Running time: 38:52

"From a rectangular rooftop 22 stories above the Charles River, metal rods and fiberglass membranes inspect the atmosphere, casting signals into world's currents and reeling them back in as data. The Green Building houses MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. The roof, with its protruding spheres and antennas, sets the opening aural scenery of Proxemia's Electric Streams of Wind—an album-length audio work that travels down to the base of the Green Building while also traversing the many vibratory registers of this elite, planet-probing apparatus.

Troubling the boundaries between field recording and electroacoustic composition, ESoW interlaces everyday sounds from the building interior—footsteps, elevator chimes—with radio signals and wind noise. We hear many streams, many channels of motion and change and transmission. José Rivera (a.k.a. Proxemia) worked extensively on site to tap and divert these different vibratory vectors into a shared audibility; at points, we can hear Rivera's radio experiments amplified into the ground floor of the building as part of an installation work, then rerecorded as they reverberate upward. During the time that Rivera began to edit this material, Hurricane Maria battered Puerto Rico, and a racist regime resounded America's cruel colonial relation to the island by dismissing its calls for help. These events laid bare the profound distance between the people who feel the effects of a worsening climate and those appointed as its objective observers; and by the same stroke, in this case, a distance between artist and institution.

Often in ESoW, these interlaced streams suddenly come apart: surfaces shear out of contact, fabrics rip, threads knot up and fall silent. Like high voltages in filament wires, the currents that Rivera convolves together are at once forceful and precarious. The compositional play of field recordings takes a note from Bernard Parmegiani with these subtle but jarring changes. Meanwhile, Christina Kubisch's influence shows when the piece invites accidental rhythms induced from electromagnetic signal relay into a space where they become musical. But ESoW doesn't merely curate a set of sound objects and signals; it probes an instrumental apparatus. Like C. Spencer Yeh on The RCA Mark II, Proxemia's interaction with the Green Building produced sounds—through hitting, sampling, transducing—out of an instrument whose designed use was closed off to the artist. But where the Mark II synthesizer is a no-longer-operational musical device, the array of measurement equipment and its institutional wrapper in the Green Building was up and running when Rivera produced these sounds. Blocked access in this case is not a matter of function and malfunction, but rather of expertise and its borders.

As Proxemia's listening station descends toward the ground, it is not a resolution into familiar or reassuring clarity. ESoW refuses an easy analogy between atmosphere and abstraction, even as it pulls us into both. With the close of the piece, the character of the listening moment it has produced comes into focus: a brief time where we can move in the middle of many currents—ethereal and terrestrial, personal and institutional—before the turbulence of their conflicting forces spits us back out onto solid ground."

-Andy K. Stuhl

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The sounds on this disc were recorded in, on, and around the Green Building at MIT (2016-2017) with contact microphones, electromagnetic microphones, a Sennheiser MKH416, a Sony PCM with binaural microphones, and Sound Devices recorder. Additional sounds were created at my home studio in Cambridge, Massachusetts (2019).

Originally a week-long, site-specific, 8.1 audio installation situated in the ground level walkway of MIT’s Green Building in the spring of 2017, Electric Streams of Wind represented an architectural investigation of a building that studies the earth sciences, as well as an opportunity to critically engage with the history of meteorology that led to modern data streams and radar forecasts, of which MIT played a crucial role in developing during WWII.

Thank you to Alexander Souvannakhot, Alyssa Irizarry, Luke Damrosch, Mary Knapp, Daniel Sheen, Seth Avecillo, Ernst Karel, Renée Green, Gediminas Urbonas, Sam Auinger, Jan Werner, Lodovica Illari, Jim Harrington, Nicolas Kisic Aguirre, Madeleine Gallagher, John Steiner, the Building 54 Roof Committee, the MIT Radio Society, MIT Environment Health and Safety Office, the MIT Program in Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences, the MIT School of Architecture and Planning, MITArchA, and the MIT Program in Art, Culture, and Technology.

This project was supported in part by the Cambridge Arts Council and the Mass Cultural Council.