Plants Speak Electric

As I’ve probably said too many times already on here, I love generative music and generative anything a ton. When I was much younger I thought it was just the lazy version of whatever was in question, but at some point along the way it started to click for me that it was something closer to a window into the living structures of anything. If life is a type of architecture where the buildings assemble themselves, in some sense generative music comes from tuning in to them whistling while they work, and I was struck this morning while I was listening to “Lavender” below that if you could hook sensors up to your hometown, you could also make music from the lives of everyone you grew up with. Much of what makes our experience of being alive beautiful is being seated in a specific place at a specific moment within the great machine. We’ll all die someday having seen very little of everything that there is, but I don’t think that limitation is something to resist. I have a sense that even if we had seen it all we would have wanted to sit down again in the grass somewhere and relax back into just looking up, and this sort of music feels that same way to me. A limited, organic symphony that goes on maybe forever in the dark, with roots that stretch as far into ourselves as they do into the soil itself.

You can listen to Lavender below, and find Shane Mendonsa’s Bandcamp page here.