COMPOST X



By Thomas Catlaw & Evamaria Müller



[Note for readers and listeners]


This text holds many layers.

You can:

    - Read it from top to bottom for a linear experience,
    - Pick your own path and explore layers in any order, or
    - Focus on a single layer that interests you most, or
    - Invent a new approach

Words layered from our email correspondence appear in italics. Words from voices other than ours are layered to the right-hand side of your screen.





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We’ll figure our process out as we go along.



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As Donna Haraway might put it, we’re in trouble. We’re all in trouble.

In her beautiful Staying with the Trouble, she asks us not to turn away from all this trouble but to stay with it, to stay present

not as a vanishing pivot between awful or edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinishing configurations of places, times, matters, meanings.p2 

Where these times cut, kill, and disappear, we need to make “oddkin” … unexpected collaborations and combinations, in hot compost piles.p4
In staying with the trouble, we become “Children of the Compost” who
write stories and live lives for flourishing and for abundance, especially in the teeth of rampaging destruction and impoverization.p136

Here is one minor story.

One small compost heap (of trouble).


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We met at a field recording seminar in the French Pyrenees in the summer of 2024 and soon began an artistic dialogue via sound over distance. We became “audio pen pals.”

During the next two years, we exchanged emails, stories, and audio files between Arizona and Vienna – between heat waves and floods, grief and joy, health and sickness – adding layer upon layer to emerging soundscapes.

In the beginning, Evamaria wrote that it might be interesting to make a piece … in form of a dialogue, passing a soundscape back and forth and adding layer after layer. Before too long, a practice of creating audio works as well as corresponding emerged.

Each layer arrived accompanied by thoughts, reflections, and memories linked to the sounds of our changing environments, our feelings about the most-recent layer, and comment on dynamics of the new composition.

The reed sounds are fantastic! I used to play in the reeds as a kid all the time and came home with lots of ticks and bugs in my hair. To me the soundpiece feels more and more like a giant organic creature that moves, I like that you get the feeling of movement from it.

Evamaria called our first layer “Sediment” because [she was] thinking of particles, erosion and movement. This idea of sediments and sedimentation – of layers piling on top of one another, of breaking down and moving – proved to be prescient.

As we neared the end of the first composition, Thomas shared a layer that was a recording of the opening and closing of a large trash bin. Opening and closing it, it sounded to him like a breathing critter. This spurred Evamaria’s imagination, evoking thoughts of an anthropocene compost heap turning and mixing, something being created and something being digested.

Sometime before that … Thomas listened to a layer and it made him want to add another creature to our world. … When I recorded it I remember thinking, this sounds like some otherworldly sea creature. The piece makes me think of the Southern Reach book series by the author Jeff Vandermeer . .  It’s about a stretch of coastline … exposed to something or someone … and it creates this new space in which biology and organisms all seem to work and interact in different, usual ways.
A few minutes later the moaning started. For a moment I thought it was in my head. Then I stopped abruptly, stood there listening. Whatever we heard every night at dusk was at it again, and in my eagerness to leave the lighthouse I had forgotten it lived in the reeds.

Jeff Vandermeer, Annihilationp139

Crossing an invisible boundary, where common sense, identity, biology, memory, and convention are mixing, churning, digesting, and creating something new.

The first composition became Compost X.

We call the current four-part work as a whole Compost X and each of the four pieces within it we call compost piles. There is also a + one: A pile of voices and email-text.


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We wondered whether we would continue collaborating.

Curious if, with Compost X nearing its completion, if you had interest or time in continuing [to] find ways to collaborate … This is just me saying that I like your ideas, ears, and energy and that it would be fun to find ways to stay in contact.

It was a vulnerable moment.

Definitely let’s go for working on another track and develop our composting method and theory.

As we prepared the first pile to share for a radio broadcast/podcast, we came to appreciate, too, that while we were excited about the composition we had made together, how we were making and creating together was worthy of our attention as well.

This process of compos(t)ing now seemed interesting in different ways.

As we began composting, recordings we once didn’t think were “very good” or “useful” were listened-to with new ears and given appreciation because of the new context in which we heard them and could now share them.

