LP – Gruenrekorder

With the recent upsurge of interest in environmentalism, so-called ‘green’ themes have emerged in both mainstream and Avant Garde cultural outputs. That said, it’s not a new thing that plants and their imaginary worlds are given special attention. This has been a focus throughout the history of the visual arts, architecture, dance and music. So too, this theme goes beyond the borders between primitivism, modernity, post-modernity and contemporary work. Tim Collins and Reiko Goto, featuring the programmer and sound artist Chris Malcom, generate data in real time. Given that the sounds are musical enough to engage the listener, the timbres and the volumes respond to the lights, temperatures and audience. They also change according to different set-ups, with specific parameters for the localization and the kinds of plants the recordings are taken from. These are made mainly by contact microphones. A computer almost never generates music on its own and elements such as rhythm, melody, plot, time and harmony are always working as a function of something else. Tim Collins still manages to surprise us, when he declares that “we have chosen sound for its aesthetic purity with the goal to hear the trees more clearly as they react to changes in CO2, temperature and humidity”, or when he compares his digital recordings to an impressionist’s palette, with the metaphor of ‘plein air’ (outdoor) painting. The plants can be a source of inspiration and here the sounds are very harmonic despite being mostly improvised, modulated on precise data but not impersonal, and adapted to a specific goal: the production of new, interesting music forms.