This week, we examine the sounds humans make in order to monitor, repel, and control beasts. Author Mandy-Suzanne Wong’s Listen, We All Bleed is a creative nonfiction monograph that explores the human-animal relationship through animal-centered sound art. We’ll hear works by Robbie Judkins, Claude Matthews, and Colleen Plumb, interwoven with Wong’s unflinchingly reflective prose. By turns beautiful and harrowing, these sounds and words reposition us, kindling empathy as we listen through non-human ears.

Links to works by the artists heard in this episode:

Mandy Suzanne-Wong’s Listen, We All Bleed. 

Robbie Judkins: Homo Tyrannicus, "Pest" (video), live in London, 2017

Claude Matthews: “DogPoundFoundSound (Bad Radio Dog Massacre)”

Colleen Plumb: "Thirty Times a Minute" (homepage), indoor installation (video)

Transcript

[ethereal music plays]

[CRIS CHEEK]

This…is…Phantom Power.

[pig grunting]

[MACK HAGOOD]

Episode 10.

[CRIS]

Animal Control.

[MANDY SUZANNE WONG]

If humans did this to each other, they call it sonic warfare, terrorism or crowd control, depending on who did it and whom they did it to. They call the end result for the victims, that is post traumatic stress, but skunks aren’t human. They’re not even pets. Not like your spaniel who clearly enjoys notions of his own. Can a skunk suffer post traumatic stress? Aren’t they just wild animals? Yes and yes, sound is contact. Fear is a weapon. The wild is here.

[sounds fade out]

[MACK]

Welcome back to another episode of Phantom Power, where we explore the world of sound in the arts and humanities, I’m Mack Hagood.

[CRIS]

And I’m cris cheek.

[MACK]

Hi, cris.

[CRIS]

Hi Mack. How you doing?

[MACK]

I’m okay. We’ve got an interesting episode in store today I think.

[CRIS]

Good.

[MACK]

I spoke with an author of fiction and nonfiction work. Her name is Mandy Suzanne Wong. She hails from Bermuda. She’s got a PhD from the University of California in Los Angeles. You may have heard of the place.

[CRIS]

I have. she’s very interdisciplinary right?

[MACK]

Yeah, she’s another person that I met through that crazy conference for science literature and the arts. Like the other person that we met.

[CRIS]

Brian House.

[MACK]

Brian House, yeah. The other person we met at that conference, Brian House. She has a concern with animals and the sounds of animals and sound art about animals.

[CRIS]

Right, it seems like she is a creative writer in short fiction and also has a novel coming out this year. It seems like she is also an essayist about sound almost a creative nonfiction thinking about sound is that right?

[MACK]

Yeah, and she’s got this manuscript that she recently finished and it’s called “Listen, We All Bleed.” It’s her critical response to a number of sound art pieces that focus on the human animal relationship through sound. So, on today’s show we’re going to listen to four pieces of audio that Mandy Suzanne Wong has writte...