JOSHUA DUMAS

Night Songs is a four-channel audio composition exploring translation, memory, and mass extinction in the Anthropocene, installed in the Lincoln Park Conservatory’s Fern Room, curated by Experimental Sound Studio. Dumas arranged six common human lullabies (from memory), stretching the songs’ durations to an hour’s length. Then Dumas gathered the calls of North American avian species considered vulnerable, endangered, and extinct. Dumas (piano), Whitney Johnson (strings), and Josh Bell (horns) improvised in response to the calls, and these recorded melodic fragments play at random, gradually degrading, becoming wind, over the duration of the exhibition.

Recorded at Experimental Sound Studio by Alex Inglizian
Whitney Johnson: Viola and Violin
Josh Bell: Saxophones
Joshua Dumas: Concept, Arrangement, Piano, Algorithms

Alex Inglizian: Engineering, Production Support, Algorithms