EARTHWORKS

Earth rumblings emanate from a pile of gravel; an ensemble of panels of plywood, foam insulation, polycarbonate, acoustic tile, and galvanized steel, fitted with transducers, fills the space.

EARTHWORKS investigates our relationship with our natural and built environment, the geologic time cycle of building materials, climate change, and the waste-stream of construction.

Sounds of common materials used in construction — wood, stone, plastic, styrofoam, and metal — were recorded in situ in nature, during extraction, and through intentional manipulation (including instrumental samples). These sonic materials were then cut, processed, and spatialized in MaxMSP.

They are heard through speaker panels that Davis custom-made using off-the shelf construction panels of these same materials: galvanized steel sheet, polycarbonate panel, plywood sheathing, foam insulation, etc. These panels are arranged throughout the listening space.

The piece also includes the narration of fragmented text from DIY instructional videos, voiced by award-winning actress Sylvia Milo, as well as instrumental contributions from International Contemporary Ensemble members Joshua Rubin, Katinka Kleijn, Modney, and Levy Lorenzo.

Peter Catapano writes: "A 40-minute conceptual and musical love child of land art and environmental activism, Earthworks is a unique acousmatic piece in which Davis orchestrates the sonic outcome of common commercial building materials. It is an audio tapestry of drilling, fracking, stirring, slurring, scraping, cracking, popping, and hammering, with the bright thread of one very intimate human voice woven through it.”

“Communicates through a series of minimal, slow-moving gestures [with] profound overtones of the environmental consequences of humans' hive-like activity… nobody else has come up with anything quite like this. - AllMusic

“The project is a reflection on the fact that it is perhaps the earth, our ultimate home, that we should now begin to renovate… Nathan Davis’s work on sound and its use in space is impressive.” Panm 360

“Davis has effectively and forcefully processed an incredible wealth of ideas for Earthworks. Seen in this light, this anti-percussive work by a percussionist is also a highly interesting object in the field of modern compositions.” - Pizzicato

Recorded by Sono Luminus in Atmos surround, binaural, and stereo formats.

Available through Bandcamp, Sono Luminus, and all major outlets.

For 360-degree immersive surround audio on headphones, head to Apple Music.

An installation with live performance:

Originally created for the exhibition “Planetary Home Improvement: From Just-in-time to Geological Time”

VI PER Gallery, Prague, December 2021-February 2022

The home improvement store is a geological site on demand. Rockwool, Sheetrock, Quikrete Stucco. Materials are processed into products, packaged, stockpiled, stacked, and sold across global DIY supply-chains, from Home Depot to Bauhaus and OBI. Basalt, gypsum, limestone. Material economies are severed from mineral entanglements with millennia of rock, fossil, plant, and stone. It takes 1 day to install drywall; it takes 299 million years to form gypsum.

What planetary urgencies, temporalities and extractions undergird products of just-in-time geology? Rewriting shelf life and collapsing the ancient and the instant, this research project takes stock of the terrestrial home via the big-box DIY store, as the home improvement industry continues to boom and propagate rocks in anthropo-convenient forms. The store is the modern quarry. This exhibition examines the geological life of product accumulation, installation, and instruction through both physical and digital gallery artifacts. If the Eames’s Powers of Ten organized the universe by relative scale, Planetary Home Improvement redesignates its earthly substrates by relative temporality—from the planet to the point of sale.

Geo Acoustics

Manipulating field recordings of the raw materials, in situ and extracted, Nathan Davis created a multi-channel sound environment that uses these consumer building materials as speakers and resonators.

Occasional earth rumbling emanates from a pile of gravel. A five-piece ensemble of plywood, foam insulation, polycarbonate, acoustic tile, and galvanized steel, fitted with transducers, fills the gallery with low humming and crackling. This geological soundscape is created from recordings of these same materials as found: in nature, during the violence of their extraction, and as fashioned into instruments. Visitors are encouraged to listen to a material up close, as each panel becomes a speaker that colors the sound with its own characteristics.

Team: Christine Giorgio, Amelyn Ng, Gabriel Vergara, with Nathan Davis

Recordings for the soundscape were gathered in situ by the composer. Narration voiced by Sylvia Milo on text adapted by Christine Giorgio. Additional samples performed by Katinka Kleijn, Levy Lorenzo, Josh Modney, and Joshua Rubin of the International Contemporary Ensemble. Extraction samples were sourced from https://www.soundsofchanges.eu/ and used in compliance with Creative Commons license 4.0.