United Visual Artists: Polyphony

UVA’s Matt Clark on their “monument to nature past set in the not too distant future”.

Polyphony is United Visual Artists’ second collaboration with bioacoustician Bernie Krause after The Great Animal Orchestra (2016), which set recordings of animals in their natural habitats to to visuals of colorful spectrogram landscapes depicting the environments in which they live.

Polyphony, like The Great Animal Orchestra, highlights the importance of preserving biodiversity, immersing the listener in a spatialised soundscape that takes field recordings from the Dzanga-Sangha Special Reserve in the Central African Republic, recorded by Krause and ethnomusicologist Louis Sarno.

These field recordings are comprised of animal sounds alongside traditional instruments and rhythmic patterns native to the local Baka tribe, which engage in a call-and-response between natural and cultural sounds – all of which are interrupted and silenced by the sound of other human activity.

In this video, Clark speaks to us about the urgent themes behind Polyphony. Synchronicity is open until 30 December, 2023 at London’s 180 Studios and features new works including Ensemble, Chromatic and Edge of Chaos.

UVA: Synchronicity

180 Studios

180 The Strand, London, WC2R 1EA

12 October – 30 December 2023

10am – 7pm, Wednesday – Sunday (closed Mondays and Tuesdays)

For ticket sales visit: https://www.180studios.com

Filmed by:

Kamil Dymek

Pawel Ptak

Matt Watt (Hotmilk Films)

Watch next: United Visual Artists: Present Shock