This month we're thrilled to present an exclusive collaboration with Brooklyn-based and Bunker New York affiliate Antenes. For this project, Antenes composed Near Shapes, a one-hour Extended Session designed for deep listening meditation. Near Shapes stems from Antenes’ interest in the potential of collected objects to ground us in the present moment. While locked down in her apartment in Brooklyn during the pandemic, she became interested in tiny sounds close to the ear made by personal objects she had collected like shells, wires, and rocks, and noticed their ability to captivate and soothe the listener.
“I would gently hit or scratch these objects close to my ear and it would give me a feeling of personal space, of closeness and intimacy. Near Shapes is an attempt to create an experience of mindful intimacy and balance that contrasts with the monumentality and instability of our changing world”.
For this composition, Antenes worked with microscopic sounds recorded with a binaural microphone in the famed Nokia Bell Labs anechoic chamber as part of her Issue Project Room residency. To give these short sounds a sense of extension in time, she combined them with drones recorded at the Waveform Research Center at WORM in Rotterdam. These sounds and the resulting composition were further refined, processed, and spatialized.
Check out Near Shapes and our Conversation with Antenes in Soundworks (links work on mobile only).
