Research

Artist and filmmaker, Shezad Dawood speaks with social and geopolitical anthropologist Mark Nuttall, who’s work is embedded in circumpolar rural communities, tracing the entanglements between climate change, extractive industries and identity of place. They discuss the accumulated residues, ecological cosmologies and shifting futures that have emerged from the deepest corners of the oceans, the icy subsurface and geological entanglements of Greenland’s complex landscapes and the lives they hold. Creation myths, told by Greenlandic storyteller Maria Kreutzmann, bubble up from the dark depths of the ocean and rub up against dramatic changes in the landscape throughout the past century.

The PROBES AUXILIARIES dig deeper into the main programme topic but are also programmed for your ecstatic listening pleasure; so examples here are edited and sequenced and cut together on the wheels of steal; there’s no talking either (at least not by me), so you need to download the playlist to get the details, backstory and relevance of each of the pieces featured. In this new episode, Hammonds talk, sing, swing, soar, strut and contemplate the universe, and Jerry Goldsmith takes the Novachord out into space and down to the bottom of the sea.

In PROBES #35 Chris Cutler examines the quiet electronic revolution ushered in by the Hammond organ and excavate traces of the visionary but short-lived Novachord - a polyphonic synthesiser born a quarter-century ahead of its time, which briefly flared - and then disappeared.  

Undead Matter is an unfolding conversation about where life lies in the ever-turning matter of our universe, as it rhythmically resurfaces over millennia. In this new episode, artist, Oreet Ashery speaks with paleontologist Tori Herridge about discoveries in the permafrost, genetic legacies, cloning from the deep past, fertility and the unborn.

In this episode, artist Bo Choy speaks with Sayana Namsaraeva, an anthropologist from Buryatia, south-eastern Siberia, exploring the traditional traditions and stories that have emerged from the landscapes surrounding Lake Baikal, the deepest and oldest freshwater lake on the planet, and how these influence worldviews and possibilities for the future.

The PROBES AUXILIARIES dig deeper into the main programme topic but are also programmed for your ecstatic listening pleasure; so examples here are edited and sequenced and cut together on the wheels of steal; there’s no talking either (at least not by me), so you need to download the playlist to get the details, backstory and relevance of each of the pieces featured. In this new episode, Chris Cutler explores otherworldly cruises through the many and wildly various applications of Maurice Martenot’s glorious instrument, with a side bar on the Trautonium.

In this new instalment of Undead Matter, Cultural theorist, Astrida Neimanis speaks with permafrost hydrologist, Nikita Tananaev, discussing the cultural, philosophical and ecological implications of permafrost degradation as it disrupts ancient ecosystems suspended in the ice.

In PROBES #34 a sequence of new, purely electronic, instruments appear – amongst them (the) electrophon, kurbelspharophon, ondes Martenot, dynophone, croix sonore, pianorad, trautonium and mixtur trautonium – none having any obvious place in the existing vocabulary of musics. In parallel an alien aesthetic begins to redefine the parameters of ‘musical’ sound.

Undead Matter, a new series by Sophie J Williamson, is an unfolding conversation about where life lies in the ever-turning matter of our universe, as it rhythmically resurfaces over millennia. In this third episode, writer, Daisy Hildyard speaks with marine microbiologist, Karen Lloyd about 100-million-year-old microbes, that breathe and excrete minerals: bridging the organic and the non-organic, the living and the non-living. 

Undead Matter, a new series by Sophie J Williamson, is an unfolding conversation about where life lies in the ever-turning matter of our universe, as it rhythmically resurfaces over millennia. In this second episode, poet Myung Mi Kim speaks with geographer, Kathryn Yusoff about the lives and histories demarcated in the silence between words and amongst rock strata.