Field Dept. (estlin usher & Andy Klingensmith)
2021, Modern Concern

https://moco.bandcamp.com/album/rhiza

“The wisdom of the plants: even when they have roots, there is always an outside where they form a rhizome with something else – with the wind, an animal, human beings…”

Uprooted nodes of interconnectivity. When exposed, precious water drips from the source. Between the glass-walled garden and the biome, fluid movement reaches from the abstract into the physical like a slowly rising stream.

Rhiza. Recontextualizing the practice of cultivation and the growth cycle by renegotiating the acoustic ecology of its process and properties. Growing, a system evolving, transcending action and redistributing itself throughout the listening field.

Reverberation of the grow-room mimics yawning flora, as close-mic’d irrigation and drainage simulate methods of sustaining, of supplanting, of sharing. Sharing space, sharing soil, sharing light. The crack of stems empathetically answers the soft whine of ventilation. The labor of watering, a landscape of glass, awaits the gardener. Innumerable budding branches of perpetual approach and departure, moving like seasons to shelter life.

Source material from water, dried and living grass, glass vases and pourers, plastic, acoustic feedback, and empty cassette tape. Field recordings of ventilation systems, various plants, and ambient room noise taken at the Franklin Park Conservatory in Columbus, Ohio on December 28, 2020. For patient listening. Rhiza was recorded and produced in the winter of 2020-2021 in Chicago, Illinois.