AIMLESS RESEARCH

June 13-16, 2011 Machiasport, Maine

In 2010 I closed the Rhode Island studio and took some basic equipment to our small family blueberry farm in Down East Maine. I went there to get away from what was becoming an excessive burden of materialism in my normal routine. I needed a dose of simplicity.

Sonic experimentation with plants and rocks make that possible.

Plants and rocks have never been the victims of egotism. Think of all the things plants do for us—oxygen, food, shelter, fuel, medicine, beauty, an environment for wildlife and a retreat from our human obsessions. Rocks; without them, no soil for the plants, no dry place to stand and build a home; rock is totally taken for granted. Rock surrounds the molten core of the earth. Without it, we would all be cosmic dust.

Rocks and plants are good to be around. As subjects of sonic experimentation, rocks and plants don't carry preconceptions about personal identity. They are a pure expression of something "else", a world vaster and more mysterious than the little voice in our head, or the others on TV.

Much to my surprise, engaging the semiotics embedded within the electrical activity generated by plants and rocks, appear to facilitate a deconstruction of individual  identity.

It's a cold, wet day in June here in Machiasport, Maine. I'm sitting in our tiny kitchen, which is dominated by a large, old fashioned cast iron cookstove. Around the corner where the kitchen table should be, sits a lavender candy-mint plant tossing out some fine tunes on the sitar. It's playing along with some impressionistic jazz guitar on the French-Canadian radio station.

Along side of the mint is another plant, a Sedum telephium or 'Autumn Joy', which frankly, I expected more from. In all fairness, it is these two plants first crack at sonic improvisation. An hour has already gone by, during which they have gradually warmed to the fact they are generating notes. The candy mint was the first to start wailing. Now, she is struggling to adapt to a French ballad. I don't want to interfere. So, I sit across the room, out of sight, rocking in my chair, writing away.

Outside, everything is lush and green and bursting with energy. I see the edge of the cow barn out of one window and the summer studio/wood-shed out of the other. I have to admit, this is a strange art form.

Ironically, for an artist,  my ego is completely unable to affect the outcome or success of the plant improvisations. That task is entirely up to the plants themselves. My contribution is limited to the selection of instrument and/or musical algorithms the plants use to generate sound. I'm not entirely sure why it should be so, but I've come to the conclusion that this work isn't  for me, at least, a public art form. The best sessions occur in private.

Outside, it is softly raining and the music on the radio has shifted to Medieval flute couplets, which the mint is doing an excellent job interpreting. I make no effort to record it, though. I wish I had afterwords.

The music ends and when the radio commentator begins speaking, the mint looses all contact with the broadcast. I struggle to understand the French; I had nine years of French in school and college—eight of them being second year. Now we are back with the music; Bach; organ; a liturgical chorus. The mint got right back in synch. Its high pitched sitar notes are at times almost indistinguishable from the higher registers of the organ.

My makeshift sonic lab is in the nook in the kitchen where formerly a small table with bench chairs were housed. I stop writing to take pictures and make a short video. What am I learning from this exercise? First, how to relax. I'm not doing anything, so why worry? The plants are generating the signals. The IBVA and computer are turning them into notes. The amp and speakers are playing it to my ears. The camera is recording the moment. All I have to do is pay attention, sip cold coffee and puff on my cigar.

It is the first time my friend Henry Platt's hand built amplifier and speaker assembly—designed precisely for this work—has been used here in Maine. Henry's design employs old components and tubes to produce a very concentrated, pristine sound at low wattage. The intent is to reflect as purely as possible the sonic essence of the plant signal. His retro design also compliments the atmosphere of the farm and locale. I asked Henry to design this system, because in researching plant spirit sounds, I was offered some guidance: the better the sonic quality, the deeper the plant music will register with the listener and subjectively effect their comprehension. ( More on Henry’s amp design can be read here. )

If indeed my primary role is 'doing nothing' within this art form, then where does the need for the experience come from? Here's the metaphorical answer. In life, I am like a passenger on a moving train. I am moving across a terrain of experience often far beyond my direct control. While travelling on this train, I ask myself, "Should I put my bag on the floor and relax, or should I carry it on my head?" All too often, I carry the bag on my head. But when I'm here in Maine, I  put it on the floor and relax.

