This is Rogue Syntax - Contexts No. 2 with Felicity Mangan. Felicity is a sound artist and composer based in Berlin who works with the varying timbres of animal voices combining them into quasi bio-acoustic environments.

She has recordings out on Longform Editions and Mappa Editions, and you can check her stuff out on felicitymangan.org

We’re hosting some of her field recordings here as context for the next episode in which we examine the complexities of animal communications and one of the things we’re trying to do is break down the hard border between animal communications and human language.

Alistair Pennycook has been a guiding light in this research and in his book Applied Post-Human Linguistics he states:

“we can start to think of language, cognition and agency not merely as distributed across different people but rather as distributed beyond human boundaries and as playing an active role in a world that is not limited to human activity alone.”

While eco-feminist scholar Val Plumwood says,

“Human/nature dualism is a double-sided affair, destroying the bridge between the human and the non-human from both ends, as it were, for just as the essentially human is disembodied, disembedded and discontinuous from the rest of nature, so nature and animals are seen as mindless bodies, excluded from the realms of ethics and culture.”

So if we’re going to look at animal communications we’re going to have to get embodied, embedded and continuous - and one of the ways we can do that is to listen to animal voices and bodies in their contexts, and of course field recordings are a great way to do that.

So here’s a selection of field recordings by Felicity with comments, we hope you enjoy them.