CRITICAL COMMENTARY/BIBLIOGRAPHY


















CRITICAL COMMENTARY (EXCERPTS, SELECTED): 

Mark Peter Wright, Listening After Nature: Field Recording, Ecology, Critical Practice. Bloomsbury, 2022
"Is it McIntyre or a bird? Probably both, possibly neither. Repeated attempts to conjure the relics of music stretch my imagination beyond romantic elegy and toward a critical appreciation of mourning, witnessing, and artistic attempts at resuscitation. (...) McIntyre's repeated attempts at playback amplify a fragmented sense of music far from the bombastic associations of a great animal orchestra. Here, the relationship is broken, impossible, yet undertaken again and again. The transposition of extinct birdsong within the context of music and conservation, along with the repetitive performance, produces a critical mourning that is aware but not subsumed by elegy."

Meredith Kooi, the ether swaddles me | you | us: Becoming-Khora in Light, Sound, and Transmission Art (PhD Dissertation, Emory University, Spring 2021)
"McIntyre’s oeuvre of birdsong is not concerned with merely mimicking gone and forgotten birds. Rather, her broadcasts reveal the worlds of these birds, their essential being within it, through the technologies that have both destroyed these animals and brought them back from the dead. In a sense, McIntyre’s practice does just what Heidegger claims a work does: “To be a work means to set up a world.” (...) When McIntyre records the forest and plays it back to itself, she is there with it. McIntyre’s works are simultaneously here and not-here, now and then, physical and intangible, audible and inaudible; the uncanny sonic and ethereal worlds she creates are ones marked by death and disappearance, strangeness and silence, disquiet and discomfort we can feel in our bodies."

Hana Nikcevic, The art of losing: performing ecological loss in contemporary art (MA Thesis, McGill University, 2021)
"In declining to offer a positive, legible aural or visual trace of the laughing owl, Twin signals firstly subverts the violent logic that feminist philosopher of science Donna Haraway has argued underpins taxidermy: writing that the practice “fulfils the fatal desire to represent, to be whole,” she suggests that taxidermy and dioramas present nature in line with human-conceived ideals that could never be assumed by nature itself. In translating the taxidermic laughing owls into imperceptible voids, into instances of non-representation, McIntyre re-situates the laughing owls, symbolically releasing them from subjection within the human system of representation that occasioned their demise. Crucially, this turn away from representation can also be seen to elaborate Twin signals’s primary statement on extinction, in that silence, in this case, is to be perceived as absence. Asking that we attune to the potential that species extinction constitutes remarkable loss with enduring, haunting effects, Twin signals’s silence forecloses the possibility of perceiving the owls’ absence from the landscape with any degree of specificity; all Twin signals discloses about the nature of the owls’ disappearance is that it remains in some way present in the contemporary environment. (...) As such, Twin signals proposes that the intricacies of extinction might be beyond our representational capacities, representable only through silence and thus not representable at all. This impossibility of representing extinction consequently suggests that it operates in excess of our faculties of perception and comprehension. The occasional sounds within the silence of McIntyre’s own movements in the museum also become relevant when considered in relation to Cage’s inspiration; just as the anechoic chamber revealed to Cage the involuntary soundings of his body as a ubiquitous component of ‘silence,’ so does Twin signals propose that the only sounds that might register in an attempted human representation of extinction are those of the artist herself."

Amy Fletcher, "Eavesdropping on Nature," Zoomorphic, issue 9, November 20, 2017
"The soundscape ecologist Bryan Pijanowski, at Purdue University, rightfully asks, “if we disconnect with the sounds of nature, will we continue to respect and sustain nature?” It is a serious question, in fact a crucial one, that brings us full circle to the paradox at the center of soundscape ecology: namely, how can we ensure that the amassing of these sounds, however important in a scientific/ecological sense, won’t finally produce only a Museum of Lost Sounds rather than audibly vital habitats? This is also the point at which soundscape ecology as science elides into art. Huia Transcriptions (...) asks us to listen to a music box in a forest playing the delicate calls of the huia, a New Zealand species of bird that went extinct in 1907 (due primarily to over-hunting by humans who prized its feathers). McIntyre’s work makes us aware that we are listening to the huia at two removes: not only is the huia extinct, but the sounds we hear are actually re-mediations taken from the work of Mr. H. T. Carver, who had the presence of mind to notate the call of the huia in the late 1800s."

