Ethan Marks
Soundscapes [audio tracks] On-site and online June 4th:
Overgrowth
Overgrowth is the third section of Bloom, an imagined aural response to Richard Powers's novel, The Overstory. It is made of various inputs from around the trumpet, processed so that particular just-intuned frequencies resonate at varying, intersecting times. The work also has synaesthetic roots, as candles whose components comprise sage, lavender, grass, bergamot, violet, orange blossom, jasmine, and woods sandal and cedar were burned at the times of reading and recording. The processing and structuring are an attempt to realize in sound this quote from the novel: “There is a world alongside ours – vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us.”
Heat Rejection Fluid Pump
Heat Rejection Fluid Pump is made from audio recorded from the Perseverance rover as it traveled through interplanetary space to Mars. Listening to the original audio, Ethan was struck by two thoughts: 1) drifting through space and seeing a craft approach, pass by him, and recede into blackness; 2) the "subdued whirring of the rover's heat rejection fluid pump" is too subdued (quotes from NASA). This work is an attempt to evoke the former and rectify the latter.
More information on June 4th on-site event.
About the Artist:
Ethan Marks is an experimental trumpet player and producer whose work deals with the collision between body and instrument. His music is usually improvised, sometimes silly, and has involved feedback, video, noise, household objects, power tools, and plundered recordings. Two recent self-released albums, dune and bloom, are about smells and biomes. He's currently playing with a 5'' speaker cone that he holds in his hand like a plunger mute that, using input from a pickup in his mouthpiece, sends the trumpet's sounds back into the bell whence they came. Ethan lives in Los Angeles with his cats, Leela and Morbo.
Artist Location: Los Angeles, CA
Social Media: Artist Website | Instagram
