Twin Cities Sounds

The Twin Cities has a long history of local music and sonic arts. But does it have its own sonic landscapes?  As part of the Walker Reader series Sounds of Space, that considers the relationships between sonics and the built environment, we invited local artists to create original scores for sites across the Twin Cities. 

Available as a free online interactive map, this collection, guest curated by John Marks, founding member of MirrorLab and Operations Director at The Cedar Cultural Center, presents a small sampling of the many ways our local spaces inspire local artists.

Experience these works as well as read an overview by John Marks below.

Pfeifer was inspired to create this short ambient piece after exploring the Sophie Calle exhibition at the Walker Art Center. She finds an uncanny connection to the urges of exhibitionism that Calle demonstrates in her work. This piece conveys a live performer’s competing desires to be on display and understood, yet enigmatic.

Nikki Pfeifer wears many hats in the Minneapolis DIY electronic music community. She is a producer, live performer, DJ, promoter, and owner of the BORA label.

This work continues my exploration of botanical soundscapes, fostering a deeper connection to the natural world. One of my favorite features of the Walker Sculpture Garden is the integration of topiary and greenery across the landscape, and my focus for this project was drawn to the garden’s north end and the recent rewilding project there. Since 2017, this lowland area has been transformed into a thriving habitat, now flourishing with tall goldenrod, native wildflowers, and wetland grasses, thereby creating a sanctuary for insects, birds, and other wildlife. During my late October visits, I was struck by the rich signs of life—the buzzing of insects and the rustle of wind through the grasses. These natural elements became the foundation for the new composition, inviting listeners to place themselves at the center of this living sound environment.

The main melodic component of Garden Music utilizes a technique known as data sonification, with frequencies sourced from a wild white heath aster flower growing near the trail edge of the garden’s north end grasslands. The living plant was connected to a small analog synthesizer using a set of small, sensitive electrodes, gently attached to the plant to capture subtle electrical variations, and this signal is translated and sent via MIDI to the synthesizer for real-time audio processing. The sounds are built from the unique frequencies of the landscape itself, an act of both conservation and reflection. Through this work, I aim to strengthen our vital connection to the natural world, reminding us that our well-being is intricately linked to the health of the environments we inhabit.

Matthew Hiram Himes is an environmental sound artist and multidisciplined musician based in south Minneapolis, making work at the intersection of nature and the human experience. Producing under his middle name, Hiram creates music that fosters a connection with the natural world, offering a sense of comfort and escape. Using an electro-acoustic approach to traditional instruments, Hiram’s performances feature wooden flutes made from walnut, cedar, and rosewood, with synthesizers, magnetic tape, and voice intertwined with the organic textures of environments around us. Recorded outdoors in Joshua Tree National Park, Hiram’s latest album, Yucca Music, was created using the frequencies of living yucca plants.

Matthew Hiram Himes is a certified Minnesota Water Steward, creating awareness to issues of environmental conservation through his action in the arts. His contributions have been recognized through several grants and awards, including the Next Step Grant (2023) from MRAC with the McKnight Foundation, and the Art for Water initiative (2022) through Freshwater Society and Hennepin County Environment & Energy. Through his art, Hiram invites listeners to explore the intricate relationships among sound, nature, and our collective well-being, encouraging a deeper awareness of ourselves and the ecosystems that sustain us.

For AquaSonos: TetrachordXPetrichor, Strange synthesizes the ecosystem of this urban refuge with resonant pulses and dissonant chimes, creating a landscape where birds, frogs, wind, and trees are subject to the artist’s filters and time-based effects. Nature becomes industrial and vice versa in a piece seemingly without beginning or end.

Dameun Strange is a sound artist, multi-instrumentalist, and award-winning composer whose conceptual works often explore Afro-surrealist and Afrofuturist themes. His sound experiments use West African polyrhythms, classical music forms, and contemporary jazz harmonic explorations, along with found sounds and historic recordings to create performances that disrupt the notion of genre.

Rushing water and broadband noise give way to a meandering melody figuratively sequenced by the river itself. The density of the sonics embody forces known only to nature. Bissen’s rippling layers of texture expand and contract like the built environment’s attempts at shaping the Mississippi. Like a midwestern subduction zone, his piece is equally impactful experienced at dawn as at dusk. The river isn’t going anywhere. 

