Tomoko Sauvage’s In the Liquid Amber Within the Ivory Porcelain takes its title from Okakura Kakuzo’s Book of Tea (1906), which describes how early tea practitioners took great pleasure in – and paid ritualistic attention to – the bubbles rising in boiling water. The piece combines amplified singing bubbles produced by unglazed, porous ceramic elements with hydrophonic feedback, all performed using Sauvage’s ‘waterbowls’ – porcelain vessels filled with water and fitted with hydrophones. This elemental setup generates a vivid, continuously shifting sonic interplay.

Jana Irmert’s Portals is composed entirely from recordings made in the Amazon rainforest in Brazil and Colombia, where sound life continues beyond human range – in ultrasonic registers, underwater, and deep within the forest’s dense acoustic fabric. Insects, frogs, bats, and freshwater dolphins move in and out of perception, their calls transposed and revealed without losing the strangeness of their origin. Irmert reshapes these signals into a vivid sound-world, attentive and precise, as the forest’s unseen presence becomes perceivable and shifting at the threshold of the audible.

Banshee by François J. Bonnet listens toward the far reaches of the old world, where land breaks into coasts, harbours, fjords, peninsulas and archipelagos. Built from recordings gathered in the Inner Hebrides, it binds fauna, flora, climate, and human traces into a single, tightly-woven fabric. A small boat cleaving through a loch becomes the voice of the mountains and wilderness, and the howling of the wind on the moors becomes the lament of a Banshee, harbinger of death, messenger of the Other World.