The software program just crashed interrupting my thoughts. Re-booting, I switch the mint's instrument to rock organ—no response. Then I switch to church organ; I get a response but only when I touch a leaf. My little mint is exhausted, it seems, but the sedum still reacts strongly when touched. However, none of the former vibrant, voluntary, self-generating and spontaneous impulse to create music remains. No, occasionally a bar or two pops out without my hand stimulating the leaves. I switch instruments back to sitar—still no go.

It's later now, and we have all rested. On the radio a couple are singing a duet in French while playing the guitar. I switch back to rock organ and go back and forth between plants looking for a reaction. Finally I get some chaotic organ sounds that do nothing for the duets musicality. I move away, back to my corner, out of sight. Slowly, like a struggling contortionist, the organ sounds coming from the plants shape themselves to the singing. Even when the commentator comes back on and begins speaking in his musical French, they limp along, like some plant version of a broken music box playing random notes.

Not exactly sublime, but that's the way it goes in the plant spirit music world. When you arrive at symmetry, it's like the angels are weeping, the sound is so amazing. But much of the time, I feel confined to a hallucinatory sonic asylum, designed especially for my tormented psyche. Dissonance reaches a plateau. It's time to take another break.

I am reading about  herbalists and medicine people that really know their plants. My experience is naive and simple minded by comparison. These shamanic individuals communicate directly with the plant spirits, who in turn teach them their curative powers. Awesome!

I have a healthy respect and regard for nature, but I also feel at home among artifice. Emotionally, I can't seem to get past the impediment that in Nature one creature needs to feed on another in order to survive. What kind of an idealized world is that? More like a hell world, actually. Yet, I suppose, with birth and death comes catharsis. We are stripped of one identity and then given another, with no explanation. Mystics call this process "annihilation". At that point, we understand crushed rock and rotting leaves.

My response to meaningless is meditation on an inner sound,  through Surat Shabd Yoga. This discipline is also designed to strip one of ego. There is an obvious parallel to the work with plants. The deconstruction of identity appears in shamanic, tantric, and devotional art forms, but is not the stuff of art world grandiosity.

On days like this, where I experience peace and harmony, alone among the familiar sights and sounds of Down East Maine, I feel the inner and outer worlds temporarily fuse. A seamless transaction between work and meditation emerges. And even though I realize I will likely never have the skills of an herbalist or the profound Nature awareness of a medicine person, I feel content. This odd art form has become a constant reminder of that sound within.

When listening to the plant sounds, I sometimes feel the drift of the inner worlds. Tonight, the deep blue of evening turns the canopy of firs around the yard the blackest of green. I love my human kitchen with its warm glowing stove, and I'm very happy not to be freezing outside on the cold, wet grass. Such is grace received, most always taken for granted.

The next step forward is to hook up a second computer and IBVA in parallel to the first, allowing both plants to operate independently of one another. Initially, I employ dowsing rods to ascertain whether or not each plant will cooperate in this process. Then, by trial and error, comes the selection and assignment of individual instruments to each plant, for optimal harmonious expression. Each plant directs its monaural output through one side of the stereo, with its own dedicated speaker. Later, I will replace the IBVA instruments with individual patches from Ableton Live, assigning multiple effects to each plant. This step provides each plant with an infinitely more complex musical repetory.

At first, the plants don't completely understand or respond to the new sound. Previously, they were each assigned a single instrument from IBVA, but not the complex sonic effects provided by LIVE. Now,  the plants small voltage fluctuations can simultaneously drive numerous electronic musical instruments, tunings and effects, and it takes time for them to adjust.

After again dowsing a favorable response to working with LIVE, I focus more on looking through LIVE for a good bank of algorithms to assign each plant. I want to insure both sonic clarity plus a wide range of expression. In effect, Ableton Live enables each plant to become a composer of electronic music—rather than just a musician playing an assigned instrument.

