Aurality :: Marrow performance for self-built stone instrument, field recordings, DIY electronics, voice and hybrid modular synthesiser

developed during a micro-residency at ROTA festival / AADK Spain & premiered at ROTA festival Murcia SP Nov. 2021

In dialog with Ursula K. Le Guin‘s poem The Marrow, in which a stone cries its words aloud and one's marrow replies, the performance aurality :: marrow is an intent to open a dialog with the mineral realm in relation, to hear the rock’s point of view and investigate with a critical and cosmological approach human’s relations to the mineral.
Continuing the Aurality research, performance and composition series on aural ecologies, aurality :: marrow listens to the voice of the ores - from within the electronics we use on a daily basis and from within our own ecosystem as they regulate of our body functions -, to the echoes from foraged mountains in our Anthropocenic landscape and to the resonances from deep below the earth to astral bodies high above our heads.

It grew off a field research in the landscape of the Baetic Mountain Ranges where it opened up a dialog with “the still less communicative, still more passive holy atemporal cold volcanic poetry of the rocks, each one a word spoken how long ago by the earth itself, in the immense solitude the immenser community of space.” (Le Guin). Along the way, the encounter with Sarah Jones’s essay Silver/Lead, one of forty mineral recompositions commissioned by A Published Event for Lost Rocks (2017-21), proved to be deeply influencial.

... to get to the Earth’s mantle, they must first pass through the Mohorovicic discontinuity, what they call the Moho. Scientists and geologists don’t know what the Moho is. They only know it exists because anything that pass through it, changes. The Moho is not something in itself, it is only the possibility for change.

We have crawled under the Earth’s skin. She is holding us sofly against the weather. The further we go, rising slightly with the adit, the warmer and quieter it gets. My footsteps compete with my heartbeat in my ears. I think I can hear the mountain’s in-breath that must last a hundred years.

The Marrow

There was a word inside a stone.
I tried to pry it clear,
mallet and chisel, pick and gad,
until the stone was dropping blood,
but still I could not hear
the word the stone had said.
I threw it down beside the road
among a thousand stones
and as I turned away it cried
the word aloud within my ear
and the marrow of my bones
heard, and replied.

At the top of the hill in the swollen darkness every star is a wineglass cracking in the boiling water of the black sky. Every star is a millionth of a second, a pinging so high pitched it suggests a frequency of a hairline fracture that is too delicate to be accompanied by real sound. We are all soft looks so as not to break those tiny stars, as we patchwork the hard ground with the blankets we share. We grow steadily silent, waiting in the darkness on the razor’s edge of the quartz beneath us as the hill holds his breath for eons.