During the virtual concert, Smolicki will present four pieces, some of them in full length and others in fragments. All compositions have been developed as part of Smolicki’s postdoctoral research into soundwalking and field recording practices in the context of arts and environmental humanities (2020-2023). Within this international artistic research project, Smolicki has travelled to several institutions and explored diverse places that surround them using an assemblage of ethnographic and historical methods along with critical and creative field recording techniques. In these works but also others, Smolicki has been particularly drawn to places characterized by complex and unresolved histories, dissonant temporalities and frictions between diverse human and other-than-human actors.

Unsound Peregrinations 

Intertidal Room (2020)

Lake that Glimmers Like Fire (2021)

Dead Horse Bay (2023 - world premiere)

Discord, MA (2023 - world premiere)

Intertidal Room (2020) is a soundscape composition originally developed for the Vancouver coastline near Stanley Park, an unceded territory of Coast Salish peoples. While bringing sonic attention to diverse micro-organisms that occupy and sustain those vulnerable zones, the piece simultaneously examines how the linearity of colonial exploitation in Vancouver has disrupted the cyclical vibrancy of the place. Limpets, mussels, barnacles, shrimp, propellers, ballast water, metal detectors, fog horns, train whistles, herons, chainsaws, driftwood, thrushes, and starlings are some among many other intertidal actors whose sonorities and their infra-connections this piece intends to bring to the fore.

Lake that Glimmers Like Fire (2021) is a soundscape composition that builds on a series of listening and recording sessions undertaken in, around, and with Rissajaure, a lake in Sápmi, a region in the Arctic Circle traditionally inhabited by Sámi people. The lake has been often described as the clearest and purest one in Sweden. The piece focuses on troubled sonorities of the region that surrounds the lake and which has been persistently permeated by noises of extractivist industry, military activities and increasing tourism. Intending to deconstruct the perception of the lake as the purest one in the country, the piece also brings attention to noise and disruption that the very practice of recording nature might be causing across various scales and geographies.

Dead Horse Bay (2023 - world premiere) is a soundscape composition based on field recordings from a series of soundwalks taken along the shoreline of the bay located at the edges of the New York City borough of Brooklyn. Known as Dead Horse Bay, the place historically functioned as the city’s disposal including, glass bottles, furniture, clothes and horse carcasses. Recently, the place has been flagged as a contaminated zone due to the leakage of a radiological substance from the local deck markers. The already eerie atmosphere of the place is additionally amplified by an unnerving sounds from a myriad of broken glass bottles continuously brushed by tidal waves.

Discord, MA (2023 - work in progress, fragments) is a soundscape composition exploring past and present soundscapes of Walden Pond popularized in the 19th century by Henry David Thoreau, American transcendentalist writer. The piece critically engages with the dominant, romantic perception of Walden Pond, seeking instead a more complex form of attunement with its natural and cultural history, including its representations’ entanglement in human-caused climate changes, extractivist endeavors, ice industry, and graphite mining in particular.

Jacek Smolicki is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, researcher and educator. His work explores historical, critical and existential dimensions of listening, recording, and
archiving practices in human and more-than-human realms. His work takes the form of soundwalks, soundscape compositions, diverse forms of writing, experimental archives, and audio-visual installations. He has performed, published and exhibited internationally and in 2019 co-founded the Walking Festival of Sound. He holds a PhD in Media and Communications from Malmö University.and is currently an international postdoc at Linköping University with guest affiliations at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Harvard University and Uppsala University.