Sonic Rituals (2024)
Category: radio, sound art, long-form
Date of production: 2024
Published by: Radio Commons
Listen here: https://radiocommons.org/transmission/sonic-rituals/
Photo Courtesy: Ana Amorós López
The piece is selected for Radio Commons, a platform for sonic interventions that seeks to practice solidarity by building collective agency. Co-authored by a remote collective of artists and cultural workers, the project is an experiment in commoning at a distance.
What forms of listening and connection might grow when you are thinking of your creative sonic practice as a ritual that you’re holding, and a meal that you are making meant to nourish someone?
Who is it nourishing? You, others?
What are the ingredients in your practice that are working for you?
What’s a form you have wanted to make?
What is its texture?
What are its perceived relationships and energies?
In this essayistic radio compilation, I invited several friends and inspirational women artists to record their rituals and sonic discoveries tethered to their daily processes and creative practices. The raw excerpts, arranged and mixed compositionally, explore collaborative and embodied practices of listening-composing as long-form sonic poetry.
Guided by an intention to nourish a continuous exploration of listening, the recorded rituals meditate on listening as a physical experience and experiment with other ways of perceiving time and relations. They share a grounding in the materiality of objects, spaces, and tactile experiences, opening a space for storytelling through voices that are influenced by their own personal histories, bodily subjectivities, and unique ties to the environment, all held together within a common sensory framework of ritual.
With contributions and voices by:
Ana Amorós López – Sound Ceramics
Eva Isolde Balzer – Presence Training through Bharatanatyam
Cecelia Pez – Ingredients to Nourish the Membrane of the Present
Maria Heller – For Voice
Alifiyah Imani – Strumok
Stephanie Fenner – Living Temple Residency
Concept, sound mixing, and production by:
Alifiyah Imani