Atrium Display- Zoophoneum: The Sonified Wilderness
The Zoophoneum began its conceptual life in 2015 when artist and curator David Samas was co-curating his first exhibition of imaginary instruments with the Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments; an exhibition which included illustrator and sound sculptor Monte Thrasher. Samas’s unique focus on biological sources reflects his deep and abiding respect for the natural world and the earthlings who share it. This instrument was conceived to give voices to our sylvan neighbors, whether they be animal, mineral or vegetable; not to force them into some human idea of music, but to discover their own endemic soundscapes. While it might be possible to “realize” many of the concepts in Zoophoneum, to do so would violate Samas’ ethical standards as a vegan; believing firmly, as he does, that all life is precious and that no being should have its autonomy reduced to a prop in some arrogant fancy; and that we are all persons, human and non-human alike.
Here you can see 6 plates from this instrument illustrated by Monte Thrasher:
Bowed Timbre: bowing branches is a known technique but what if we could allow the whole tree to resonate?
Dawn Keyboard: a method for live sampling birdsong with sunlight.
Animalia: a ziggurat of critters making the sounds they make best.
Rabbit Leslie: neutral buoyancy balloons used to spacialize sound output from the Zoophoneum.
Sonicillin: a rare mold which incapacitates its host with ecstatic musical hallucinations.
Parrot Dictionary: a chatty flock of the earths most evolved living samplers which can construct poly-lingual words or pure vocal sounds.
Monte Thrasher grew up among the prop shops, animators, sculptors and set painters of Burbank California. Craft awakens the senses and and leads to art. A contributor to now-legendary Experimental Musical Instrument magazine, Thrasher has worked in sound sculpture since the early 80s. A critic/aesthetician as well as instrument builder, He is seeking the breakthrough that will deliver this orphan art form to the mass audience it deserves.
Thrasher studied sound sculpture under Bill and Mary Buchen at SFSU, designed for motion pictures, TV and film (Star Trek the Next Generation, Steve Martin’s LA Story, Starship Troopers). He has received two certificates of merit from the City of Los Angeles for work as a muralist, fell into toy and collectables design and wrote a patent for a marvelous new material that’s as fun and versatile as fluorescent color. His art influences include Bela Bartok, R. Buckminster Fuller, Bob Crumb’s ZAP artists, the Baschet brothers, Brian Eno and the Surrealists.
David Samas is a composer, curator, conceptual artist, instrument inventor, and social sculptor. A queer, native San Franciscan from a mixed immigrant roots, David got his a BFA from the SF Art Institute in conceptual art in 2000 and studied poetics at the New College of California. He performed with the SF Boys Chorus, SF Opera and SF Symphony (receiving a GRAMMY, 1994 for best classical recording). His paintings hang in the Di Rosa collection and showed at the Diego Rivera and Canessa Galleries. He has performed at the Exploritorium, Grace Cathedral, YBCA, Cal Shakes, Bing Hall, the Asian Art Museum, CCRMA, the SF Conservatory of Flowers and the Center for New Music where he also curates the Window Gallery for Invented Instruments with Bart Hopkin. He was Artistic Director of the Turquoise Yantra Grotto from 2011-2016, a house concert series for free improv and ethno-modernism and curator for season 16 of Meridian’s Composers in Performance. He gives back to his communities by teaching inventing workshops through Thingamajigs (Oakland), where he is director of community outreach.