I did a little bit of recording up [in the Canadian Rockies] but can’t say I got anything especially interesting. But who knows – maybe they will soon sound interesting :  )

It was not just a recovery of sounds but also a recovery of the time, place, and experience at which we made the recording.

The new bird sounds are so great and in combination with what you wrote about isolating sounds reminded me of a situation that I had almost forgotten about. When I was working in northern Germany two years ago, we were in the countryside for a film shoot because it was said that there is always a lot of fog there. And I was recording at dusk in a completely fogged field that was full of wild geese, with farm machinery rumbling in the distance, ravens cawing and dogs barking. It was so loud and so threatening because I couldn't see anything.

Our composting also made us aware of how the events in our lives informed how our ears heard the next layer and gently guided us to what we might contribute next. It made us conscious of how we brought our current selves to the moment of creating with the other.

Each new layer triggered something in us that was decisive for the further composition. In this sense, it really is a dialogue, a conversation based on compositional elements that are based on our experience of the environment. … this process requires openness, responding to the other in the form of a transformation. This reaction to something, the processing and mirroring could maybe also be seen as a sonic transfer of the composting process. It becomes the basis for something new.

A process that is not merely mechanical. It is generative and re(-)active.

Generative in that each layer provoked something in each of us as we encountered and reflected on the new layer we had received and how it had re-made or re-shaped the composition. Reactive in a chemical sense: Each layer was a new element or compound that could produce unexpected and novel new sounds and imaginings.

I know exactly what you mean – that moment of re-discovering a sound we’d mentally discarded, only to have it come alive again through a new context or unexpected juxtaposition.




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We do not “mix” layers. They are not like tracks in a different kind of compositional practice. Instead, each layer arrives already reacted-with or in-relationship with the earlier piece. The new layer generates a new manifestation of the emerging pile. Imagine how you might work eggs or flour into a cake that has been baked. But maybe you don’t have flour or eggs.

We cannot pull out sticks, leaves, or banana peels from these piles. Rather we work with and appreciate whatever one has given to the other. We remain open to the process of receiving each layer and to working with the other’s reactions.

It’s such a generous way of working, and I’m grateful we’ve created this practice together. You’re right: the layers we send each other allow for something to shift – not just in the recordings, but also in how we hear, perceive, and value them.

This gives each manifestation of a pile an invariably emergent, surprising, sometimes shocking, quality. Because there is no set vision or plan for the whole, each new layer may suddenly change the feel, mood, or atmosphere.

I really began to listen closely to the layer you sent, the olive tree in the wind. I absolutely love this. It’s like the ominous rumbling of a mountain rock slide or avalanche. When I connected the sound to this, my whole interpretation of the piece shifted.

In doing this, we give up control over what the bigger piece will sound or feel like.

[S]etting a certain goal in this sense cannot be placed above the process itself, at the beginning of our soundscape there was a theme, but that turned out to be only the theme of the first layer, which in turn set another theme in motion. … We are thinking less about designing or vision-ing a pre-formulated soundscape or order, but about offering or “gifting” a sonic layer to a “compost pile,” one informed by our encounter with the emergent soundscape and our personal histories, current contexts, subject positions in/from which we find ourselves listening and offering.

The process is “decomposing” in that the compositional elements from each layer inevitably “break[s] down”, dis-orients, or transforms as the other (you/me) listens to and engages with the new raw materials now in the pile. Sounds we have generated previously enter into new juxtapositions among entities, frequencies, times, and registers; and/or they are transformed by us in ways that help to make sense of our understanding of the soundscape. How much and what flavor of “decomposing” occurs is an open question, depending on the context , or environmental horizon, of each layer. Yet in this breaking-down, there is a re-making, a “recomposition,” as elements are listened to, transformed and enter into new relationships and are heard and interpreted by the other in new, unanticipated ways.



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This practice of composting is an artistic practice and also an ethical one. It is one that seems right for our global troubles. Ethics concerns how we are in the world: practices of relating to ourselves and to others. It concerns the form or way of one’s life and being in the world.

As we have experienced it from our singular, molecular subjectivities, composting centers on closely listening to and truthfully engaging with what another has given to you, what has left the other’s hands and comes to you.

