Fragments from an ongoing conversation between musician/theorist Dr. Kwasu Tembo (DKT) and artist/researcher Nolan Oswald Dennis (NOD). Redacted notes toward a set of liner notes.

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aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa "we have now reached broadcast depth" aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa through signaling/signsending/semiomancy. To broadcast, to hack (into/out of), to listen-is-to-be (remember/react/remix). aaaaaaaaaaa with landsongs aaaaaaaaa

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transliterate/translate/transmute the data INTO something, a style, a sound, a time. You have to liberate with limitations aaaaaaaaaa This is inherently violent and makes me always ask, could the song be louder? Could the contours of the land be sounded aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

aaaa 🤯

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa this data artefact - the seismic/infrasonic recording - what else can it be? what else does it want to be? What other beings are already latent in it aaaaaaaaaaa what do we need to do to open ourselves and it to these potential beings/becomings. aa the seismic record is already a becoming of the planet - in some way it’s the land speaking out, violently, through the machine. aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa sounding and the kind of seismic survey technique that’s used to map underground resources - the violence of that - and listening to the already sounding of the planet becoming - the tectonic and volcanic violence of forces we call land. aaaaa amplification and transposition aaaaaaaaaa the contours sounded 🤍

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa Sonics and music offer such a robust lexicon to theorize with. Even riffing, standard, ghost note, glissande, ricochet, sidechain, bitcrush.

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa a materiality/ontology of the artefact stripped of arte. Can an artefact speak is maybe the question Spivak SHOULD have asked? Is listening ‘speaking for’ in some way or other? But this is why music, of the big three (math, alphabetic language, and music) is the most magical notational system we have aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa, what does the signal, the waveform, want to be? Think of Mission to Mars, when the Face gives off that signal. Don Cheadle, in another one of my fave lines, calls it what it is: "it's a signature" (sound as DNA, sequence, sequence of sounds as song, signature as index of time etc, so so much)

There is most definitely an 'art of listening'. Alchemist breaks it down so well. He says the hardest thing to do as a beat maker is to step away and feel/recognize/anticipate when its "finished". aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa as Bela puts it, "know when its finished-enough". aaaaaaaaaaaa And yet-...

aaaaaaaaaaaa the seismic is the planet speaking through the machine. Not mechageist, in the Harawayean formulation, but rather Gaiageist. The oldest song. Older than a heartbeat.

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa Sounding,
fathoming, the determination of depth is always-even in the Craft-latently concerned with a type of penetrative empiricism. To know is to kill. To generate a signal strong enough you need a large enough explosion. aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa rhetoric of domination and freedom that, like two waves, cancel each others' noise. Maybe this is a residue of something latently capitalist about the idea of waves, maybe ringing in the terminology: wave FUNCTION. I'm no mathematician, but my instincts brindle.

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa highpass (maybe we could define as signals that register in the frequencies of certain spaces, listenership cultures, high art, low frequency), lowpass (bass heavy, nihilistic, hedonist, sexual), frequency, pitchbend, gating. aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

Sub in signal for portal and interesting things emerge. Like a clean signal. You also thing of Basinski's disintegration loops and then ask: What are seismic signals if not-not disintegration loops as the planet will outlive the cacophony of the anthropocene-but process loops? Processing, writing-to-disk, cyclicality as the essence of comprehensibility, as the foundation of music, the eternal return of the same-but-different, a jazz standard in which new and new-only-once things emerge in and through the standard, through repetition. Rhythm-as-repetition. The seismic song of planets as but one part, a top note, of the symphony aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

All the -cenes as scenes and scores, the Anthropocene as a bad track on a long album. I'll stop here, hahaha aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa, whose to say we will even 'understand' what we are 'hearing'?

Yes! a topology of notes, a topographic score? Thinking of these seismic waveforms as drawings as real-time notation - or something like a score that emerges simultaneous to the music, not before or after but somehow equi-vocal? aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

https://www.iris.edu/app/station_monitor/#Today/
GT-BOSA/webicorder/

aaaa we should just follow the waveform, aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa We’ll unfold it later. aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

aaaaaaa seismiphorms as real-time notation, emergent notation, equi-vocal etching (in the sense of a palimpsest, afterall mountains rise and fall). aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

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aaaaaaaaaa the Boshof verticals look like thick DNA sequences but also ultrasound data aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

Resources: open access sensor data streams

1. https://www.earthsound.earth/index.html

2. https://www.iris.edu/app/station_monitor/#Today//map/

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Soundings is presented in collaboration with Delfina Foundation.

Delfina Foundation is London’s largest international residency programme and a home where the next generation of contemporary artists, curators and thinkers are supported and nurtured. Based in two renovated Edwardian houses near Buckingham Palace, Delfina Foundation is an independent, non-profit organisation dedicated to fostering artistic talent and facilitating exchange through residencies and public programmes, ranging from workshops to exhibitions, both in the UK and with international partners.

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Kwasu David Tembo is a PhD graduate from the University of Edinburgh’s Language, Literatures, and Cultures department. He currently lectures at Ashesi University in Accra, Ghana, in the area of written and oral communication. His research interests include – but are not limited to – comics studies, literary theory and criticism, philosophy, particularly the so-called “prophets of extremity” – Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida. Formerly operating under the moniker M.O.T.O, Slimeking represents artist Kwasu David Tembo's return to textural experimentations, kopftkino soniscapes, and the various sources and permutations of fascinating sound. Having released several projects independently as well as with labels like the Edinburgh based Paradise Palms Records (The Weirding Way EP) and Berlin based PRRRRRRR (Always-Already EP), Tembo's interests and production ethos orbit the relationship between sound and sense, time and feeling, the flash and form.