Creative Work

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Eagle Over Algae (2024) - 12 min.

Voice and immersive electronics.

View score here.

Eagle Over Algae is a spatialized, spoken-word-plus-synthesis meditation on ecological change and the overlapping layers of memory that accrue on a landscape. Its materials consist of a long poem I wrote, manipulated audio of me performing that poem, and recordings I made on a pair of old analog synthesizers, the ARP 2500 and Buchla 200.

The poem was inspired by the channeled scablands, a region of Eastern Washington near where I grew up. When you first encounter the scablands, you don’t see much. It’s a dry, hot steppe, with long stretches of bleached-out rock and dull sagebrush broken by irrigated fields of alfalfa and spearmint. The wind is unrelenting. As a kid I found this landscape impenetrable, a combination of hypnotically boring and hostile.

The barrenness of the scablands conceals, however, a time-hardened, complicated beauty that is like few other places in the continent. It is a beauty of entangled geological and human violence, operating at wildly diOerent timescales, shaping a place that we experience now only as a brief snapshot in an eon-spanning story. This is a place whose land erupted from the earth as magma, whose soil was scoured to the bedrock by a series of cataclysmic floods, whose rivers were rerouted by thousands of humans and millions of pounds of concrete, whose wind was irradiated by the production of nuclear weapons. And yet, despite this ferocious change, there are pockets of ever-evolving, patient life hiding in plain sight: goopy alkaline lakes, scummy microbial life, tiny populations of fish, hawks and eagles overhead.

Eagle Over Algae approaches these contradictions with a text that, like the palimpsestic landscape of the channeled scablands, layers impressions one on top of the other without too much concern for sense-making. Rather, a fragmented narrative emerges through a process of repetition and accretion. Framing this language is a soundscape that points in two directions at once, evoking natural phenomena like wind and resonance but also suggesting an aura of synthetic, quasi-scientific intervention. Formally, incessant local variation of the text is buoyed by slowly developing changes in the harmony and intensity of the soundscape.

What transpires, I hope, is a kind of aestheticized sonic environment that mirrors the feeling of being in the channeled scablands—or any place, really—and tuning in to the many stories of change murmuring in the air.