If you tune your digital dial to Radio Amnion each month during the full moon, you’ll hear a new composition specifically commissioned for the occasion. In June, Blanc Sceol, the London based duo of Stephen Shiell and Hannah White, presented Orbit, a half-hour piece recorded at an East London pumping station. The meditative track is composed on an eponymous decagonal string instrument of Blanc Sceol’s own making. The Orbit is played by two people: one rotating the cedar barrel, the other bowing its strings. Its cascading, hallucinatory frequencies are interwoven with one word poems created by participants of Blanc Sceol’s sonic meditation sessions.

Jol Thoms, the artist and researcher behind Radio Amnion, met the duo during one of these meditations. Thoms associates the moon with the “divine feminine”, standing in opposition to “our wildly patriarchal societies”. The satellite’s influence on the tides is another reason why the project activates during the apex of the moon cycle. Radio Amnion is part of the P-ONE neutrino telescope: developed at the Technical University of Munich and submerged 2.5 kilometres into the Pacific Ocean’s Cascadia Basin, it’s designed to detect particle interactions within the water. The addition of the Sonic

Platform – a tetrahedral speaker to channel the station’s subaquatic transmissions – serves a more conceptual purpose. “Radio Amnion opens the possibility for us to think with both science and mysticism simultaneously,” Thoms explains. “I’m obsessed with the ecological problems we’re facing and interested in renewing our relationships with the Earth.” Thoms is inspired by the sentient ocean planet in Stanisław Lem’s Solaris, alongside the spiritual traditions of indigenous communities. Broadcasting soundworks into the ocean, he suggests, creates a positive dialogue with the planet that doesn’t exploit its resources or destroy its biodiversity.

Blanc Sceol’s Orbit, also released by Otoroku, was the 25th transmission in the station’s two year history. Previous commissions include Margarida Mendes’s Lateral Waters, and Libita Sibungu and Perivi Katjavivi’s inaugural liquid-themed poem pacific2.wav. A highlight is Nocturne: Sonic Migrations in which Matt Warren, Sally Ann McIntyre, Dani Kirby and Eliza Burke blend together bioacoustic data, environmental sound and interviews with nipaluna/Hobart residents to tell the story of the near-extinct whale populations of Tasmania’s Derwent River. But you don’t have to dive deep to catch the next broadcast – their webpage will host the simultaneous stream. ○ radioamnion.net

Ilia Rogatchevski
Originally published by The Wire, July 2023