For this year’s Earth Day Reforesters is teaming up with New Ear:: SPATIAL to present a program of sound works that listen closely to and with the living world.

The festival brings together artists exploring various ways of interconnectivity, field recordings, open systems and eco-logical thinking. Across the program, voices emerge in dialogue with local ecologies, revealing both their expressive vulnerability and the fragility of the ecosystems they inhabit. Works delve into altered environments, from the shifting ecologies of a vast coastal lagoon to compositions shaped directly by climate-change data.

Listeners are invited into attentive encounters with place: an exploration of presence within the soundscape of the Cairngorms, grounded practices of field recording and aural mapping, and speculative reconstructions of the lost vocal worlds of extinct birds.

EarthFest offers a space to hear, reflect, and reimagine our relationship to the planet—through sound, memory, and the fragile act of listen

Program Notes

TItle: Plumes, waves, and echoes on the Étang de Berre  
Composed and performed by: Mike Bullock  
Field recordings by: Mike Bullock and Jeff Silva  

PLUMES emerges from a long-term sonic and ethnographic exploration of the Étang  de Berre, a coastal lagoon near Marseille, France shaped by industrial pollution and  ecological disruption. Recorded between 2021 and 2024, the album captures fragile  entanglements between human activity and more-than-human life. Using hydrophones,  ultrasonic detectors, and parabolic microphones, we probed the lagoon’s submerged  acoustics, bat echolocations, and the overlapping signals of industry and wildlife.  Rather than documenting from a distance, these recordings listen closely to a damaged  landscape. It invites us to hear what contamination, survival, and resilience sound like,  and proposes listening as a way to inhabit the complexity of a territory in flux.  

An album of these recordings, called PLUMES, will be released on Dinzu Artefacts in  summer/fall 2026. The live multichannel presentation of “Plumes, waves, and echoes  on the Étang de Berre,” created by me specifically for the dome at Reforesters Lab,  presents several of the tracks from that forthcoming album, along with previously  unheard material and the soundtrack for Silva/Bullock’s short experimental film  Echolocomotion [2025].  

In September 2024 I did a week-long artist residency at the Tétrodon Martigues, in the  Bouches-du-Rhône region of France. I focused on acoustic ecology recording in a  variety of settings. The Tétrodon sits on the western shore of the Étang de Berre, a salt  water lagoon connected to the Mediterranean Sea by the Canal de Caronte, which runs  through the town of Martigues. 

Framing everything, sometimes invisibly, is energy production as both industry and  culture: The regional economy has been dominated by the petrochemical industry for  decades; fishing and trading, for millennia before that. The Tétrodon itself is the last of  a species of plastic, pre-fabricated housing; made from petroleum, for petroleum  workers. Fishermen describe the constant pressure and compromises necessitated by  the petrodominance of the local economy. The Lavera refinery’s thunder can be felt  through the ground, while gas plumes light up the night. 

The main purpose of this residency was to expand upon the sonic research I had been  doing in collaboration with France-based American filmmaker and ethnologist Jeff  Silva, who has been researching the Étang for several years. Using the Tétrodon as an  anchor point, we gleaned sounds and observations from around the western and  southern shores of the Étang, along the Canal de Caronte and to the Mediterranean  sea.  

Our individual approaches to each site were based on different experience levels with  site, as well as our different ways of listening: ears, technologies, priorities and  preconceptions. I chose a wildlife-centered approach, with an emphasis on the  ultrasonic activities of bats, to compliment Jeff’s more ethnographic research. As with  much of my recording working, I sought out ephemerospheres, temporary acoustic  ecologies that appear under the right conditions and often go unnoticed. 

Jeesoo Hong :: The Path Leading Down to the Caretaker’s Shower Room

A building caretaker moves briskly up and down a stairwell. This narrow, isolated staircase connects the ground floor to the basement, ending in a private room equipped with a shower and a washing machine. For him, the stairwell is both a transitional space between different rooms and a workplace where the building’s domestic water infrastructure is set into motion. As he ascends and descends, various artificial water streams and channels are activated. The work is based on my research, “Sonic Routes of Domestic Water Supplies,” which explores architectural situations of water systems through their acoustic characters. Sounds were recorded at various water facilities, including the Paderborn sewage treatment plant, the Gummersbach waterworks, and the Mainmühle pumping station. In 2024, these recordings were installed in an actual stairwell in Cologne through six distributed speakers.

Sara Bouchard :: The Invisible Landscape is a sound performance created in collaboration with the artist’s home landscape of Richmond, VA. The artist has gathered natural and man-made objects, recordings, texts and historical/ecological research while exploring her local surroundings at the fall line of the James River. These artifacts and ephemera make up the palette for a real-time improvisation in which an immersive soundscape emerges and swells, creating a multi-layered, virtual space that exists in parallel with–and in tension with–the physical environment. By weaving deep listening practices with song, Bouchard builds a shared intimacy which she hopes will spark a connection with one’s own place, one’s own time, one’s own landscape.

About the Artists

Mike Bullock is a composer, improviser, and environmental sound recordist based in Western Massachusetts, USA. He creates electroacoustic sound work with field listening, contrabass, synthesis, and spatial audio systems. Bullock has presented projects at Harvestworks, ISSUE Project Room, Experimental Intermedia, the Park Avenue Armory, Fylkingen (Stockholm), Instants Chavirés (Paris), Café OTO (London), the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Waterworks Museum, the Goethe-Institut (Boston), and EMPAC (Troy, NY). His recent projects include Ephemerospheres, a series investigating hidden, temporary acoustic ecologies.

Jeesoo Hong is an artist based in Cologne, Germany, who works with sound and built environments to reveal the often-overlooked narratives and emotional dimensions embedded within them. She looks at events or exhibitions as spaces where participation can arise through their specific spatial contexts and transformations.

Sara Bouchard is a multidisciplinary artist and composer who uses sound, installation and performance to interweave song and the landscape. She has exhibited and performed internationally, including at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (CT), The Center for Book Arts (NYC), The American Folk Art Museum (NYC), ERES Foundation (Munich, Germany), International Conference of Live Coding 2023 (Utrecht, Netherlands) and numerous festivals including Third Practice Electroacoustic Music Festival (VA). As part of an artist residency with the global science collective FLUXNET, Sara collaborated with ecologist Chris Gough, Ph. D., on a composition for choir and drums about carbon cycling, which was recently performed at the Patricia Valian Reser Center for the Creative Arts (OR). Born in Stockton, CA, Bouchard received her BA from Yale University in 2003 and was subsequently based in Brooklyn, NY, for 13 years. She relocated to Richmond, VA, to study with sound artist Stephen Vitiello, earning her MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2019. She is currently Adjunct Faculty at VCUarts Department of Kinetic Imaging.