Lake Black Town will sound a 12 minute collage of field recording based compositions from 4 drowned town sites; Birmingham, KY; Oscarville, GA; Ferguson, SC; Kowaliga, AL.

Lake Black Town is a research composition project where the artist is deeply listening to the sonic soil, water, and plant data of these “drowned town” sites to inform their resonant response to the call of history’s emptiness. Deeply listening to the liminal spaces and stories surrounding “drowned towns” by using creative field recording methods to listen to the recreation, racism, and hydroelectric progress built atop flooded American dreams, Montgomery constructs a modular composition of soundscape storytelling. This is an attempt at the modalities of Deep Listening and Great Black Music.

Lake Black Town background:

America’s post-Civil War history is rife with stories of successful Black cities being razed and flooded to create lakes largely used for recreational purposes. The most infamous is likely Lake Lanier outside of Atlanta, formerly home to Oscarville, an African American community with more than 1,000 residents who were forcibly removed after a horrific lynching in 1912. These lakes can be found all over the South, their original stories submerged under the waters.

For the past year, Nashville-based artist, creative musician, and composer Jayve Montgomery has led a creative residency that explores the history of these locations. The creative residency, in progress, has included a tour of lake sites of these so-called “drowned towns,” where African-American communities were forced out by local white supremacists and neighborhoods and towns were flooded to create spaces for water recreation.

At each site, Jayve uses a PlantWave device, which captures and translates the biorhythmic vibrations of plants into sound and MIDI data. Geophones, hydrophones, contact microphones and binarual microphones capture the sonic vibrations from area flora, fauna, air and water and are used as a sound bed and foundation for live, onsite, improvised musical call and response as well as written compositions examining the resonance of emptiness left after a town has been drowned.

I made this recording in the small town of Amherst, Massachusetts. I sped it up by a factor of 60: 12 hours becomes 12 minutes, raising the pitch by almost six octaves and making infrasound audible. Although we might think we hear something familiar when listening to this album, only its very highest sounds could have been detected with an unaided ear. Since ordinary microphones cannot pick up frequencies this low, this track was recorded with infrasonic “macrophones.” If a microphone amplifies small sounds, a macrophone brings large sounds with long wavelengths into our perceptual range. Each consists of a wind-noise reduction array leading to a microbarometer and a data recorder. I based the design on what the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization uses to detect distant warhead tests. In this case, however, we’re listening to a planet in transition. Changing ocean currents, wildfires, turbines, receding glaciers, industrial HVACs, superstorms, and other geophysical and anthropogenic sources from across the planet are a part of the infrasonic soundscape of our lives, wherever we might be.

Tremologies features a reading voice and a soundscape. The soundscape mimics a haptic topology. Shifting zones throughout the space are marked by simple tones whose interference produces utterly local ecotonalities: third-tones of latent partials and rhythmic beating. There is no sweet-spot. One could, hypothetically, rhythmically migrate along these tremological tension lines. Instead, the zones shift and mimic a rhythmic migration as the haptic map moves around the listener—creating the illusion of movement as the environment slides by, around, beneath, and above us. 

The total movement of the system follows an eco logic as its constituent parts are in constant flux while the overall structure of the system remains static—a vibrational terrarium. The modulation of the zones is driven by equal phase divisions of a single low frequency oscillator such that a given frequency range is always equally divided and the total motion of the system remains constant, even as the zones perpetually migrate.

Built from recordings of a severe windstorm made inside a flimsy motel, Atrana explores a evolving sound field that moves between real-time site depiction and an electronically transformed sonic space.

This piece explores the ring at the intersection of existing architecture and impossible spaces, using spatial audio and ambisonics to create abstract environments for deep listening. The piece uses field recordings and synthesized audio to explore the organic and ephemeral nature of the continuity of sound through the lens of afrofuturism and experimental electronics. The ritual practice of collective listening gives thanks to the ground beneath my feet and its indigenous roots.

The material in this piece is constantly in a state of discordance. Pushing to be released, sounds evolve into distant variations of themselves while constantly threatening to renew elsewhere as they fall deeper and deeper into abstraction, each carrying traces of their past with no assurances they'll remain in the present.

Untitled is an experimental composition for electronics and acoustic sound sources that explores "attentions in listening" by shifting and pulling aural focus.

JayVe Montgomery is a site-specific improviser who breathes epigenetic listening into woodwind instruments and bells as a sustained decay descendant of the sound at the bottom of a slave ship. These soundings range from acoustic to electroacoustic; from horns and bells to samplers and turntables.

Of Jamaican and Louisiana Creole descent, Abstract Black / Jayve Montgomery was born at Ft. Hood, Texas on the last day of 1979 and raised a dependent of the department of defense in Berlin, Germany, before and after the wall fell; Rayne, Louisiana, before the frogs left; Columbia, SC, a home of the confederate flag; and Ft. Campbell, KY, home of the 101st Airborne Division and Jimi Hendrix’s turn to music. Montgomery earned a double BA in Japanese Studies and Anthropology from Centre College of KY and has also studied sound at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His staggering student loan debt makes him wish he hadn’t signed his life away at 17, 18, 19 & 20 to attend a predominantly white institution.

