Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
Purchasable with gift card
Download available in 24-bit/44.1kHz.
$10USD or more
Book/Magazine + Digital Album
Printed publication-album, 20pp, includes download code
(when you receive book, DL code is on sticker on inside back cover).
Illustrated and designed by Aidan Koch.
Printed by Publication Studio Hudson.
Includes unlimited streaming of Old Growth Playback
via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
Old-growth Playback centers around four works I composed as an artist-in-residence at HJ Andrews Experimental Forest (HJA), a biological research station in the central Oregon Cascades. It is an album and an art book - illustrated and designed by Aidan Koch.
HJA is a Long-Term Ecological Research station (LTER), with projects planned out for as long as 200 years that are generating a vast and detailed body of knowledge about these forests. Old-growth Playback is a contribution to the artistic component of this 200-year project called the Long-Term Ecological Reflections program. Inspired by this long-term approach to getting to know a place, Old-growth Playback is a project of listening closely to forests in the present to speculate on the soundscapes of future old-growth ecosystems. Through listening, we can consider how present forests with their emergent 21st century soundscapes will have novel old-growth futures. Listening can prompt acknowledgement of our undeniable entanglements with and responsibilities to these dynamic sounding spaces.
The notion of old growth might bring to mind images of cathedral-like forests and sounds of droplets falling from mossy branches, but it has
become almost synonymous with scarcity and a fear of losing what remains to profit-based resource extraction. While there are very real ecological, cultural, and intrinsic reasons to nurture remaining old growth, this project looks forward to what is yet to grow. The old-growth forests of the future are coming of age in a more extreme climate, with technologies and sounds that were not present even 100 years ago. Might we (humans) stay with this trouble [1] and learn from these forests? HJA is a good place to prompt this train of thought; among ecologists and foresters, HJA is known as a place where assumptions have been challenged and
ecological concepts have been redefined. Only so years ago, scientists at HJA were prioritizing studies concerned with optimizing forest growth for
resource extraction by replacing old growth with fast-growing plantations [2]. However, in the 1970s ecologists at HJA began to push towards conceptions of forests as complex ecosystems supporting
a diversity of species worthy of protection. In 1981, HJA ecologists described the characteristics of old growth forests for the first time, including the importance of fallen trees, nurse logs, snags (standing
dead trees), and structural heterogeneity to these habitats [3]. In the 1990s, efforts to protect remaining old-growth forests were founded on studies by HJA scientists of the endangered Northern Spotted
Owl (Strix occidentalis), ultimately reducing old-growth logging significantly. More recently, HJA has challenged the exclusivity of ecological research, inviting artists and writers into the research
process. Reflecting on her own experience at Andrews, biologist and writer Robin Wall Kimmerer speaks to this potential exchange with beyond-humans: 'in the right hands, scientific research is a
conversation, an interview of sorts between two parties that don't speak the same language" [4].
1. Donna Haraway (2016), Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press).
2. William G. Robbins (2018), 'The HJ Andrews Experimental Forest: seventy years of pathbreaking forest research', Oregon Historical Quarterly, 119 (4), 467.
3. Jerry F. Franklin, et al. (1981), 'Ecological characteristics
of old-growth Douglas-fir forests', USDA For.
Serv. Gen. Tech. Rep. PNW-118, (Portland, Oregon:
Pacific Northwest Forest and Range Experimental Station), 48 pp.
4. Robin W Kimmerer (2016), 'Interview with a Water shed', in Forest Understory: Creative Inquiry in an Old-growth Forest, Eds. N. Brodie, C. Goodrich and F.J. Swanson (Seattle: University of Washington
Press), p. 44.
credits
released October 4, 2024
All music, field recording, performance and composition: lisa ann schonberg
Illustration and design: Aidan Koch
Field recording assistance: Anthony Brisson & Leah Wilson
Scientific advisor: Fred Swanson
OLD GROWTH PLAYBACK is made possible, in part, by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, through the Media Arts Assistance Fund - a regrant partnership of NYSCA and Wave Farm. OLD GROWTH PLAYBACK has received critical support from The Spring Creek Project, HJ Andrews Experimental Forest, The Sanctuary for Independent Media (Troy NY), NATURE LAb (Troy NY), and Hudson Mohawk Magazine (Troy NY). The album was printed by Publication Studio Hudson, and mastered by See Thru Sound.
Free-flowing, loosely structured songs that borrow lightly from jazz and ambient but expand in directions all their own. Bandcamp New & Notable Oct 7, 2023
A stellar compilation featuring shoegaze and indie favorites like Drowse, Midwife, and Mount Eerie benefitting Project Onward in Chicago. Bandcamp New & Notable May 11, 2023
These evocative ambient compositions are dotted with quiet vocals & distant field recordings, making them feel like a cave in a deep woods. Bandcamp New & Notable May 1, 2023
This eerie conceptual album by this well-regarded audiovisual collective was inspired by visits to the sacred Indian city of Varanasi. Bandcamp New & Notable Oct 31, 2018