Susan Ballard, "Signal Eight Times: Nature, Catastrophic Extinction Events and Contemporary Art," Reading Room: a Journal of Art and Culture, Auckland Art Gallery, issue 7, June 2015
"There is something profoundly beautiful and nostalgic about McIntyre’s reanimated voices that move beyond defence and into an ethics of care. In the human languages of affect “shame” is considered immensely disabling. Yet it is a collective shame that McIntyre addresses and in this she engages much more than melancholy."

Ted Apel, in an interview, 04.02.2014
"The silence of these recordings is very different from Cagian silence in that we are not truly concerned with the sonic characteristics of the silence. I really appreciate this conceptual approach to a field that is dominated by a discourse of assumed ecological content to any soundscape recording. For me, she is pointing at other ways of engaging ecological themes with sound."

Dugal McKinnon, Dead Silence: ecological silencing and environmentally-engaged sound-art, Leonardo Music Journal, vol. 23, 2013
"For contemporary sound artists engaged with environmental matters in which silence plays a role, the question is: How to make dead silence speak? How to represent and deploy it meaningfully and in ways that do not cloak it in the habits of silence associated with Cage and acoustic ecology?"

Cecilia Novero, Birds on Air: Sally Ann McIntyre's Radio Art, Antennae: the Journal of Nature in Visual Culture, issue 27, 2013
"Far from the perspective of a collector, a scientist or a contemplative artist, McIntyre’s transceiver picks up sounds, makes itself present, retransmits them in new forms to the place from where they came, returning them as echoes of the silenced or forgotten histories that also permeate the culture of nature."

Caleb Kelly, Futures from the Field, Hunting for Sound in Nature 6, 2013
"Maybe just below the surface of the nature recording lies the possibility of a critical recording practice, one that doesn’t merely mimic the scientific, nor the nature documentary, or believe in a picture postcard fantasy of nature, way over there. This would be a critical recording practice that questions our assumptions about ecology, rather than continuing long held beliefs in the power of nature."


SPECIFIC EXHIBITION REVIEWS: 

Collected huia notations (like shells on the shore where the sea of living memory has receded) at Constance ARI and the MONA FOMA Festival, 2015

"Noting the shortcomings of reproducing birdsong, the work becomes an exploration of sound recording media. A phonograph, invented in 1877, sits like a relic in the gallery – although it was as common back then as an iPod is now. There’s also a recording of the musical notation on a phonographic wax cylinder, but it’s so fragile it will be destroyed by its own playback, so McIntyre has provided a digital version of the recording. Sidestepping the interactive and performative elements of the other sound pieces at Mofo, McIntyre draws on the mortality of old media to explore how sound gets lost, abstracted and reinvented by new technology."
- Anna Madeleine, "The Sound Art of Mofo 2015: making noise in the art world," The Guardian,
Friday 23 January 2015

Nature Reserves, at GV Art (London), 2013

"Nature Reserves questions whether by imposing names on the natural world we have ourselves created the divide between humanity and nature – but perhaps categorising and naming, while argued to be a violent imposition on a ‘voiceless’ party, is in fact a pure extension of the natural order of things. there is a logic and a rationality inherent in the natural world that is reflected in the way humans have evolved to think: cause precedes effect, related organisms share similar properties, and hierarchies of function exist even without the imposition of a label. as the physicist and philosopher Paul Davies argues, human rational thinking is generated by and dependent upon in the existence of a rational natural world. with this in mind, labelling and categorizing no longer seems ‘violent’ but rather a natural extension of physical categories into our linguistic and conceptual worlds but the real repercussions of our drive to collect and categorise are not so symbiotic with nature. Sally Ann McIntyre’s sound works highlight the damage wreaked on a species subject to the whim of scientific enlightenment. Huia Transcriptions is a mechanical musical notation of the song of the now extinct huia bird from New Zealand. wiped out in 1907 in part due to overzealous natural historians, there are no recordings of its song and only a written account on which McIntyre’s work was based. Collected Silences for Lord Rothschild also confronts the effect of colonialism on New Zealand’s indigenous birds. the recordings of 5 extinct birds, each introduced separately, are acutely silent."
- Cosima Gretton, review in Super Collider, 2013