Listening breaks apart the shell of the subject, eases the borders of identity, and initiates an interdependence whereby one is constituted by the whole environmental horizon. To listen attentively then is to become a part of things and to lessen the human agency of will, for the subtle sounds, the far and the near, the voices of persons and insects alike, the shifting wind. Thus, listening predisposes one to be attentive to the greater context, as a lateral becoming, rather than through linear determinations of one’s own will.

Brandon LaBelle, Background Noisep243

When we attend to building and feeding our compost piles, we are, at once, passive and (re)active, constrained and empowered. We listen and ask, “What does this pile ask of me at this moment?” The pile cannot reply in everyday human ways to this question and we must do humble interpretive, curatorial, and emotional work to hear a response. We know, too, that our sedimentations and layers will be generative and reactive. We will produce effects.

And, really, we do not know fully what the other will hear even when we know what the other will hear.

So I put the recorder inside the log. In thinking about this layer, I wondered what the log might hear as the water moved through and around. What would it sound or feel like to the log, further, as the water rotted and decomposed it, returning the log, bit by bit, to the creek?


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“Is this practice of composting more than metaphor? Ok, sounds are ‘found’ and physical media breakdown. But in what way are they really doing the work of composting digital sound files?”  

In considering these questions, we reflect back to our first layer and the word sediment.

The meaning of any sound – whether object, event, or material – is inseparable from its historical moment, site of production, or reception … [S]ounds need to be recognized as sedimentation of historical and social forces.

Brian Kane, “The Fluctuating Sound Object” in Sound Objectsp68
Our process of composting fosters a reflexive sensitivity to and curiosity about how the sounds we listen to and work with have come to be and how they join-up with other sounds and environments. This attuning to the sedimentation of forces in sonic artifacts deepens the process and possibilities of composting.

As we’ve explored here, engaging with our sound archives turns our attention to the times, places, and contexts at which the recordings were created. These are personal accounts but often explicitly attached to broader historical, theoretical, and social trajectories.

Someone a long time ago thought it would be a good idea to plant giant reeds along the river about 100 miles upstream – for erosion prevention or furniture manufacturing, depending on the story. Today the reeds have taken over and often make an impenetrable barrier to accessing the water. But sometimes they sound nice :  )

Our compos(t)ional process makes us aware of the complex effects and affects generated by sedimenting and layering sound upon sound, recording upon recording. Relatedly, the selection of new layers trains attention on the thoughts, feelings, and affects evoked by the prior layer and how that informs the selection and interpretation of new sounds.

We are enlivened in our bodies as the past, present, and future are reknitted.

With this wave organ recording – and many others since we began these projects – I have re-discovered recordings and sounds that I didn’t think had much use or maybe did not excite me as “good recordings." In my mind, I had thrown them away or forgotten about them. But when those recordings are “thrown” into the compost pile in our compositions and re-purposed and re-connected to new sounds, the recordings have another life. This happens when they encounter the unexpected surprise that comes with each layer you send to me. It is like that moment makes it possible for my own mind to decompose some of the associations and expectations I had for that recording which lets me re-imagine or see in a new way what could be possible for them.

Good compost requires aerobic decomposition of organic matter. Very basically, you assemble a pile of materials–some woody or dry plant materials … and some green plant materials … and a small amount of nitrogen-rich manure or legumes or nuts and build it into a pile of about 3 feet. Microorganisms live on the plant material and manure as well as soil, and they begin to eat the simple carbons in these piles and poop out slightly more complex carbon chains and reproduce. … Good compost can work wonders.

Kristin Ohlson, The Soil Will Save Usp206-207

In this way, this process of compos(t)ing is more than metaphor. As we engage with the emergent, growing compost pile, our own attachments to familiar sounds, experiences, and recordings seem also to de-compose. We become more open, then, in our explorations, listening-with, and to the possibilities for creating.




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Composting also encourages extending the process to the artifacts created through those interactions. So, we have chosen to reuse the texts we generated over the last two years for this essay. This has stimulated (new and old) feelings as it had in re-engaging with our sound archives: We have remembered, reconsidered, reworked, and re-engaged thoughts, feelings, and ideas from the recent past. This, in turn, has both stimulated the composing of this essay but also spurred new curiosity about lateral and horizontal sedimentation as we continue to explore some of the films, books, and ideas from other references and associations, some of which we have traced here.

