study for a stranding in 1861 (kia tūpato/beware) was a work initially made under the auspices of the Cities and Memory Polar Sounds project, which involved selected artists taking a single sound from the Helmholtz Center for Polar and Marine Research, and artistically interpreting this under the umbrella theme of Anthropogenic Climate Change.
study for a stranding in 1861 (kia tūpato/beware) extends and is very much indebted to sounds, methods, and ideas that emerged through the two-year research process of the site-specific collaborative group composition Nocturne: Sonic Migrations (created with Dani Kirby, Matt Warren and Eliza Burke) that was performed on the Hobart/nipaluna waterfront in February 2022. It's a small solo coda to this more extensive project, that also has a lot of relation to prior work I've made on pelagic themes, such as The New Zealand Storm Petrel EP released as part of Flaming Pines 'Birds of a Feather' series almost a decade ago.
I wrote the following notes for the composition:
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study for a stranding in 1861 (kia tūpato/beware)
Polar Sounds Project: sound no. #044
Region: Arctic
Title: Seismic airgun (close take)
Description: "Seismic shooting is used for exploring the seafloor for oil and gas deposits. It involves ships travelling along the ocean blasting soundwaves through an airgun. These sound waves echo back and are captured by hydrophones. This process can be harmful to marine life."
Location: 79.0002, 5.6687
Credit: CC-BY 4.0 Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Center for Polar and Marine Research 2022.
Title of Track: study for a stranding in 1861 (kia tūpato/beware)
Duration: 14:12
Artist: Sally Ann McIntyre/radio cegeste
Process/Description: Sally Ann McIntyre (aka radio cegeste), is an Australian/New Zealand sound and radio artist who uses micro radio as a site-specific and live performance instrument. Her work investigates cultural histories of "nature," particularly as they relate to recorded sound, and the construction of the library and museum within settler colonial contexts. Themed around place and ecological displacement, memory/loss and the relationship of mediated representation to species extinction, her work has been described as "taking advantage of cultural associations related to radio as time machine, memory device, and communicator with the dead.” In addition to exploring the sounds and silences of colonial-era species extinctions in Aotearoa New Zealand, constructing her own sound libraries and counter-archives, her projects have listened-with non-human creatures who inhabit a sphere rife with other channels, not available to the human senses, often using devices that translate signals across frequency spectrums.
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"study for a stranding in 1861 (kia tūpato/beware)" uses Helmholtz Center for Polar and Marine Research library sound #044 as the basis of a composition that explores the phenomenon of seismic shooting for oil exploration, and the link to both whale beaching (via sonic disorientation of finely-tuned Cetacean communicative channels) and Anthropogenic Climate Change.
In the process, the piece draws on longer histories of the mediation of the oceanic environment by anthropogenic sound, a cultural development itself arguably indebted to the extraordinary communicative and navigational abilities of Cetaceans and other non-human creatures at home within the different ecology of this medium/media, inhabiting a sphere (sense of planet) that sees them use the ocean like a telephone or a shortwave radio, a non-human cultural practice that pre-dates the European experimental investigation of radio waves, sonar, radar, etc, by millions of years.
In addition to the use of sound #044, which can be heard as a dull, monotonous distant thud throughout the piece, source material for "study for a stranding in 1861 (kia tūpato/beware)" includes ocean field recordings made at Taroona and Verona Sands on the coast of lutruwita/Tasmania, a region that has seen several unprecedented mass whale strandings in recent years, the most recent of which, resulting in the deaths of over 200 pilot whales, occurring while the piece was being composed. Instrumentation includes accordion and zither recordings that have been harnessed to provide a range of textures and tones, partially in the service of mimicking polar natural Geophonic phenomena such as sea ice and aurora "natural radio" sounds, as well as Anthropophonic/Anglo-Western cultural sounds such as the creaking hulls of 19th century ships.
Several recordings made at the offices of TMR (Tasmanian Maritime Radio), the state's official Coast Radio Service, whose services routinely include providing a listening watch on VHF and HF distress and calling channels, pay homage to the state's pioneering (1911–1914) Antarctic radio link, established when Radio was still a new technology. Other source sounds from the artist's extensive physical record library of the mediated history of anthropogenic ocean sounds, and related cultural material, include a recording of a Sofar (Sound fixing and Ranging) bomb and other demonstrations of undersea communications audio from the 1968 album "Sound in the Sea" produced by the Electro Marine Sciences Division of Marine resources, and the run-out grooves of a 78rpm recording of the song "Asleep in the deep" recorded in 1913 by Wilfred Glenn and the Victor Orchestra.
This last record's refrain "many great hearts are asleep in the deep, so beware, beware..." is the key to the title of the piece, which is a reference to a report of the stranding of a massive white sperm whale, washed up on the black sands of Whatipu, a remote beach on the west coast of the Auckland Region in the North Island of New Zealand in 1861. Local Māori, who in their role as kaitiaki (guardians of the land, sea and sky), had arrived to greet the whale, reported that on the second night of their stay, the whale gave an enormous groan, then spoke to them. The creature said, “Kia tūpato” ("beware"). These indigenous guardians, believing the giant, ancient, battle scarred whale, that had over 20 harpoons embedded in its flesh, had prophesied the end of the world, and that death and destruction were coming, immediately put a rāhui (a form of tapu) on its carcass, but this wasn't respected by a group from Auckland Museum, who arrived to remove its gigantic teeth and 10 of the harpoons, mutilating the carcass in the process.
Some sources say this ancient sperm whale's beaching on an Auckland shore may have been the last resting place of the whale that earlier inspired Melville to write 'Moby-Dick; or, The Whale' (1851), a story that remains as tantalising as it is potentially fanciful. The white whale's rage, famously, was spurred by the hunting and destruction of its pod, in a small part of the slaughter of millions of whales for whale-oil between the 17th – 20th centuries, in a near-complete destruction of several species, a violent bio-extractive process which fuelled the Industrial revolution.
This fact gives additional substance to the whale's apocalyptic predictions from beyond the grave; it's germane within this example to think about the beached leviathan as having suffered its own apocalyptic moment, reporting as one of the last survivors from an interspecies war, that was about to change its focus to another extractive resource: fossil capitalism. At the time the indigenous cultures of Aotearoa were also facing the early years of the centuries of colonisation, a process which unravelled their cultural fabric and its emphasis on complex co-constituted more-than-human relationships with endemic creatures. The Pakeha (white settlers), of course, didn't listen, and plundered the whale's body for museological treasure, as they had hunted it in life. Their descendants are still intent on mining fossil fuels for profit at all costs, endangering not only themselves but the less culpable, including indigenous cultures and the nonhuman, and indeed all life on earth.
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