitalism, Freetrade, and Neoliberalism are the masters of our world. Most forms of democracy completely ignore everything nonhuman. Only a worldwide revolution and a complete recentering of all aspects political, decentering humans as the center of all decisions and creating inclusion of everything nonhuman can we then look to build any democracy.

Democracy indicates that there is a voice, whether written or spoken, there is a voice and more than one voice. If there is a voice, there is sound, and sounds of voices come together to make decisions to make plans and changes. The democratic process is human, made of human voices. The voices come and go with different needs throughout time. When democracy becomes capitalism, voices change. The earth and all of its contents alive or otherwise become a resource to humans. Demand on the earth and her contents became a necessity to live. Human life supersedes the life of the past present and future. Individuals who see the depletion of the earth speak up to demand conservation. Some of those voices are heard, and those voices that make those changes are participating in democracy. The laws and votes to conserve the earth and her contents are always at risk of disappearing overnight, benefitting the capitalist empire. The sounds that come with the depletion of the earth, her residents, and resources are noised those noises take up space. Resources of near silence for contemplation for nature, birds, and all other creatures to speak are disappeared. The constant hammering of the jackhammer fades into the background in the name of growth, survival, progress, profit, as a necessary piece of human existence. Extract the auditory and consider the vision. What place is visual noise? What is lost for the sake of pure nature with the continued expansion of visual noise? The endless construction of buildings, the sawing off the tops of mountains, drilling down into endless drains in the plains, trees brought from high above to land at a human knee. Consider noise. Are the radio waves, WiFi, and electrics noise? Ableism. There is a normalization of nature within the laws the democracy has set forth, ecological politics. [english language] [amnesia of what nature is] [who is speaking]