He is an outer music city sound artist and multi-instrumentalist of the Chicago school of Free, Creative, and Improvised musics, Sonic Healing Ministries sector. He was Senior Program Specialist for the Chicago Park District’s Inferno Mobile Recording Studio (2006-2013), a collaborative sound making program for youth and people with disabilities. He was also a curator and artist-in-residence at Brown Rice (2008-2012), an art space for listening in Chicago, IL. 

Since moving to Nashville, he has become an integral member of the improvised and experimental music scene of the city and region; gaining local recognition for Nashville Scene solo performance of the year 2019; and becoming alum of Pitchfork Music Festival (Standing on the Corner), High Zero Festival of Improvised and Experimental Music, and True/False Film and Music Festival. In 2024 Montgomery started NEA grant-funded research on drowned towns in the Southeast US for a performance project called Lake Black Town. He has recently performed with such luminary sound artists as Tatsuya Nakatani, Maria Chavez, Ben Lamar Gay, and Lisa E. Harris.
jayvemontgomery.com

Brian House (he/him) is an artist who investigates the rhythms of human and nonhuman systems. Through sound, subversive technology, and multidisciplinary research, he makes our interdependencies audible in order to imagine new political realities. His current project, Macrophones, explores atmospheric infrasound as a means of listening to the climate crisis.

House is a Creative Capital awardee and has exhibited at MoMA, Los Angeles MOCA, Ars Electronica, ZKM Center for Art and Media, V&A Museum, Beall Center for Art + Technology, Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center, Stockholm Kulturhust, Science Gallery Bangalore, Fridman Gallery, Issue Project Room, Eyebeam, and Brooklyn Botanic Garden, among other venues. The New York Times Magazine, WIRED, The Guardian, and TIME’s annual “Best Inventions” issue have featured his work, and his research has been published in Leonardo, Journal of Sonic Studies, Media Art Study and Theory, and e-flux Architecture.

House holds a PhD in computer music from Brown University and was Associate Scholar at Columbia University’s Center for Spatial Research. He is currently Assistant Professor of Art at Amherst College. 
brianhouse.net
@h0use

Jake Sokolov-Gonzalez is a musician and educator from New York City whose practice is based equally in free improvisation and tedious technical labor. He’s currently working on very-close-miked, very quiet cello music; a distended piano score for a short film; and a rolling drum’n’bass visual record. He’s been teaching creative music in the NYC public schools since 2013. He produces pop and dance music under the name BABL.

Peter Szendy is David Herlihy University Professor of Humanities and Comparative Literature. Among his publications: Of Stigmatology: Punctuation as Experience (Fordham University Press, 2018); Le Supermarché du visible: Essai d'iconomie (Éditions de Minuit, 2017); All Ears: The Aesthetics of Espionage (Fordham University Press, 2016); Phantom Limbs: On Musical Bodies (Fordham University Press, 2015); Apocalypse-Cinema: 2012 and Other Ends of the World (Fordham University Press, 2015); Kant in the Land of Extraterrestrials: Cosmopolitical Philosofictions (Fordham University Press, 2013). At the Cogut Institute, Szendy leads the Economies of Aesthetics Initiative.

Ed Osborn works with many forms of electronic media including installation, video, sound, and performance. He has presented his work at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the singuhr-hörgalerie (Berlin), the Berkeley Art Museum, Artspace (Sydney), the Institute of Modern Art (Brisbane), the ZKM Center for Art and Media (Karlsruhe), Kiasma (Helsinki), MassMOCA (North Adams), the Yale University Art Gallery, and the Sonic Arts Research Centre (Belfast). Osborn has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Creative Work Fund, and Arts International and been awarded residencies from the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program, the Banff Centre for the Arts, Elektronmusikstudion (Stockholm), STEIM (Amsterdam), and EMPAC (Troy, NY). He is Professor of Visual Art and Music at Brown University.

Femi is an architect and sound artist from New York who works with various synthesis techniques and live coding languages to discuss the organic within electronics and technology through sound art and composition. His work explores the intersections of sound and space though spatial audio and architectural design as an experimental practice. He’s most interested in generative systems, chance, texture within sonic soundscapes. Femi’s architectural work explores indigenous ritual practice as a vessel for conversation between sound, space and interactions of the body. Femi has been performing as a solo experimental electronic improvisation artist since 2018 as sadnoise. Musical and Festival performances include Ende Tymes (2022, New York), Creative Code Festival (2020, New York), Waterworks Festival (2024), Slabfest (2024), amongst others.

Composer, improviser, and sound artist Isaac Barzso strives to explore the activity of placemaking and the transfer of data and methods of communication between different mediums, aiming to create music and multimedia art that exists in the space between. Heavily influenced by disparate aspects of pop culture, such as the textures of post-rock music and the structures of literature and film, his music often utilises techniques within computer-generated or computer-assisted composition to close the gap between acoustic and electronic media. Isaac’s work has been featured at venues such as the Darmstädter Ferienkurse, SEAMUS, NYC Electronic Music Festival, and ICMC. In 2023 he graduated with distinction (M.M.) from the Royal Conservatory of The Hague.

kite/wing is a performance duo based in the Hudson Valley, NY made up of Robbie Wing (Cherokee Nation citizen) installation artist, musician, and performer and Kite (Oglála Lakȟóta) performance artist, visual artist, and composer. kite/wing often comprises electronics, body interface, machine learning tools, banjo, violin, field recordings and more.

kitekitekitekite.com
robbiewing.com