Preorder ‡ Milo Thesiger-Meacham, Audible Heat
£12.50
Tenement #17 / ISBN: 978-1-917304-08-5
90pp [Approx.] / 140 x 216mm
Edited by Dominic Jaeckle
Designed and typeset by Traven T. Croves
Forthcoming, 28.02.25
With an introduction by Ed Baxter.
•
A manuscript shortlisted for the inaugural edition
of the Prototype Prize, 2024, a eulogy to the sonic
influence and cultural inferences of the sound of the
cicada. A train of thought on the multiform significations
and significance of the cicada’s purr and hum; a dissection
and deconstruction of the insect as emblem; a wild and
associative suite of fragments on the evocations of
background noise when brought to the fore.
•
Milo Thesiger-Meacham‘s Audible Heat is a rich and rambling walkabout of a work that aims to map a reticulated, cultural biography of the sound of the cicada. Equal parts academic argument, travelogue, and critical collage, this synthesis of ideas pulls upon a wide-ranging bibliography of materials to examine the omnipresent sound of the cicada as ‘audible heat’ throughout human history and culture. Herein, this climatic sound of the cicada acts as a conduit between ecology, identity and mortality, and the cicada’s sonic inference emerges as a codification of the unknown and unfamiliar—as a spiritual weathervane in desert settings—and as a means of teasing out the sensorial limits of human understanding.
In Audible Heat, Thesiger-Meacham sits himself in a field of enquiry and in dialogue with voices various, ancient, and modern, such as Douglas Yanega of the University of California, folk musician Matthias Loibner—author Catherine McNeur—and Gene Kritsky, developer of Cicada Safari (see here), a public app which tracks the mass emergence of periodical cicadas across North America, in a transversal network of interlinked, informational nodes.
Herein, we’ve the sonic-induced anxieties of 17th, 18th and 19th-century colonists in Northeastern America—notably the largely unknown career of entomologist Margaretta Morris—and the apocalyptic premonitions of the indigenous Wampanoag; Greek tongue twisters; the poetry of Ibn Quzmān and Harry Crosby; African-American mathematician Benjamin Banneker’s lost wooden clock; Socrates's fear of dehydration; the geopolitical tensions embedded in Southern Spain as Al-Andalus (سُلَدْنَألا); Plato’s Phaedrus; a history of the hurdy-gurdy; Geronimo’s hatred of telegraphy; contemporary and historical entomologies; the slurred, slow body language of Clint Eastwood; insects on the film sets of Sergio Leone's Spanish Westerns; squinting; tanning; metamorphosis; acts of violence in Once Upon a Time in the West (1968); military reenactments of the Battle of Marathon; the botanist Donald C. Peattie’s existential dread; ancient cooking implements; riverside trees hills, and their symmetric reflections in still water... All ideas emanating from the acoustical atmospherics inherent to the cicada’s song.
•
A wonderful bringing together of natural and cultural histories.
Tom McCarthy
A work of great refinement and intelligence, entailing some beautifully crafted surprises.
Elizabeth Price
Beautifully written.
Bhanu Kapil
•
See here for a further word on this title.
See here for details on the 2024 edition of the Prototype Prize—judged by McCarthy, Price & Kapil—and co-run by Jess Chandler (Prototype) and Rory Cook (Monitor).
•
Stickered editions will carry a cover adornment; a photograph by the author; Opuntia cacti / Prickly Pear Cacti (© 2019).
•
Milo Thesiger-Meacham is an artist, composer, performer, broadcaster, and artistic director of the community arts radio stations Resonance FM and Resonance Extra. In 2022 he was commissioned by the European Capital of Culture to create ‘Body Edit Mind,’ a twenty-two-hour long audio work comprising six thousand discrete pieces of found material, and he has worked on solo and group projects for Tate Modern, The V&A Museum, the Centre for Contemporary Arts Glasgow, London and Paris Fashion Weeks, Radiophrenia, Café OTO, Iklectik, Tenement Press, the European Poetry Festival, Waste Paper Opera, Lewisham Arthouse, Radio Revolten, IvyNODE & Tierra Vivente, Echoraeume amongst others.
Ed Baxter is a radio-artist, writer, cultural producer, and an Associate Lecturer in the Screen School at London College of Communication, University of the Arts London. Baxter won a BASCA Composer Award in 2013, and his previous publications include the co-edited Works of Thomas De Quincey (twenty-one volumes; Pickering & Chatto, 2000). Baxter co-founded Resonance FM in 1998.