Listening to the Deep Earth
Stuart Hyatt, Janneane Blevins & Willa Benjamin Blevins [Eds.]
Book size 15.2 x 21.6 cm / 5.98 x 8.5 inch
Illustrations numerous illustrations
Binding Hardcover
English
Stations: Listening to the Deep Earth is the essential listener’s companion to Field Works’ Stations album. The book includes an digital audio download cart for the entire album.
Commissioned by the Anchorage Museum and the National Geographic Society.
Release date: April 1, 2022
For more information:
What does the Earth sound like? In Stations, musician Stuart Hyatt teams up with PRINTtEXT to invite poets, composers, and scientists to answer this question. What begins as a grand science experiment quickly transforms into a lyrical duet with the enchanted ground beneath us.
Hyatt and Enrique Ramirez begin the text with examinations of a whole-Earth sensorium. The text then branches out in three directions—Invocation, Reverie, and Rhapsody—before reconverging in Quieting.
In Invocation, Hanna Benn transcribes a leitmotif of her vocal duets with the planet, while Ashon Crawley opens up the landscape with a hymn. Next, Gustavo Valdivia dispatches a vibrant precolonial tectonic report from the Andes. In Reverie, Paige Lewis unfolds a quantum fantasia atop pixelated spectrograms. In Rhapsody, Joan Naviyuk Kane, Kashina, and Ishmael Angaluuk Hope explore sensory (and extrasensory) terrains to make sense of topographies both familiar and strange. In Quieting, Anaïs Duplan and Laraaji listen to what’s newly audible—unearthed harmonies, fresh dissonances—when the planet slows. Finally, Debi Kilb and a consortium of seismologists offer a postlude foundation built on sciences, both hard and soft.
Stations: Listening to the Deep Earth brings together multiple voices and polyphonic ways of knowing, encouraging the reader to listen more closely to the magical sounds of our planet.
Richly illustrated in full colour, each hardbound book contains a unique download card for the accompanying Field Works album, featuring an all-star ensemble of vocalists and instrumentalists: Hanna Benn, Janie Cowan, Masayoshi Fujita, Stuart Hyatt, Laraaji, Qasim Naqvi, and Brad Weber. There are also ten bonus remixes by Deantoni Parks, Green-House, Olga Wojciechowska, Afrodeutsche, Nathan Fake, Ben Chatwin, Sophia Loizou, Amulets, Penelope Trappes, and Alva Noto.
