This Mystery Box has been mixed by Ariana Martinez. It’s composed from sounds recorded by: Jess Shane, Miyuki Jokiranta, Anouk Hannan, Mike Williams, Ayesha Barmania, Adair Sheppard and Isaac Arnquist. To hear these sounds in their entirety, click here.*** Constellations is a community of listeners, investigating the world through sound. The mix engineer is MM. The graphics are designed by JS. For more sounds from Constellations, visit out website: https://constellationssounds.org/

This episode of Constellations we speak with artist and writer jamilah malika abu-bakare about Aural Alterities, an online exhibition curated by abu-bakare. Aural Alterities is a collection of works by 8 sound artists, which suggest dimensions and possibilities for working in sound outside of formal or canonical of the medium. All of these artists are Black, Indigenous or POC Chilean. This episode is primarily an interview with abu-bakare, alongside excerpts from the exhibition. We strongly recommend you listen and take in these works in their online format here: auralalterities.com Aural Alterities works: - “sending a message to you” by Adee Roberson- “Speaking into Existence” by Aj McClennon- “Audible Rising” by Allah George- “L2BW2” by jamilah malika abu-bakare- “ALL OF ME” by Jessica Karuhanga- “FIGHT ME” by Kim Ninkuru- “only workers” by RUTMEAT- “Detenidxs Desparecidxs” by Soledad Fatima Muñoz Referenced reading:The Combahee River Collective StatementArt Papers, Interview: David HammonsUndrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Animals by Alexis Pauline Gumbs Further reading:Aural Alterities “On Listening” page: auralalterities.com/on-listening

Trick & treat. You know where we've been 😉 Constellations returns with some 🪄😈✨🧨 very soon.  

Lonely Artefacts is a podcast series about regional Australian museums by Sisters Akousmatica for Constellations. Lonely Artefact #2 takes you to the Waratah Museum in Waratah north west lutruwita-Tasmania. From Sisters Akousmatica: “I visited in 2010 and the museum experience stayed with me, as it was so obviously a labour of love and community service. In fact it was probably the original inspiration for this series.” Sisters Akousmatica pay respect to the Palawa people as the traditional and ongoing custodians of Lutruwita and to elders past, present and future, and acknowledge that sovereignty has never been ceded. https://www.constellationsaudio.com/sounds

Energy usage and sound are two omnipresent components of our daily life. We're constantly trying to weigh our own wants and complications against individual sacrifices and the perceived "difference" our actions can make. And of course, as with much of existence, many things can be true at once. Featuring: "i don't think its my place" by Sophia Steinert-Evoy "Forest to Desert" by Sarah Boothroyd https://www.constellationsaudio.com/sounds

Language is inextricably linked to land. In this episode, we explore how the shifts in the landscape have impacted language across generations and cultures. Featuring: “Translation (a prayer)” by John Isaiah Edward Hill “During the drought the road is dry” by Bartosz Panek John Isaiah Edward Hill is writing a poem to the generations passed and the generations to come in the Oneida language that’s been threatened by settler colonial violence. In their piece “Translation (a prayer)”, we hear two voices: the English voice which is static and unmoving, and the Oneida voice, which moves in a counter-clockwise motion, representative of traditional Haudenosaunee dance practices.  ~ In Poland, drought has wrecked havoc on the landscape. 2019 was the hottest year on record in Poland, and it’s affecting their entire way of life from water, the soil, food and energy prices. These shifts have meant a shift in the language used to describe water, heat and dryness. In Bartosz Panek’s piece “During the drought the road is dry” he explores how old words are being given a new context alongside the changing climate. Transcript for “During the drought the road is dry” is below. [8:49 - 9:00] During the drought the road is dry.   [9:10 - 9:15] During the drought the road is dry.   [9:20 - 9:25] During the drought the road is dry.   [9:34 - 9:34] Can you see the drought?   [9:34 - 9:54] So you know... in a place like this it will be seen there... Take a look there, where's upper: dryness has just been appeared. So it’s visible. If the whole area, the grass here, is burned by the sky, it’s obvious there’s the drought.     [10:03 - 10:33] Nope! It's not so bad now. In my backyard I have a garden with some vegetables and it was visible You just need to dig your finger into the soil and you know if it’s dry or humid. So when the vegetation started in May and June, there was a kind of crisis. But not now.   [11:50 - 11:59] Damn deckchair. The drought exhorted great havoc. Raspberry season is almost over… [14:20 - 14:39] Sasha is treading down a dry road,
He can hardly walk, that’s a forebode.
The heat is pouring out of the sky,
During the drought the road is dry. [24:09 - 24:17] Dry across, dry out, dry over, dry totally…

Ft. “American Ghosts” by Erica Huang and “Bob Hope No Hope” by Jenn Stanley. The act of recording has impacted how we perceive and understand time. Recording’s byproduct, whether by sound, video, photo etc, is an artifact of the past, a moment of space and time captured and archived. For this episode of Constellations, we asked two artists, Erica Huang and Jenn Stanley to reflect on how they consider time, its relationship with recorded artifacts and the significance of the archive. We asked them: How might our conception of what an ‘artifact’ is be sonically unraveled?  