"Among the many highlights of this exhibition (...), it was Sally Ann McIntyre’s work was the most consistently transfixing as well as the most actively engaged with Jeffrey’s original call. Unfortunately, her pieces are also among the few works that are not currently for sale. McIntyre has two pieces in this show: Huia Transcriptions (2012) and Collected Silences for Lord Rothschild (2012). The Huia piece comprises an audio recording of both bird call and music box representation of this call, the music box and paper by which to play this mechanical call yourself, and a heavily disrupted textual comment on how the bird received its name. McIntyre frustrates the reading process by disrupting and reordering the words into an almost indecipherable recodification, so much so that many may give up trying to get any meaning out of it at all.. Don’t! The reward in deciphering what these words say is the key to the piece. The time you spend poring over these disrupted words echoes the time taken to understand and record the sounding of the Huia itself. McIntyre’s method of slowing down the reader’s perception sets a benchmark for the way in which you go on to engage with the audio piece afterwards. The beauty of this work is facilitated by McIntyre insistence that you enact something of the process by which the Huia’s call was first understood and in doing so, incorporate a realization of how and by what means this knowledge is accessed, processed and stored, first hand. In sharp contrast to the music of the Huia piece, McIntyre’s Collected Silences presents the ugly sound of extinction. This time, there is no music; there are no bird calls. In place of these, we hear only the hum of the building in which these dead birds are stored, the occasional murmur from the body of the artist and the monotonous aural imprint of the audio equipment itself. The presence of each of the small sound reels used to make these recordings, in front of you, suggests a link between the presence of these storage methods and materials and the absence of that which is recorded."
- Mark Westall, review for Fad Magazine, August 28, 2013.

"In Collected Silences for Lord Rothschild we are told that we will be presented with recordings of the now extinct Laughing Owl (or Whekau). You sit there for ages waiting to hear something other than the gentle sound of a camera, but nothing comes. This poignant work of McIntyre highlights the dark side of natural history: that the act of collecting of Huia and Whekau specimens was instrumental in their extinction. These are silences that cannot ever be filled."
- review in At The Interface: Where Art & Science Meet, 2013


SPECIFIC RECORD REVIEWS: 

radio cegeste, three inclements (the ocean does not mean to be listened to), Consumer Waste, 2014

"...recorded all in one day as part of a residency program, the artist made use of an old multiband maritime radio as a receiver, scanning the country and the coast to channel environmental harmonies and recording using a variety of microphones. The work considers the idea of signal and relates historical methods of communication to the evocative sense of a place that has suffered exploitation but also conservation and restoration."
-Aurelio Cianciotta for Neural Magazine, 23 Jan 2015

"An island residency presents the artist with an opportunity to absorb wildness and remoteness and shape it into an intelligible form, to translate otherness into a language that can be shared with those back on the mainland — in short, to colonise. McIntyre’s interests lie elsewhere. Island sounds saturate these three pieces, but they are always intertwined with other elements that counteract the immediacy of the field recordings with a temporal and spatial diffusion. Radio emanates from a point, but extends in all directions. The sounds of Kapiti are broadcast across a transmission gap — historical, geographic, perceptual, semiotic — that turns and transforms them. First track “a lagoon considered against its archival image” is full of hiss and static, with few recognisable environmental or musical sounds, yet its deliberate stop-starting and movement around the stereo field has a strong sense of performance about it — this is the track in which McIntyre’s own presence feels most clearly discernible. This presence, and presentness, begins to wane on second track “study for lighthouse”, despite the sounds of human voices and snatches of music; only a pattern of five clicks suggests deliberate structure. A violin sounds on final track “1897, detail (song for Richard Henry)”, yet it is almost as if the bow is being blown across the strings by the wind, tone and melody arising completely by accident; music in the absence of humans, broadcast from another time perhaps. Radio interference becomes musical, and musical instruments become nature."

