With Womens Work: Maayan Tsadka - Sonic Botany: RA'ASH ADAMA (earthnoise)

Wednesday, February 24th, at 8pm EST, ISSUE is pleased to stream Sonic Botany: RA'ASH ADAMA (earthnoise), a new work by composer, sound artist, improviser and teacher Maayan Tsadka. The piece is part of the With Womens Work series, commissioning artists to interpret and respond to scores included in Womens Work, a magazine first edited and self-published in 1975 by Alison Knowles and Annea Lockwood.

The piece responds to the Piano Transplants scores by composer Annea Lockwood included in Womens Work Volume #1, 1975.

Notes from Maayan Tsadka on Sonic Botany:RA'ASH ADAMA (earthnoise):

For my piece in the project I chose to respond to Annea Lockwood's iconic Piano Transplants series. The works and the text scores include: Piano Burning, Piano Drowning and Piano Garden. Each piece takes the complex instrument of the piano—with all its historical and symbolic baggage—only to decontextualize it and make it surrender to the forces of nature and to time. For me, those brilliant works and scores are not only an invitation to recreate the pieces as described, but also a broader invitation for sonic explorations and for different ways of listening, thinking, and making music. These works take the music outside—outside the concert hall, obviously, but also outside of one's control. Through a very intentional setting and process, the piece leads the performer to eventually release, or set in motion, something from the inherent sonic potential of the object, which then is no longer in one's control. Another aspect of the piece which I considered in my response is the fact that it puts our temporal human existence in proportion, and alludes to the idea of experiencing reality under different time scales, often beyond our human perception. The scores, which are set to be performed out in nature, are inevitably puting the human musical-machines and concepts in relation to the natural sounds of the surroundings. My response to the pieces and the ideas mentioned above is through an extension of my own musical practice of Sonic Botany, in which I work to expose the sonic potential in organic, found natural artifacts that are explored systematically and combined to create new imaginary soundscapes.

Dani Willianson: video and editing
Shaul Kohn, Amir Bolzman, Maayan Tsadka: sound recording
Shaul Kohn: mixing and mastering

Maayan Tsadka is a composer, sound artist, improviser, and teacher. At the root of all my works is an attempt to grasp some understanding about the nature of sound, its behavior, acoustic ways of organization, and its environmental and social roles. I am interested in uncovering and amplifying layers and musical patterns—hidden, inherent structures— which occur acoustically, as well as in an exploration of the ways in which the sonic phenomena meets the physiology of the ear and the psychology of listening. Often, my work incorporates a dimension of imaginary and speculative sonic worlds, on the line between crypto-zoology, crypto-botany and futuristic folklore. Studied Music at UCSC and currently lives in Haifa, Israel. Teaches at the University of Haifa, Sapir College and Musrara school for art and society.