Cultural anthropologist Stefan Helreich’s A Book of Waves (Duke University Press, 2023) is a brilliant exploration of the ocean waves as forms of media that carry ecological, geopolitical, and climatological news about our planet, and reflects on waves in mythology, surf culture, feminist theory, film, Indigenous Pacific activisms, Black Atlantic history, cosmology, and more.
This book inspired the American sound artist and filmmaker Andy Graydon, whose work is concerned with natural and social ecologies, and with sound and listening as creative practices, and the Italian, Berlin-based experimental double bass and electronics player Klaus Janek, whose work searches for the balance between aesthetics and discourse, to create the album by the same name. Graydon and Janek have been involved before in a series of joint projects with various collaborators.
Graydon collected field recordings from Berlin, Minneapolis, his hometown, Maui in Hawai’i, and Serra Grande, and Bahia in Brazil, added electronics and a no-input mixer. Janek added processing to his double bass playing. The album was composed and recorded remotely between 2022 and 2024 and offers five enigmatic, minimalist electroacoustic soundscapes.
Graydon and Janek describe the work process of trading and responding to recordings as «a conversation in concrete sound objects as opposed to the intuitive communication and reciprocal flow of on-stage collaboration. A different listening, becoming a different sounding». This long-distance, long-term recording process allowed both Graydon and Janek to mirror, resonate, and reflect patiently their own and each other’s ideas and to develop distinct sonic semantics, metaphors, and states of consciousness that gently oscillate. A Book of Waves flows-floats with its highly nuanced blocks of suggestive, liquid-like waves of sounds, and this cyclical sonic adventure perfectly echoes Helreich’s book and its deep ocean metaphors.
Eyal Hareuveni
Klaus Janek (double bass, processing), Andy Graydon (field recordings, electronics, no-input mixer)
