Wave Form Transmission Art Audio Buffet: “Ether Archives” by Regine Basha and Barbara Held
March 10 at 11:AM EST
Broadcast Archive
In an interview with Regine Basha, we unpack a selection of sonic works and recordings in Barbara Held’s archive and talk about what sonic archives can contain and how they bring communities together both human and non-human, living or living in the ether.
bashaprojects.com
ALETHEIA, UNCONCEALMENT OF BEING 1987
For flute, voice control solenoid system and amplified grand piano by Yasunao Tone
A recording from a 1987 live performance of Yasunao Tone’s Aletheia Unconcealment of Being, is archival on many levels. The performance score consists of dance notations from 8th century China and analytical charts of the dance notations. The interpretation of the flutist is based on the meanings and phonetic values of the Chinese characters used in the score, numbers in the charts and manipulation of the voice control solenoids by parameter of the flute’s amplitude. The solenoid system was first used for “Piano for Taoists”, with an ancient text, tales of Taoist hermits and magic, in English translation and original Chinese. The voice of the reader triggers electro-magnetic hammers on piano strings so the piano seems to be played by a ghost.
IMAGEN SONORA DE SIEGA VERDE
Our conversation in this program includes experiments in archeoacoustics – recordings that I made in the summer of 2025 at a Paleolithic rock art site while enjoying a residency invited by the Campocerrado Foundation. For more information about the rock art at Siega Verde, Villar de la Yegua, Salamanca, Spain:
Siega Verde archaelogical sit
IMAGEN SONORA is a first exploration of the special acoustics at Siega Verde, a site of Paleolithic rock art near Cuidad Rodrigo, Spain, on the banks of the Rio Águeda.
The animals depicted there connect us with a vision of the world that underlines the relationship between human beings and other animals, a link that remains an essential part of this land.
It is believed that one of the possible origins of music came from our relationship with animals—our veneration of them, our kinship, and especially the imitation of their sound rhythms. We also know from ancient sound studies that our ancestors who painted and engraved images on stone were also aware of and explored the power of acoustic reflections and echos of sound, and very likely used certain frequencies to create special meditative states. Maybe they were not so different from us, creating images and sonic spaces that reference philosophy, ritual and science.
Many indigenous people support a life practice of listening and talking directly to nature, thanking the animals and plants, listening to the land with an open heart.
Canadian Anishnaabe philosopher and musician Leanne Betasamosake Simpson writes in her beautiful book Theory of Water, Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead:
“The sound of rushing water is a kind of portal to another world. Places where waves of energy altered human hearing were often where spiritual beings lived or where certain significant events happened. And the sounds in these places, such as that of water moving, were normalized.”
Some researchers call these places “ensouled landscapes”.
I came to the investigation at Siega Verde as an instrumentalist (a flutist) who performs and responds tothe subtleties of spaces and places. More than simply collecting field recordings, I am interested in what curator Regine Basha describes as a sound conversation—an approach of paying close attention to the acoustic properties of the space around me and responding with sound. In turn, the place transmits a reaction to my sounds. At Siega Verde I was able to explore the subtle differences in acoustics that we believe were intentionally nuanced by the artists/shamans who created animal engravings on these immense stone surfaces.
My imperfect recordings document three such locations; a concave stone that filters the sound of the river nearby, a circular space that not only projects sound like a small amphitheater but depicts a flat scene of wolf and auroch (an extinct bull) that from a distance and at a certain angle can be seen in perspective, and a stone with a heartbreakingly simple outline of an auroch’s head and horns on a stone background that creates a totally silent space.
The sound of a place is made up of all the rhythmic phenomena there. To the rhythms of nature such as the sound of the river, birds, depictions of ancient animal rhythms, and a sudden summer rainstorm, I added my own personal rhythm in sound, what composer Dafne Oram called “each human being’s innate waveform”. Barbara Held
HEAVEN’S EARTH
A small fragment of my experimental sound compositions for a reading of the archive of sound and moving image by Catalan Artist Toni Serra *) abu ali from his 2019 pilgrimage to Iran, shortly before his death. An image above shows an imense cave, a holy site for prayer and meditation, from Toni’s presence there. My piece is a tribute to the profound musical tradition of Iran, using voices and percussion instruments to activate a convolution reverb made from the real acoustical reverberation of the cave. Toni was a follower of Sufi mysticism, and his recordings of architectural and natural spaces followed the sufi symbol of space as “one of the most direct symbols of Being. It is primordial, all-pervading, and in the cosmology of Islam, the “locus” of the Universal Soul”.
Toni Serra *) abu ali https://al-barzaj.net/
Excerpt of a rereading in concert of archival audio material from 1978-2026. Moving image by Noemi Sjöberg.