Spore Score • Alchymy, North Wall

Spore Score, 2021 | Composer & Sound Designer

”What do you do when your world starts to fall apart? I go for a walk, and if I’m really lucky, I find mushrooms.”

- Anna Tsing

In Spore Score, performance duo Emergency Chorus and sound designer Alice Boyd collaborate to contemplate the inner life of fungi.

Fragments of text from wide-ranging sources percolate, whilst an ever-changing soundscape emerges from music improvised using the guidance of a spore print. Inspired by John Cage’s Indeterminacy, the minute-long texts are randomly selected from a bank of options, and the sound created separately: each part recorded in isolation.

The resulting composition mines elements of chance, audio processing and environmental data to explore the fruitful collaboration between humans, fungi and technology, asking how we might listen in new ways to the natural world, and how it speaks to us under jeopardy.

About the Artists

Created by Clara Potter-Sweet, Ben Kulvichit and Alice Boyd, after John Cage
Music Alice Boyd
Violin Ben Kulvichit

Created for Alchymy Festival at the North Wall Art Centre, Oxford.