IOSIS is the project of musician, composer, and sound designer Alex Bissen. IOSIS creates gnarled soundscapes and lush atmospherics in the service of channeling ritualistic sonic experiences, primarily through hardware-synthesis means and electroacoustic techniques. The music of IOSIS is built upon the foundational forms and textures found in drone, noise, and ambient composition, alongside more traditional compositional structures and considerations; it employs instrumentation ranging from a vintage Roland Juno 6 to modern Eurorack modular systems to a contact-microphone-enabled Tibetan singing bowl. IOSIS is an emotionally transmutational artistic practice, evolving as an entity of constant experimentation and redefinition of boundaries both within the studio and in the live-performance space.

Scott’s looping, repetitive saxophone passages expose a nostalgic image of this place. This piece is multilayered, yet reductive, like a color-shifted photograph. Equally a minimalist memory and a detailed discovery.

Mary Hanson Scott (she/they) is a saxophonist, composer, and educator. She has performed at Drone Not Drones in Minneapolis, International Noise Conference in Miami, Big Ears Festival in Knoxville (with Green Ribbon), basements, plant stores, galleries, churches, and more. Scott completed a Fulbright Grant in Brazil in 2019, where she taught language and sound classes, exploring connections between sound and space. This work led to teaching field recording and sound art workshops at spaces like Beaubourg School and the New Orleans Museum of Art. In May 2024, Scott earned a Deep Listening Certificate from the Pauline Oliveros Deep Listening Institute. Her work as a teacher, composer, and performer is dedicated to the art of listening and the interplay among sound, the body, the earth, and the cosmos.

In 2017, I had the great pleasure of co-curating a program of media objects from the Walker Art Center’s Ruben/Bentson Moving Image Collection. The program included a new commission of 16mm film projections and live sound performance for Expanding the Frame that I created alongside my dear collaborators, Sam Hoolihan and Crystal Myslajek. One selection from my research was a live recording from May 1990 of Pauline Oliveros’s performing a durational piece for amplified and processed accordion, which took place in the former Cowles Conservatory. Underneath Oliveros’s repetitive and elongated accordion tones, incidental sounds from within the conservatory make their way to the microphones embedded in the instrument. Water flows from a fountain, and children laugh. An ambient din reverberatesoff the glass walls and ceilings through the body of the instrument and is heard by tiny microphones designed to reproduce the detail of wind through reeds. Where and when the recording was made are preserved. The recorded piece acts as a kind of electroacoustic carrier for time and space. The sound of the accordion and sounds from the space synthesize a sonic landscape.

It felt both natural and intimidating when asked by the Walker Reader to curate a selection of artists working with sound to create pieces in response to, in conversation with, or inspired by locations within our metropolitan landscape. Natural, because the intrinsic connection between sound and place are so critical to my experience as an artist and Twin Cities resident that this proposal made such good sense to me. Intimidating, because there are just so many great artists working with these considerations in the Twin Cities. Contemporary experimental/ambient/drone music is having a moment, and the communities of artists making it span a broad spectrum of aesthetic sensibility. Right now the Twin Cities is undoubtedly a site of concentrated cultural production in this field.

Within a week of writing this, the 10th annual Drone Not Drones Festival, a 28-hour concert of contiguous sound to benefit Doctors Without Borders, will happen at the Cedar Cultural Center; over 50 artists and ensembles will offer a testament to just how dense the experimental music scene is here right now. The recent American Composer Forum showcase of its 2024 McKnight Composers Fellows was full of drones, field recordings, and synthesis of all sorts. On any given week multiple events at venues, artist-run spaces, and DIY basements make the Twin Cities a place for artists of all ages experimenting with sound to build community and sustain their practice. If you are like me, this is a good place to be right now.

It’s clear plenty of artists are making sounds in this place, but what are the relationships between this place and the sounds being made? The artists selected for this series draw on those relationships in myriad ways. Either consciously or subconsciously, they demonstrate the influence of Deep Listening, a meditative practice of intentional listening led by Pauline Oliveros in the late 20th century and active today through many practitioners. There are nods to the architecturally and environmentally aware Ambient and New Age music of Brian Eno, Harold Budd, and Susan Ciani prominent in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as contemporary artists such as Lawrence English and Norman Long, whose site-specific approach is heard through both representational and metaphorical ends in recorded formats, performance, and installation settings.

Similarly, some sounds made for this series are quite literal in their response to a location; others are much more figurative. While pieces by Mary Hanson Scott and Dameun Strange represent a deep, long-standing connection to a specific site, IOISIS’s piece reflects a new perspective of an often-overlooked place on a well-traveled path. Matthew Himes’s and Nikki Pfeifer’s works enter a conversation with the Walker Art Center and Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, places made for artworks to be experienced within and communities to be built around. While disparate in form, these individual sonic threads weave a fabric of place interconnected by the networks laid out by the built environment and given identity by the community of artists working in this place at this time.▪︎