Galaxy Express 555 Chris Farstad / 555

Water Has Nothing To Say And Neither Do I is a site-specific sound piece for treated boat and radio. Taking inspiration from treated piano techniques developed by John Cage, sound artist Anthony Janas treated a 25 foot sailboat with hydrophones and contact microphones and processed them through a modular synthesizer, creating the base recording used for this episode.

During the course of the vessel’s journey from the Adler Planetarium to the 31st Street Beach, the water, waves, and wind "performed" the piece—with Janas acting as the conductor of the ship. A radio broadcast antenna placed on the vessel transmitted the performance to the audience on shore. Audience members were provided with handheld radios and were encouraged to walk up and down the shore to observe the boat from afar, listening to the interactions of their environment with the composition produced on the vessel.

The recording of this event was transformed by additional synthesizer treatments into a collaborative, meditative sound piece, substituting "we" for "I" and offering a new take on Janas' 2016 Transmission Arts project.

Environments is a series created by producer and sound recordist Irv Teibel (1938–2010) for Syntonic Research Inc. between 1969 and 1979.

The series consists of recordings of natural sounds such as a seashore with crashing waves or a thunderstorm with falling rain, without musical accompaniment. Mr. Teibel's work helped to ignite a worldwide interest in field recordings—which resulted in many imitations being released throughout the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, both with and without music.

The sound collage presented here is the result of the compilation of Environments 1-11 (of the LP iteration of the series) into a curated progression of simultaneous events. These “impossible spaces” are designed to create a dissonance of orientation, staging a strange cacophony from what originally were intended to be methods of relaxation.

The sixth installment of Galaxy Express 555 is a nexus of personal catharsis and abstract geographic resonance, as inexplicable to its creator as is may seem to its intended audience. Using the Renaissance composer William Byrd’s “Miserere Mei” as a starting point, a MIDI file of the 16th century composition was executed through a synthesizer at 5 BPM, turning a roughly 2.5 minute motet into over three hours of audio data. This sample was then cut down to 25 minutes over a period of weeks. The final composition is paired with an excerpt of a very unique field recording of silence taken in the afternoon of 20 December, 2011 by Belgian sound artist Peter Lenaerts.

The fifth installment of Galaxy Express 555 features excerpts from a daily sound diary kept by sound artist and musician Natalia Beylis throughout 2013. Focusing on the practice of intensive listening, her work under the Sunken Hum moniker investigates the pure sonic fact of everyday events, translating her life in the wilderness of northwestern Ireland into the common language of awareness.

Episode four is made possible throughout the steadfast work of biodiversity research teams networked by the EU-Asia GRID (Global and Regional Integrated Data Centers). As part of their research, a team of scientists at the Khao Luang National Park in Southern Thailand captured the evening chorus of the moist evergreen arboreal biome. The setting synthesized for this episode is the product of a time-collapsed sampling of recordings made by this research team from 17:00 to 21:30 on December 9, 2014 CE.

Sound artist Félix Blume’s extensive library helps to create this collage of sound from either side of the Mexican/American border. Oil pumps in California and samples of a Pemex protest in Mexico City are woven together with the sounds of the Nearctic desert and Sian Ka'an Biosphere Reserve to pay homage to the depth of our global interconnection.