Voicing was produced and composed by Mara Schwerdtfeger The piece is an interweaving abstract conversation exploring the concept of voice through a series of four sound elements. The deconstructable nature of the piece allows for multiple forms of expression to be heard both as individual voices and together as an active cohesion of sound. We encourage you to visit our website to play with these different voices – voice, viola, environments and sound objects – in your own time. We’ve got each of the separate voices listed there, so you can hear they interact, relate, and reflect back on each other within your own sonic environment. Play with them how you like. constellationsaudio.com/sounds

This episode of constellations we’re mapping ourselves, from the outside in. Relax your need to understand everything and listen to yourself, your body, loosen the need to analyze. Featuring: “Necropolis 2: Cruise Control” by Kamikaze Jones “A Sound Poem” by Axel Kacoutié and “Necropolis 3: Planet of the Gapes” by Kamikaze Jones. Axel writes: “We are wrong to look for uniformity and objectivity. We have all mapped associations to what our subjective experience is like. My experience of the colour red is different from yours. Our brains light up the same way when hearing water but our relationship to its sounds will never be the same. Because of this, I wanted to illustrate how I've mapped mine using abstract terms like solitude, sunbathing, patricide etc. All as an attempt to say, "you don't have to understand, I just want to connect and have you see (listen) how I relate to the world." — “Necropolis 2: Cruise Control” —> This piece is composed from Grindr chats, sex toy Yelp reviews, and hold music from gay phone-sex hotlines. It imagines a queer hauntological underworld mediated by the technologies of yesteryear. “Necropolis 3: Planet of the Gapes” —> This piece is a more meditative, cosmic manifestation of the Queer Necropolis, and is comprised entirely of acoustic instruments played with a vibrating butt plug. Kamikaze writes: “My original intention was to create an immersive sonic environment that was representative of the darker, more infernal channels of the collective queer subconscious. My work as a performance artist and extended technique vocalist over the past year has been focused on explorations of queer madness, and supernatural manifestations of queer erotic identity. My objective was to create a mythological sonic territory that addressed the sublimated ghosts and demons of our shared history. I quickly realized the boundaries of my own subjectivity in the compositional process and, embracing the queer art of failure, realized that the project would undergo a kind of conceptual mitosis, splitting into two separate but distinct companion pieces, each radical interpretations of what a “Queer Necropolis” could sound like. (for more, head to our website) constellationsaudio.com/sounds

What do eyes sound like? Does a spider’s abdomen sound furry or crunchy? How much sameness do I share with a cardinal? A mouse? Or the mold in the corners of my bathroom?... I should clean my bathroom? In BASIC INGREDIENTS we’re into objects - both seemingly inanimate and living - to reconsider our relationship to the spaces that surround us. Featuring: "Dust Meditation” by Clare Dolan "Fork, Knife, Lid" by Kim Hiorthøy “The Land Owns Us” by Nishant Singh

Do you ever feel like you’re not quite getting it? We live in a time of missed connections expressed through misunderstandings, dropped calls and glitches. In this episode of Constellations, sit with us in an attempt to express the inexpressible. Oh, and a duck sound or two. "Echoing Quack" by Natalie Kestecher and Mike Williams "poor connection" by Yardain Amron

I want to talk about how the accumulation of things — books or bottles or whatever - is overwhelming on different scales. Overwhelming to the environment, overwhelming to the individual home, or overwhelming to the body. I wanted to make something that was claustrophobic but also could be exhumed and heard in parts like picking through the ruins of an old factory building.

X Axis: The rationale of a body in pain -- Think about each layer existing at the same time and bleeding together. Each layer is like a different perspective to a single thing that is too massive to perceive all at once. -- Accumulation Over Time was written, produced, and edited by Adriene Lilly and features the voice of Tiana Tucker with additional help from Tiana Tucker, Olivia Bradley-Skill and Michelle Macklem. Readings from The Body in Pain by Elaine Scarry and Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World by Timothy Morton.