"I've been wanting to hear more of Sally McIntyre's (Radio Cegeste) work since her collaboration with Lee Noyes a couple of years back and this one satisfies that desire quite well. Three pieces, each fairly short (total disc time less than a half hour)and concise. The titles make one curious about the contents. "a lagoon considered against its archival image", for instance, a series of statics amidst thunder and rain (one of the inclements), the former tearing jagged holes in the fabric of weather. Some faint beeps (shortwave? two sets of four tones, repeating) can be gleaned through the storm. A marvelous work. I get the sense of more radio involvement in "study for a lighthouse", a bristling sound essay full of both intense activity and plenty of air, the sonorities several plies deep, with a series of five, sharp, hard "taps" repeatedly establishing a harsh surface while hisses, gurgling and perhaps faint voices occupy strata beneath; entirely absorbing. In "1897 (song for Richard Henry), McIntyre unsheathes her "broken violin", wending it through wooly masses of static, birds and (there must be a better name for it) the "woo-woo" you get on shortwaves, normally a sound I'm not terribly fond of (too much baggage) but here, it just manages to fit in. The violin is dark and a bit mournful, evoking an off-tune sea shanty, perhaps, though that thought might be influenced by the preceding nautical imagery. Fine, fine work."
- Brian Olewnick, Just Outside, August 13, 2014

radio cegeste, The New Zealand Storm Petrel (Flaming Pines, Birds of a Feather series), 2013

"Much of Radio Cegeste’s recent work has focused on bird species at the other end of the rareness/ubiquity spectrum from the omnipresent Rainbow Lorikeet. Taking advantage of cultural associations related to radio as time machine, memory device, and communicator with the dead, she has used the medium to perform the spectral calls of extinct birds such as the Huia and the Laughing Owl. The New Zealand Storm Petrel was until very recently believed to be similarly consigned to the fossil record; since the re-discovery of the species in 2003 several of their number have been tracked using radio transmitters, though no recording of their call has yet been made. The piece that bears their name thus uses radio static and interference as a surrogate for absence, marking both the birds’ unheard calls and their disappearance from human observation for over a hundred and fifty years. Haphazard, sliding accordion and strings evoke the freewheeling flight of petrels on ocean winds and the game of hide-and-seek we play with them."
- Nathan Thomas for Fluid Radio 

"as melodies gradually emerge from the ether, one imagines the surprise of discovery, of finding something where nothing was believed to exist. On multiple occasions, the strings subside completely, leaving a trail of electrical discharge. This makes The New Zealand Storm Petrel sound nearly hauntological, an impression of an impression, a memory of a memory."
- Richard Allen for A Closer Listen,  January 7, 2014 

radio cegeste and Lee Noyes, To Orient Themselves with Coastlines (Idealstate Recordings), 2012

"At times the recording seems to be searching for survivors like a rescue team that has found the spot of a submersion, but no debris. It’s the sound of magnetic currents and the feedback of stars, the empty pockets between what is said and what is meant, the unexpressed words, tumbling into silence. As such, it’s an intensely lonely recording, a record of dropped connections, missed opportunities and shipwrecks, one in which the invisible protagonists, attempting to orient themselves with coastlines, find the geography to be as intimidating as the lack of land. [...] there’s more going on here than simple field recordings; disorienting samples and live musical elements are woven in as well. The birds may sound live, but there’s a good chance they’re not; the rain arrives from a pre-recorded source, and the foghorn is an accordion. This additional layer of detachment – the thought of environmental sounds not being environmental – adds to the sense of dislocation, making the screech at 8:05 of “to check their homeward progress” feel like punishment: the friendliest response one receives is the sound of feedback, the crossing of wires. One wonders if a traveler in space might feel the same way, encountering a friendly voice only to discover it to be an echo of a distended, long-lost radio show."
- Richard Allen for A Closer Listen, February 2012

INTERVIEWS:

Jez Riley French interviewed me about my motivations for using Field Recording in my work for his 4 Questions series in 2012, and the interview is archived on the LOCATED SOUND Wordpress; link is HERE

BIBLIOGRAPHY: PUBLISHED REVIEWS, CATALOGUES AND CITATIONS OF CREATIVE WORK (SELECTED):

