Photographer
2021
Down toward the Patapsco River, a field ringed by a strip of unmowed meadow grasses and a mix of mature oak and hardwoods hosts massive choruses of uncountable thousands of 17 year Magicicadas. The location is just remote enough that it lacks a din of car traffic and air traffic is blessedly sparse. A nearby railway can occasionally be heard at a distance.
In these recordings I attempted to capture a mix of the overwhelming, pulsing, evolving drones of the chorus with some more close range calls. While I hope that these recordings bring an impression of the sublime, it is impossible to replicate the heat of the midday sun burning the skin, the smell of the thousands of shells at the foot of trees, or the expansive spacial layers of the chorus unfolding as you move through them.
The session itself, a week delayed, proved serendipitous bringing together a handful of artists to the to same field on the same day in what felt a lot like an unplanned intervention. We filmed, recorded, performed, listened and communed with a species with little perception of anything outside of its own rapture.
credits
Hosted by Steven Bradley
May 26th – 27th 2021
Released May 29, 2021
RELEASE
An editioned collection of artifacts was minted on Objkt. Each artifact combines a still photograph with the audio track, formatted as an mp4 file.
Uneditioned high resolution audio may be purchased from Bandcamp or streamed from Soundcloud.