Y Axis: The hoarding habits of two manhattan heirs -- imagine these pieces as parts of a whole. -- Accumulation Over Time was written, produced, and edited by Adriene Lilly and features the voice of Tiana Tucker with additional help from Tiana Tucker, Olivia Bradley-Skill and Michelle Macklem. Readings from The Body in Pain by Elaine Scarry and Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World by Timothy Morton.

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“There's something to me something about hoarding or accumulating or the need to own things and purchase things and have things in your life. I understand it on a lot of levels and obviously I have stuff and I have more plants than a person should have. But there's something about that impulse. It's the opposite of the impulse I have, which is to shed everything and have nothing. So I say that because, that's like where the tension is for me, right? Because I want to understand … what is this accumulation? Like, why is why is this? How is this? What is this?” [Adriene Lilly] -- Accumulation Over Time was written, produced, and edited by Adriene Lilly and features the voice of Tiana Tucker with additional help from Tiana Tucker, Olivia Bradley-Skill and Michelle Macklem. Readings from The Body in Pain by Elaine Scarry and Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World by Timothy Morton. 

BROOD was composed by RUTMEAT. RUTMEAT writes: This work was created by singing with feedback, using effects pedals, playing cymbals with beadwork and some field recordings. April 30th is when I pulled "the sun, it sets on the empire" through my body by using my voice in this way. The words are from a work by Dzawada'enuxw artist, Marianne Nicholson, who has consented to me referencing her 2017 work, The Sun is Setting on the British Empire. I want to talk about the blockades that were in Vancouver this winter in support of Wet'suwet'en hereditary chiefs (law and governance system that is older than what is now known as Canada). I want to talk about ongoing colonial violence, genocide and hope. About Black and Indigenous communities showing up for each other and demanding more than performative allyship from yt and POC settlers. Talk about how resource extraction always brings ripples of violence. I want to talk about how a generation of Indigenous youth called to shut Canada down and then covid struck. I want to talk about labour that is expected of Indigenous femme presenting people to educate those around them. And I will, with my communities.  In the words of Ta'kaiya Blaney, "We are the land protecting itself." ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ This work was supported by constellations' 2019 Indigenous Sound Art Fundraiser.

For the first episode of Constellations’ 2020 season, we present FEEL THE SKY, a duo of sound works in conversation composed by JAYE KRANZ (Australia) and MYRA AL-RAHIM (USA). Both extend from the same starting point – a recording from 1992 made by a news reporter unfamiliar with field recording, but entranced by a chance encounter with trumpeter swans on an icy lake. Originally recorded on cassette, Constellations digitized the material and commissioned Kranz and Al-Rahim to compose their own landscapes – both real and imagined – in response. Take an interior road trip in “Are We There Yet” (Kranz), a journey across interior ecologies and mountain peaks. Then venture into “The Burdened Land” (Al-Rahim), a sprawling whorl that considers borders from the perspective of migratory bodies that cannot be contained within them. Both works take inspiration from field recordings by HEATHER EVANS on the ancestral and traditional territories of the HAISLA NATION. From the mind of Myra Al-Rahim: When I began developing “The Burdened Land”, I knew I wanted to create an environmentally-conscious piece, though not in the traditional sense of the term. I wanted the work to have a distinct feeling of space and scale. I sought to explore the thematic interconnectedness between the migratory paths of birds and the sprawling supply chains of capital. Heather's original tape appears close to the beginning of my piece and continues throughout Act 1. I imagined she was taking a new journey through the sonic landscape I created for her to explore.

For the first episode of Constellations’ 2020 season, we present FEEL THE SKY, a duo of sound works in conversation composed by JAYE KRANZ (Australia) and MYRA AL-RAHIM (USA). Both extend from the same starting point – a recording from 1992 made by a news reporter unfamiliar with field recording, but entranced by a chance encounter with trumpeter swans on an icy lake. Originally recorded on cassette, Constellations digitized the material and commissioned Kranz and Al-Rahim to compose their own landscapes – both real and imagined – in response. Take an interior road trip in “Are We There Yet” (Kranz), a journey across interior ecologies and mountain peaks. Then venture into “The Burdened Land” (Al-Rahim), a sprawling whorl that considers borders from the perspective of migratory bodies that cannot be contained within them. Both works take inspiration from field recordings by HEATHER EVANS on the ancestral and traditional territories of the HAISLA NATION. From the mind of Jaye Kranz: “Are We There Yet?”  is a strange, recurring road-trip towards home. A home we can never really find or retrieve; while at the same time, being a home we have already found: the one that is already ours. Like a circular roadmap for finding our way there. We hear the same driving tape over and over, but we move through different landscapes, across vast spans of time and place, in a dreamscape where the laws of separation and structure, boundary and contour, do not apply.