There is no utopia without nature. Life is already a utopia–Mileece Petre

When I heard sound artist and environmental researcher Mileece refer to utopia as she presented on her bio-sound work  this past year for MOMA’s PSA1 series “Speculations: The Future Is ____” I was startled and intrigued. When I asked Mileece to delve further into her conception, Mileece explained how when faced with an environment lacking flora–such as on a recent trip to India where she spent a lot of time in a cityscape heavy with apartment blocks–she noticed that finally coming upon a garden outside a temple or other flush area felt like utopia. “I’m referring to an ecological utopian society, not a fictional one.” Mileece told me, “But either way, what we imagine as a perfect society always comes with fruit. Nature makes man right in the head. Without it, things get really rough. With it too of course, but you can see what…

The third album from the enigmatic Strië (Iden Reinhart) is a lesson in abstraction: an impressionistic set inspired by abstract art, swaths of sound built upon whispers.  On this album, Reinhart travels farther down the path she set out upon in Sléptis and fine-tuned in Õhtul.  Signposts are still present: a series of beats here, an intense crackle there.  And yet, the artist known for her public shyness (despite orchestra tours, only a half-photo seems to exist) continues to disappear, dragging her instruments slowly into the void.  The beauty of the set is its chimeric nature; the songs shimmer and shift beneath the ear.  The danger is that Strië seems intent on becoming an abstraction herself: a smudged memory, an elusive impression, a series of images scattered in the sun.  We fear that one day the artist will fade like fog, molecules made invisible by the heat, leaving only a faint…

GRM Works, by France-based Argentinian composer Beatriz Ferreyra, is perhaps a key new entry in the wonderful Recollection GRM series by Editions Mego, which represents an important documentary move towards producing a new set of archival materials of one of the birthplaces of electronic music, the Groupe de Recherches Musicales as founded in 1958 by Pierre Schaeffer. The history traced by the collection is one of differing voices for the context under which we usually place the GRM in the development of electroacoustics, in the sense that it becomes a beacon for a modernism that is not fully dedicated to the machine. Its serialist, more formally avant-garde counterpart, best exemplified by composers like Milton Babbitt, Karlheinz Stockhausen and later Pierre Boulez, set out for the conquest of sound in a scientific approach intimately compatible with that geared towards the dominance of nature, a mechanical environment to be transcended…