Tessa Laird and Xenia Benivolski: Locating Echoes (You Can't Trust Music)

In "Musical Vitalities", Holly Watkins describes the life of music - tenuous, metaphorical, contingent and mortal - as the cross-modal interpretation of sounds. Sounds are ambiguous, they alert us to dangers and lures, both animate and inanimate. “Music retains that ambiguity; music is the art of possibly animate things”. Artist and writer Tessa Laird and curator Xenia Benivolski discuss how echo-location can act as metaphor, word play, and sonic stimulus; the double-sided notion of anthropomorphism; and interspecies cultures and resonance.
 Tessa Laird’s essay 'Locating Echoes' attempts to bridge the existential void that separates us from bats. It is presented alongside video works by the artist and editor of our journal Disclaimer Liang Luscombe, and audio compositions created using bat samples by our editorial associate and former artistic director Joel Stern. Co-commissioned by Liquid Architecture and E-Flux ‘Locating Echoes’ was developed for the latest chapter of You Can’t Trust Music (YCTM), a research project on sound and music, curated by Xenia Benivolski. The piece is featured in Chapter 3 of You Can’t Trust Music – ‘The Art of Possibly Animate Things' – exploring the convergence between danger, safety, community, prayer and the flow of information through und erwater cables, generations, skies, animals and sediments;  'Listening to music, we continuously experiment with being other.' (Holly Watkins, 1972). https://yctm.e-flux.com/the-art-of-possibly-animate-things Image: Liang Luscombe. Produced by Mara Schwerdtfeger. Financial support from patrons at any level has a resounding impact on our work. You can support Liquid Architecture’s weekly podcast and our online journal Disclaimer, for new thinking and writing on listening and sound through a Patreon subscription, for as little as $5 a month. https://www.patreon.com/liquidarchitecture For the past 20 years, Liquid Architecture has been Australia’s leading organisation for artists working with sound and listening. LA investigates the sounds themselves, but also the ideas communicated about, and the meaning of, sound and listening. https://liquidarchitecture.org.au/