Environments 12

Date

2023

Date 1
August 1, 2023
Status
Machine Listening,
Machine Listening, Environments 12, 2023, cover art.

Environments 12, 2023 Listening environment: 8-channel sound installation, 35 minutes (looped); turntable, vinyl record and record sleeves.

Researched, written and produced: Sean Dockray, James Parker, Joel Stern. Voices: David Chesworth, Jasper Dockray, Jenny Hickinbotham, Roslyn Orlando, Francis Plagne, Catherine Ryan, and their clones. Design: Stuart Geddes. Commissioned for: WILD HOPE: Conversations for a Planetary Commons, RMIT Design Hub.

‘Is it difficult to reproduce the sounds of nature?’

Environments 12 is a new, speculative addition to the once-popular Environments series: a sequence of 11 records released between 1969 and 1979 that anticipated a mass-market in mood-altering nature recordings. The work takes the form of a multi-channel audio installation, presenting a world in which the environment itself has been updated. In this world, the reproduction, synthesis and management of soundscapes has become ubiquitous and planetised. Loudspeakers and microphones are laced through the biosphere, all in the name of a cybernetic ecology.

Unfolding across a series of historical, contemporary, and speculative scenes, the work is narrated by an ensemble of vocal performers and their generative voice clones. Together, this more-than-human chorus tells and retells stories of ‘psychologically ultimate seashores’, reef lullabies, natural symphonies designed for zoo enclosures, and large language models for whales and crows. A collection of songs and fables recovered from the ruins of a future history.

Link to sleeve art and liner notes.

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Wild Hope Exhibition, RMIT Design Hub. 2023. Photo by Tobias Titz
Wild Hope Exhibition, RMIT Design Hub. 2023. Photo by Tobias Titz
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Wild Hope Exhibition, RMIT Design Hub. 2023. Photo by Tobias Titz
Wild Hope Exhibition, RMIT Design Hub. 2023. Photo by Tobias Titz

Environments 12, 2025, Stereo LP, 35 mins. Future Resistenza.

Machine Listening's Environments 12 was released by Belgium's 'Futura Resistenza' label in June 2025.

In sum, Environments 12 is deeply perplexing, beautifully garish, and an unbridled pleasure for all its grotesqueries. Rarely do records strike so deft a balance between high-conceptualism and irreverent absurdity, much less while maintaining a distinct emotional core. It is a mind-inverting libretto for the anthropocene: a post-historical field recording; aggressively brash and thoughtfully devious, one for the curling of your inner ear.

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