π Biosphere Dreaming: Music for Biosphere 2
A new original score for the most ambitious ecology experiment ever.
β¨ Pre-Save on Spotify (due out May 8) or Stream/Download at Bandcamp
The original soundtrack to Mark Nelson's Biosphere 2 retrospective at the UC San Diego Qualcomm Institute Gallery, curated by Jacob Lillemose, this 46 minutes of music gathers six years of personal field recordings together with an ever-iterating array of hardware and software electronics and acoustic instruments to provide an immersive ambient-yet-dramatic backdrop to Mark's archival photos and texts recounting the adventure and discovery of living together with seven other "biospherians" inside of what might be history's most ambitious (intentional) ecology experiment.
Improvised in-studio over the course of weeks and then layered, mulched, and retextured, these tracks constitute seven different sonic environments just as the seven different biomes of Biosphere 2 were an effort to reproduce the planet Earth in miniature. Like Biosphere 2, and like our interactions with "Biosphere 1" itself, they are the record of a messy, expansive, and uncertain process that challenged conceptual and spatiotemporal horizons. I invite listeners to merge with these musical spaces as Mark Nelson and his colleagues learned to merge with the miniaturized bio/noo/technospheres within their enclosure βΒ to recognize, as they did, the co-imbrication and mutually-dependent arising of all things on Spaceship Earth...
πΆ Michael Garfield:
Acoustic Six-String Guitar, Electric Eight-String Guitar, Boss RC-505, Boss PS-5, Boss DD-200, Boss SL-20, Boss PW-3, Boss VE-5, Ebow, Kalimba, Voice, Beyerdynamic M88-TG, Scarlett FocusRite 4i4, iPad Software Synthesizers, KME K-Board-C, Zoom H2n, Pixel Watch, Macbook Pro, Ableton Live, Adobe Photoshop
Watch our panel discussion from the opening reception on April 27th:
For more information on the exhibition, visit the Qualcomm Institute Gallery website.
Photos Β© The Institute of Ecotechnics.
More about Mark Nelson here.
More about Jacob Lillemose here.
π§ For earlier discussions between me and Mark Nelson, dig Future Fossils 94 & 95.