In the summer of 1997, were heard a series of sounds, unrecognisable at first and classified as strange, even monstrous. The unfounded nature of the underwater sounds, onomatopoeically named 'bloop’, captured popular imagination and stirred up a rather fantastical speculation of their likely and unlikely sources. Nearly a decade later, it was concluded that this mysterious sound spectrum was ‘consistent with icequakes generated by large icebergs as they crack and fracture’ and dip down under with a loud and resounding 'bloop'!
Bloop, for me, is a crack, a dip, an immersion or a drowning into the vastness of the sonic sensorium and its multiple uneven spaces. An unpacking of the immenseness of sound. It’s a hearing, as much as a listening; an investigation into thresholds of sensing and sense-making; an inquiry into the language and limits of the acousmatic as a mode of speech. It's a provocation finely crafted in the material of the heard, a conversation about sound-in-itself that flows and meanders through place and time, listening in to the silent notes and cadences that linger long after. Tuning into the practice of sonic thinking, contrary to what it ‘sounds’, this particular instance of the bloop is a deliberation just as much as an erroneous utterance.
Snippets here and below
Artist Residency as a constituent of the program Body-Machines-Publics, Centro NAVE, Santiago with Khoj Studios (May 2025)
https://www.instagram.com/p/DJ4zq8PSmtj/?img_index=2
https://www.instagram.com/p/DJ-IeYzyPLT/?img_index=3
The place we do not is the place we are looking for, Westspace, Melbourne
https://westspace.org.au/program/the-place-we-do-not-know-is-the-place-we-are-looking-for
Recompositions Public Program, Collingwood Yards, Composite, Westspace and Liquid Architecture, Melbourne
Recompositions <br> Public Program | Liquid Architecture
https://liquidarchitecture.org.au/events/recompositions-public-programs
Ambient Drift, podcast interview with Mara Schwerdtfeger
Sarai x Listening Academy | Public Sessions | 9th-15th December
Fugitive Frequency, Season 5 Episode 2: A Close Listen To Rojak Radio Rojak