Thonis-Heracleion, peaceful beneath the waves

Thonis-Heracleion, peaceful beneath the waves. Sound of the Anthropocene. Alphabet Art Center. The New Museum of Networked Art.Cologne, Germany. July 13th - August 30th 2024

Programme Notes:

Thonis-Heracleion (Egyptian-Greek names) was an ancient Egyptian City founded around the 8th century BC on adjoining islands on the mouth of the Nile Delta. The city was built around a central temple to Khonsou-Herakles from which a network of canals interspersed with docks and quays cut across the city. For 1000 years it acted as the port of entry for ships from the Greek world until a combination of earthquakes, tsunamis, and rising sea levels caused the sinking of the city into the Mediterranean Sea. It wasn’t until the year 2000 that it was finally rediscovered having sat peacefully below the waves for 1200 years.
The story of Thonis-Heracleion presages what lies in store for coastal cities facing the ravages of climate change in the coming years.
This track was recorded in response to our rapidly intensifying climate catastrophe. Faced with the inevitability of climate collapse, we find our social and political worlds in advanced states of decay while the Earth, greedily exploited and abused now for centuries, winds and coils around us twisting itself into ever more inhospitable configurations. The lives of many are becoming increasingly solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
The pieces confronts this looming state of ecological and socio-political collapse in the form of a tableauthat reflects upon a unique real-world location in the context of its relationship to our impending annihilation. Sonically it is crafted with a combination of electric guitar and sampled instrumentation with musique concrète and computer music techniques. The results sit somewhere between dark ambient, ritual drone, and noise music.