Things generated in the process of listening and creating – artifacts we perhaps could discard – can themselves be recovered and reimagined.

The other day my analogue camera took some photos without me knowing, as I found out when I was developing them. I've layered a few of them, what do you think?

I truly and deeply enjoy listening (really, experiencing) to the pieces and working on this text kind of allowed me to recover parts of myself that I haven’t used very much since I left the university, but got to explore them here in newer, freer ways. So unexpectedly, there was some composting there as well.

We extended this work in + one, a compost pile that uses the texts we generated in our correspondence as materials for a new composition. For us, + one is interesting, too, since, off and on during our correspondence, we wondered about adding human voices to the compost piles.

Still haven’t found a good start for Nr. 3, I was thinking of a recording with human voices – would you be against something like that?

Thomas sometimes would say how he didn’t especially like the sound of his own voice.

Ultimately, human voices were not layered directly into these four compost piles. However, in repurposing our email texts, we discovered a way to explore our own voices in this + one “vox-compos(t)ion.”


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While personal updates in our back and forth email dialogue were initially just a side note – a brief update on daily life – they became more detailed over time as we reflexively share our listening- and creating-positionalities. These conversations include movies we’ve just watched; books we’re currently reading; descriptions of exhibitions we’ve visited; observations about the local weather and its changes over the years; discussions about the political situation in each country; descriptions of our surrounding environments; conversations about our personal lives; physical, emotional, and family circumstances; and the passing of our beloved pets. Essentially, the process of composting was accompanied by another process in which two people got to know each other more and more, layer by layer.

All these life circumstances and sensibilities are reflected in the layers. They influenced our selection of the respective sounds, drove the composting process forward, and deepened the composition. They appear again and in new ways here in this text.

In that regard Compost X can be read and listened-to as a dialogue, a dialogue in sound, a dialogue of circumstance, care, friendship, and curiosity.


I conceptualised The Sound of Temperature Rising while pregnant with my first child, during a stretch when I felt hot all the time and couldn`t sleep very well. This was also during the rise of Donald Trump and the heated political atmosphere he brought with him. Persistent droughts, floods and storms were marking the effects of climate change and a warming world.

Christine Sun Kim, “The Sound of Temperature Rising” in Bodies of Sound–Becoming a Feminist Earp78


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Compost X – A composition comprised of four (+ one) soundscapes of this unsettled, liminal moment in the Earth’s history.

Composting – A multi-species collaborative hope that as natural, social, economic, and political systems break down these materials may be the nutrients and raw material for a different, better future.

Compost piles – Sounds are de-composed, become-other, and move into different registers, relations, and imagined geographies.

Ears to the heap, we listen for an emerging, living world.

I began to record underwater, or even inside ants’ nests, in compost or in mud, sand and ice … I am already thinking in terms of layers, even when I am out to sea, layers that might be incorporated in a compositional structure.

Jana Winderen in In the Field: The Art of Field Recording p149, 154


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Morning!

Hope things are ok in your world.

-Evamaria and Thomas




Thomas Catlaw is a sound artist and field recordist based in Arizona’s Sonoran Desert. His practice centers on transforming, layering, and (re)assembling field recordings into soundscapes that traverse the border between documentation and fabrication.
thomascatlaw.com
@lazy.bird.says

Evamaria Müller is a sound artist based in Vienna. Her soundscapes continuously explore new compositional approaches to examine the complex composition of (and our relationship to) our environment through field recording and sound experiments.
www.evamariamueller.net
@gmorrk

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Homepage image credits: Exhibition Texts: Sarah Callesen - exhibition poster

SoundBleed is an online journal of critical writing around sound in NZ/Aotearoa – a forum for discussion around sound-related activity and practice.

HOME

LINKS



SoundBleed is an online journal of critical writing around sound in NZ/Aotearoa – a forum for discussion around sound-related activity and practice.

Homepage image Credits: Exhibition Texts:
Sarah Callesen - exhibition poster