Earthworks

Earthworks is a unique acousmatic piece, a 40-minute conceptual and musical love child of land art, environmental activism and music concrete in which the composer orchestrates the sonic outcome of the extraction, processing and use of common commercial materials of our contemporary built environment. It is an audio tapestry of drilling, fracking, stirring, slurring, scraping, cracking, popping and hammering, with the bright thread of one very intimate human voice woven through it.

This particular iteration of Earthworks, originally produced as a sound installation for the exhibit “Planetary Home Improvement: From Just-in-time to Geological Time”, is immersive in nature — both a recording and a full-body experience, primordial and post-industrial. Nathan Davis collected field recordings of the raw materials and created a multi-channel sound environment using the materials themselves as speakers, soundboards, and resonators.

As a percussionist Davis possesses a deep attunement to materials and their sonic characteristics. But there are non-material aspects embedded here as well. In this case the political context of the work: it is a response to the industrial plunder of the planet. The experience of listening to these materials speak, hearing their breath and pulses, move us closer to an understanding of this, and to a relationship of awareness and reciprocity with the Earth, whose body we tear apart in order to achieve shelter or convenience, and whose riches we violently transmute into material for use. Nathan Davis, Instrumental Samples & Composer Sylvia Milo, Voicings Katinka Kleijin, Cello (Tracks 2,3,6,7) Levy Lorenzo, Percussion (Tracks 2,3,7) Josh Modney, Violin (Tracks 2,3,7) Joshua Rubin, Clarinet (Tracks 2,3,7)