Allen, Richard. (2014). CD review. A Closer Listen: A Home for Instrumental and Experimental Music
         (online journal)
Ballard, Susan. (2015) “Signal Eight Times: Nature, Catastrophic Extinction Events, and Contemporary
         Art,” Reading Room: A Journal of Art and Culture, Auckland Art Gallery, issue 7
Boyle, Cameron. (2019). “Remembering the Huia: Extinction and Nostalgia in a Bird World”, Animal
         Studies Journal, 8(1), 66-91.
Boyle, Cameron. (2019) “The Silence of the Huia: Bird Extinction and the Archive,” Journal of New
         Zealand & Pacific Studies; v.7 n.2: p.219-236
Burke, Eliza. (2016). "Ghost Biologies", catalogue essay, Contemporary Art Tasmania
Cianciotta, Aurelio. CD review. Neural Magazine 
Cowley, Julian. (2014). CD review. The Wire: Adventures in Modern Music 
Derrick, Reuben. (2014). Acoustic Illuminations: Recorded Space as Soundscape Composition,
         PhD thesis, University of Canterbury 
Fletcher, Amy. (2017). “Eavesdropping on Nature.” Zoomorphic, issue 9.  
         [http://zoomorphic.net/2017/11/eavesdropping-on-nature/]  
Gilmurray, Jonathan. (2018). Ecology and Environmentalism in Contemporary Sound Art. PhD thesis,
         University of the Arts London. 
Heise, Ursula K. (2015) Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species, University
          of Chicago Press.
Hope, Cat. (2020) “From Early Soundings to Locative Listening in Mobile Media Art,” in
         The Routledge Companion to Mobile Media Art. ed. Larissa Hjorth, Adriana de Souza e Silva and
         Klare Lanson, Abingdon: Routledge.
Jefferies, Tom. (2013). "Nature’s Reserves: tracing thoughts and the future of the archive". catalogue
          essay, GV Art, London. 
Kelly, Caleb. (2013). “Futures from the field: Hunting for Sound in Nature 6”,  SoundThoughts (online
          blog/journal) [https://soundthoughts1.wordpress.com/2013/05/24/futures-from-the- 
          field-hunting-for-sound-in-nature-6/]           
Kieniewicz, Johanna. (2013). "A natural arkive", exhibition review.     
          [http://blogs.plos.org/attheinterface/2013/08/15/a-natural-arkive/]
Kooi, Meredith (2021) the ether swaddles me | you | us: Becoming-Khora in Light, Sound, and
         Transmission Art, PhD Thesis, Emory University.
Kooi, Meredith. (2017) "The Chorus at Dawn: An Aesthetics of the Tweet," Art Papers, Fall issue. 
Madeleine, Anna. (2015) “The Sound Art of Mofo 2015: making noise in the art world”, exhibition
          review. The Guardian
McKinnon, Dugal. (2013). "Dead Silence: Ecological Silencing and Environmentally Engaged Sound
          Art." Leonardo Music Journal (2013):. Vol. 23: 71-74.
Nikčević, Hana. (2021). The Art of Losing: Performing Ecological Loss in Contemporary Art. MA
          Thesis. Department of Art History and Communication Studies, McGill University,
Novero, Cecilia. (2013). “Birds on Air: Sally Ann McIntyre's Radio Art”. Antennae: The Journal of Nature
          in Visual Culture, Bioacoustics issue, issue 27, Winter.           
Olewnick, Brian. (2014). CD review. Just Outside         
         [http://olewnick.blogspot.co.nz/2014/08/radio-cegeste-three-inclements-consumer.html] 
Thomas, Nathan. (2014). CD review. Fluid Radio - Experimental Frequencies. 
          [http://www.fluid-radio.co.uk/2014/07/radio-cegeste/] 
Smith, Jacob. (2019). “Episode 1: Three Skeleton Key,” ESC: Sonic Adventure in the Anthropocene.
          University of Michigan Press.  https://www.fulcrum.org/concern/file_sets/fx719n892?locale=en
Warren, Asher. (2018) “Divisive dramaturgy: Community engagement in contemporary mediated
          publics.” Australasian Drama Studies, No.72, Apr 2018: [204]-237.
Wendt, Ralf. (2019) “Ghosts”, Radio Revolten: 30 Days of Radio Art, Spektor Books, Leipzig, 257-262. 
Wright, Mark P. (2022) Listening After Nature: Field Recording, Ecology, Critical Practice. Bloomsbury Publishing USA.