The Bog of Sound
Fishing for sound with a modular synthesizer while preparing a performance for the Peat and Repeat bog book series.
Fishing for Sound in the Bog
What Am I Doing?
As I am practicing with my modular synth setup, I wonder: what exactly am I doing? This is not music in the classical sense, of having an aesthetic structure. I am not even sure it is music in the musique concrète sense of found sound, since it is sound that I am not finding in nature but generating in ways that are impossible to reproduce.
I am working on this performance now for the Peat and Repeat launch of the Bog book series, and in particular, the book Mole Mansion by Caterina Verde.
I said recently that I was fishing for sound.
The Bog
The bog is where life goes to decompose and sometimes be preserved in altered forms. With the generated sound, I feel like it is decomposing into its structural essence. Waveforms with certain shapes — the deconstructed shapes overlap and cycle over each other, preserving sounds, creating sounds, or transforming them.
Working this way feels like virtual archaeology: uncovering something hidden, examining it, reconstructing it, and imagining a life for it.
It also reminds me of foraging for herbs, particularly roots. Who knows how far down that sassafras root goes? To get it out, you need to connect with the plant, ask if it wants to come with you, and leave something behind for it — a song, or a prayer.
Generating Possibilities
In A Year with Swollen Appendices, Brian Eno writes:
“I tend to set up systems which generate possibilities and then I select from those possibilities.”
In the pieces I am working on now, I imagine walking in the bog — the bog of sound.
In general, it is murky, filled with decomposed sounds: sine waves and sawtooth waves. But every so often, I see something — a will-o’-the-wisp, the phosphorescent light in the bog coming from decaying organic matter.
The origin story of the jack-o’-lantern.
But it feels like something else is happening too. Not just selecting possibilities, but constructing small virtual worlds around them.
A sound appears. Then we build a house for it.
Fire and Transformation
Phosphorus represents the element of fire. If we harken back to the four-element world of Empedocles or the five-element world of Chinese medicine, I struggle to make a similar analogy to Vedic cosmology. Everything is agni, fire, in a sort of fractal, holographic universe kind of way.
In the body, phosphorus acts as a bridge between the nucleotides of DNA. The “acid” in DNA and RNA comes from the phosphoric acid in the phosphate groups. It is connected with the processes that give us energy.
All the elements transform in their own way, and give life in their own way, but electricity and these electric instruments feel like instruments of fire.
Fire flickers. It appears suddenly and then disappears.
Most of the time, the modular system produces murk — layers of sine and sawtooth waves drifting through one another. But occasionally something appears, like a will-o’-the-wisp rising out of the bog.
We build a structure around it, and that structure eventually sinks back into the bog, becoming material for the next emergence.
I love the bog for sound fishing. The phosphorus recalls reports that Israel is using white phosphorous in Lebanon.