From Microbes to Vibes

When Skaņu mežs proposed a collection of essays on nature and experimental music, the idea was initially quite straightforward – to think about experimental sound outside the urban environments where it most commonly resides. It was the period following covid-19 pandemics, when nature had become one of the few spaces largely free from restrictions and therefore gained a renewed social relevance. There was also an apparent contradiction worth touching upon: nature and electronic music, sound art and technology are often instinctively imagined as opposites. Field-recording equipment provided perhaps the most obvious bridge between them.There are festivals in nature without amplification (such as the Latvian festival Dabā), psytrance gatherings in forests (such as Lithuania’s Yaga Gathering), and even industrial music events staged in rural settings (such as Latvia’s Kūcvāls, which traditionally takes place in a countryside barn). This was the initial perspective we had: a renewed encounter between sound practices and the pastoral. Or even between electronic sound arts and outdoors sports, for instance, bicycling, both as there are a number of local underground musicians and organisers who are keen cyclists, as well as an indirect homage to the passion of the iconic electronic music group Kraftwerk. Yet projects such as tekhnē tend to be less interested in using nature merely as a setting than in exploring it as an active participant.

Nature in this collection is approached in diverse ways, though always in connection with experimental sound. It appears as a reservoir of botanical information and ecological relationships (Pierce Warnecke & Matthew Biederman), as a testing ground for technologies and listening practices (Artūrs Punte), as a medium of communication (Shortwave Collective, essay commissioned together with OUT.RA), and as a realm where even microorganisms may become “sonic actors” (Adomas Palekas). We also encounter an outsider’s perspective on experimental music through the eyes of a field biologist (Līga Pentjuša), while Leif Elggren guides us towards speculative territories where sound becomes a method for approaching memory, absence and the unknowable.

What unites these otherwise very different contributions is a shared interest in extending perception. Nature appears here not as scenery, but as a network of organisms, processes, information, and relationships. Experimental sound practices become a means of approaching these layers — whether through field recording, radio transmission, sonification, microscopy, photogrammetry or speculative listening. In this sense, technologies are not presented as nature’s opposite, but rather as tools for insight and awareness.

What began as an exploration of nature and experimental sound revealed a different common thread. Across these essays, nature rarely appears as refuge or pastoral ideal. Instead, it becomes a means of revealing processes, relationships and forms of communication. Listening emerges not just as an artistic act, but as a way of approaching phenomena and relationships that exceed daily human experience.

These essays suggest that experimental music’s relationship with nature is not primarily one of representation. Instead, nature becomes a collaborator, a communication partner, a field of inquiry. Listening, in this context, becomes a way of encountering connections that extend beyond the human scale.

The conversation that follows between Pierce Warnecke and Matthew Biederman provides an appropriate point of departure. Their project Phytomorphic Topologies, developed during a tekhnē residency in rural Latvia, explores vulnerable ecosystems through field recording and photogrammetry, treating landscape not just as material to document, but as a participant in the creation of the work. Their dialogue opens many of the questions that resonate throughout this collection: how technology shapes perception, how sound mediates relationships between human and non-human worlds, and how artistic practice can create new ways of listening to the environments we inhabit.**