Listening with glaciers? Auscultation and planetary health? Climate data turned into percussion performances played on glacial ice? Tune in for all of that and more in a fascinating conversation with Konstantine Vlasis. Konstantine is an environmental composer, audio researcher, musician and writer currently based in Iceland whose work explores how sound, music, and listening mediate experiences of changing landscapes and ecologies, and how music can be a form of climate communication and environmental storytelling. With collaborations, compositions, and publications with a wide range of people and places around the world, I really enjoyed diving into his world and his sounds.

Links and Bio

Artist website https://www.konvlasis.com/

Instagram https://www.instagram.com/konvlasis/

Time and Water https://scienceandfilm.org/articles/3747/the-sounds-of-time-and-water

Life of the Glacier https://intotheblue.is/life/

After Ice film https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsQoCVlgGn8

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Composer & Project Lead: Konstantine Vlasis

Produced by Jake Lyons Performed by Chris Parker Audio by Yi-Wen Lai-Tremewan Directed by Marcus Neudigate

Ablation

Composer & Project Lead: Konstantine Vlasis Videography: Josh Flint Recording & Mixing: Yi-Wen Lai-Tremewan Video Editing: Jake Lyons Color Grading: Marcus Neudigate

Bio

Konstantine Vlasis is an environmental composer, audio researcher, percussionist, NYU Torch Fellow, Leifur Eiríksson Foundation Fellow, Fulbright-NSF Arctic Research Fellow, and Fulbright-Nat Geo Award recipient. His projects, public talks, and performances center on the ways that sound and listening mediate experiences of changing landscapes, and how music can be a form of climate communication and environmental storytelling.

As a composer, Vlasis has become a leading voice within environmental, art-science, and audiovisual composition. His music blends complex rhythmic structures, minimalist textures, and sound design to create environmentally conceptual and immersive pieces. In this regard, Vlasis explicitly builds his works upon pre-existing musical textures created by nonhuman entities, natural soundscapes, and environmental phenomena. His recent compositions expressly focus on ecological awareness, creative approaches to musical sustainability, and the efficacy of art-science collaboration. Vlasis is a visiting lecturer at Listaháskóli Íslands, a research affiliate of Háskóli Íslands, an Innovative Percussion Artist, and a performing member of APEX Percussion.

Fresh off an amazing sound workshop in Norway last week called Soundshed, we hear sounds reflecting sonic presence and absence, hauntings, ruins, and imaginaries. The project, funded by the Oslo Center for Environmental Humanities, explored sound at the intersections of art, ecology, and energy production at Kistefos, a sculpture park and museum located on the site of a former paper pulp mill about an hour outside Oslo. I was excited to be part of this project led by Sadie Menicanin from University of Oslo and can’t wait for you to hear the sonic collages created by the participants.

Co-creators

Sadie Menicanin

Steve Williams

Kyle Devine

Megan Gette

Cristina Archetti

Moa Hjärtström

Elise Matilde Malik

Alexander Refsum Jensenius

Parisa KhoeiLucy Cathcart Frödén

Vicky Mikalsen

Nikos Baskozos

Chryso Nikolaou

Sofia Shuvanova

Kahena Wilhite

Links

IMV Instagram @unioslo_imv

Kistefos https://www.kistefosmuseum.com/

Soundshed project page https://www.hf.uio.no/ikos/english/research/projects/oceh/research/teams-phase-two/junior-collaborative-research-teams-1/soundshed.html

UNRULY Sustainability https://unrulinesss.com/

Thumper trucks and dowsing rods. Seismic listening and fraudulent maps. Ham radio and silence. Just a few of the ideas we cover in today’s show with Megan Gette. Megan is an artist, a writer, a poet, an editor, interested in how sensemaking is articulated and given material form. Playing with technologies of listening, fluidity and im/materialisms , her artistic and academic works made for a fascinating conversation. Check out our chat and listen to some of her sounds.

Bio

It is hard to name the various crises of the present to which theory promises to attune. The worlds of others are incoherent. Thought is immanent to material processes and their social fragmentations. I am interested in how sensemaking is articulated and given material form. I examine techniques and technologies of listening through which extractive atmospherics shapes perception and ordinary life.

Links

Instagram https://www.instagram.com/808omega/

Artist web site: https://atrace2.cargo.site/