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

Polyphony, showing now at 180 Studios as part of the Synchronicity exhibition, is United Visual Artists’ second collaboration with bioacoustician Bernie Krause after The Great Animal Orchestra (2016), a work that set recordings of animals in their natural habitats to visuals of 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 17 March, 2024 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, 2023 – 17 March, 2024
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