Later, I take a break and go to a neighbors cabin to catch a breather from the plants. When I return, the plants have become highly animated and do not require any stimulation by touch to continually produce sounds. In fact, my proximity tends to suppress their activity more than anything else. Rather than mess with the composition, I expand the visual waterfall graphics. These graphics display in real time the mille-voltage activity on the surface of the leaf that becomes translated into sound. I change the graphics, making them more free flowing and artistic. Previously, they were representing the data. Now they are expressive, ever-changing abstract forms. From pure data, these plant semiotics can be changed instantly into sensual graphics.

Once all these changes are set, I begin filming. Of course by now it is dark, and the whole mood has become more mysterious. Normally, plants become subdued in the evening, but the brief break I gave them at dusk somehow provides surplus energy. They power on until 10pm when I shut everything down.

It has not been lost on me that my work with plants and rocks is well outside conventional art and music, much less science.  Nevertheless, that work proceeds in what is best described as a state of bliss.  I find that in pursuing this "aimless research," the shackles of 'identity' and 'purpose' diminish. What I gain is freedom. I am able to proceed without external justification. To an extent, the modest little plant melodies become an expression of that new found freedom. Just as the plants are liberated from silence and can now communicate sonically with everything around them, so do I sense something bigger behind my incessant mental chatter emerge, accompanied by bursts of joy and gratitude.

Today I begin where I left off yesterday, but soon switch to a LIVE patch for the sedum that electronic composer David Last constructed for a performance we did with Benton Bainbridge at The Stone in New York City. In utilizing Henry's fine amplifier, the plants produce crystalline clarity and imaging. The sound is very much reminisant of an electronic rain forest. So, to stimulate the plants, I add a CD, "Sounds of the Rainforest: Serenade of the Coqui" that I brought back from a trip to Puerto Rico. ( The Coqui is a small, local tree frog, named after an Indian prince. Coqui fell in love with a Goddess, but one day an evil spirit took him away, causing her sorrow. In her anguish, it is said she created this small frog to evermore sing his name.)

Now the recording of the frogs and the plants blend with one another while I write, out of sight, in the opposite corner of the kitchen. As the tracks on the CD fade to emptiness, so do the plants retreat with their soliloquy. Then, as the next track emerges, the plants return to their haunting refrain of a distant forest.

By afternoon, I am surrounded by and imbedded in, Plant Beneficence. I am sitting in a shingled, wood frame house, being made warm by a wood fire, sipping green tea, listening to recorded sounds of a Caribbean rain forest augmented and interpreted by two local herbs. No doubt the electricity that gives rise to all this enjoyment is powered by a distant coal furnace. When I look out the window or door, I see a lush, green forest and and two beautiful, old wood shingled barns. It is raining, so the plants and trees are wet with mist and raindrops, reasonably warm after a long, cold winter.

I brought along with me a small, portable Kelly radionics device. It was gifted to R. J. Reynolds III from Peter Kelly and later passed along to me. I introduced the two unusual men back in the mid 1980's; now both are deceased. This particular device went missing for some years, but recently, it was returned, to my great happiness. I brought it here to Maine, not entirely sure of its role in these sessions.

Today I decide to pluck a leaf from each plant and place them in the input well, with the requested intent, to 'harmonize output', written on a scrap of paper. By this action I hope to augment the blending of the two plants sonic output, a task which can occur spontaneously, but doesn't always.

Of course I have no way of knowing whether or not the radionic input has any real effect upon the mix. Perhaps it is just a way of inserting myself into the collaboration.  Here, radionics represents another pathway into unfamiliar territory. Theoretically, using radionics one could construct a form of communication with plants, essentially dowsing for their input in a 'yes or no' fashion, then building special patches to reflect the qualities or impressions the plants are emanating.

Perhaps in performance, the plant's sonics become a radionic broadcast of their own, one which could also be curative. The techniques for exploring such an experience remain largely unexplored.

—Duncan Laurie, June, 2011