LP/DL : https://f-o-m.bandcamp.com/album/musiques-tourbes

Sound artist, instrument builder and field recordist, Diane Barbé makes their return on forms of minutiae with “musiques tourbes”, a weaving of wetland soundscapes and biomimicking synthesis. 

Concerned with interspecies conjunctions while nurturing the planet as a finite verdant space, Diane Barbé plays with experimental music, listening practices and activism to bring attention to delicate environmental phenomena, that, despite their minute size, translate profoundly the effects of the Anthropocene while celebrating the living. Over the last years, in search of sonic signs in the landscape, Barbé followed murmurs in Europe’s wetlands which lead them to the “musiques tourbes” (French for “bog musics”). Musics made of animal rhythms, blown hums, and electronic simulacra that transport us, listeners, with Barbé into the humid zones of the planetary garden. 

With “musiques tourbes” Diane Barbé offers a peculiar map into the bog. A sonic cartography that matches the tentacular sprawl of drifting algae. As listeners, caught between the organic and the electronic, the real and the imagined, we are left with little choice but to forgo our contours and melt into the surprises of these humid zones. Gifted with new planetary garden perspectives, we may begin to sense a possible world. One where listening practices and technology come together to nurture the collective imaginary in an attempt at resetting our environmental norms and reversing the shifting baseline. Field recording is at the core of “musiques tourbes”, yet what ultimately seeps through is an act of field remembering. 

diane barbé – le grand jardin de coupigny

diane barbé – les marécageuses

diane barbé – les hululées

diane barbé – les enlisées

diane barbé – le petit jardin de coupigny

On August 9, 2014, protests erupted just outside of St. Louis, Missouri in the United States after the killing of Michael Brown, a young Black teenager, by a white Ferguson Police Department officer. The blisteringly defiant yet peaceful protests against the racist practices of the Ferguson Police Department were met by regional and local law enforcement with a militarized show of force.

Radio and television reports packaged the events in Ferguson with a near-pornographic fixation on looting and property damage. Yet skeptical viewers and listeners had to go on-line and piece together a mosaic of video feeds and social media posts to get a sense of what people there were really thinking, feeling, saying, and doing. 

Fit the Description (Ferguson, 9-13 August 2014) collates multiple live video and social media streams from August 9th and the subsequent protests in the wake of Michael Brown’s murder. Multiple and terraced audio fidelities range from gritty, lo-fi voice mail textures to clarion stereo. These unstable and turbulently polyphonic viewpoints continually affirm this work's artificial and (humbly attempted) symphonic construction. 

You will hear events in Ferguson from multiple and occasionally contradictory voices. Grief, shock, and anger mingle with exuberant defiance, astute observations, fear, steely resistance, and wisdom. I owe a profound, life-changing debt to the activists and protesters who shared their (sometimes private) audio and video posts with me personally as well as online.

Fit the Description was commissioned by the Creative Audio Unit of Australia’s Radio National for Soundproof, a now-defunct weekly radio show devoted to adventurous listening.

This is a stereo mix of the four channel Decade Memorial version, which I composed in 2024 and debuted at “A Surround Sound Evening of Agitprop Sound” heard at The Red Room in Baltimore on August 25, 2024.


Fit the Description (Ferguson, 9-13 August 2014)

ｏｒｉｇｉｎａｌ ｔｒａｃｋｓ：

Ｂｏ Ｓöｄｅｒｓｔｒöｍ － Ｒａｉｎ ｓｈｏｗｅｒ ｉｎ ｔｈｅ ｎｉｇｈｔ ｆｏｒｅｓｔ

Ｍｅｄｉｔａｔｉｖｅ Ｍｉｎｄ （ＹｏｕＴｕｂｅ）： Ａｌｌ ９ Ｓｏｌｆｅｇｇｉｏ Ｆｒｅｑｕｅｎｃｉｅｓ － Ｆｕｌｌ Ｂｏｄｙ Ａｕｒａ Ｃｌｅａｎｓｅ ＆ Ｃｅｌｌ Ｒｅｇｅｎｅｒａｔｉｏｎ Ｔｈｅｒａｐｙ

rain / 528Hz

ｏｒｉｇｉｎａｌ ｔｒａｃｋｓ：

ＡｕｄｉｏＦｏｋｕｓ － Ａｘｅｌ Ｍｅｃｋｅ － ｂｅｅｈｉｖｅ ｉｎ ｗｉｎｄｙ ｆｏｒｅｓｔ （ｂｉｎａｕｒａｌ ｒｅｃｏｒｄｉｎｇ）

Ｍｅｄｉｔａｔｉｖｅ Ｍｉｎｄ （ＹｏｕＴｕｂｅ）： Ａｌｌ ９ Ｓｏｌｆｅｇｇｉｏ Ｆｒｅｑｕｅｎｃｉｅｓ － Ｆｕｌｌ Ｂｏｄｙ Ａｕｒａ Ｃｌｅａｎｓｅ ＆ Ｃｅｌｌ Ｒｅｇｅｎｅｒａｔｉｏｎ Ｔｈｅｒａｐｙ

beehive / 417Hz

Happy to share with you the framework — afield, I made to try to grasp the whirlwind of January 2025. Hope you will enjoy it.

"Please note: beginning in the 47th minute, this mix features a near-silent field recording. It was made during the recent student protests in Belgrade and is a snippet of 100,000 people observing a 15-minute moment of silence for the victims of the Novi Sad train station tragedy. Please do not adjust your sound." 

Something old and something new, for the robust beginning of 2025. This mix features sounds from people I admire deeply and soundscapes I consider sentient. It starts with the beavers of Upper Austria working around their creek lodge and ends with 100,000 people protesting in Belgrade.

Artists contributing to this mix are —

Abby Lee Tee, Jez Riley French, Natasha Barrett, William Basinski & Richard Chartier, francisco lópez, Alex Briand & Eyden Zhao, Fletina,  Wadada Leo Smith, Arlo’s  Sounds of Norfolk, florconvenas, Ahmed Essyad, Igor Stangliczky, & Manja Ristić.

Framework afield —— Manja Ristić

Cette semaine, retour en France dans le département de la Lozère, sur le lac de Charpal. C'est une retenue d'eau douce servant à alimenter en eau toute l'année la ville de Mende. Situé à 1326m d'altitude, il gèle une grande partie de l'hiver et devient un lieu magique pour écouter et enregistrer les chants du lac. Un mélange subtil de craquements, d'explosions et de crépitements du au soleil qui agit sur sa surface comme sur une peau de tambour.

VSN013_FRANCE_Lac de Charpal_F Deroussen

My sound work encompasses field recordings, electroacoustic and acousmatic music, text-sound scores, free-improvised low-tech electronics, and compositions for acoustic instruments. 

https://f-o-m.bandcamp.com

publishing platform for attuning listenings, electroacoustic music, and sonic ecologies. 

artists are invited to produce sound topographies that point to specific (or imagined) environments.

co-runned & curated by @pablodiserens & @mathieu-bonnafous

> demos: we encourage submissions by women, trans, non-binary and BIPOC artists.

Sap as Tears is best known for their field recording and documentation of undiscovered worlds.

New tracks tagged #phonography