The Blue Beyond by Jana Winderen

If you’ve seen the news lately, you know that now isn’t a particularly good time to be something that lives in the ocean, as human activities encroach further and further upon deep blue territory. Norway-based sound artist Jana Winderen brings this imperialism to our headphones with her new set of field recordings called The Blue Beyond. In these, she mashes up recordings from a few different terrestrial and aquatic settings, turning the microphone towards both natural phenomena and human-caused noise. Bugs scuttle across the earth, tides ebb and flow, and fish swim past, all while airplanes sneak by high overhead. Winderen sets the scene to contrast the natural and anthropogenic as representatives of good and evil, as the noises of human machinery always throws unpleasant disorder into the harmonious world. We all hear that we should drive less, fly less, and recycle more, but witnessing the direct impacts of our actions on the world in the form of auditory pollution really brings these platitudes to life. If we want to stop inflicting mass harm upon life on Earth, we at least have to be willing to be made uncomfortable by visionary artists like Winderen.

-Michael