Musical Environment
Brad Nath
Volume One, Issue One, “Atmosphere,” Music
Stasis is one thing that Brad Nath’s music sounds like; envelopment, too. It’s all frantic and stillness and it churns like the sharp flow of air inside a space that’s smaller than itself, because that’s sort of what it is. Nath embeds contact microphones in construction materials — concrete, silicone, plaster, wax, dirt — to get at how our built world sounds at scales we don’t see. His contribution to this issue casts concrete, silicone, and plaster ringing and lugubrious; taps and thick billows, the strange sonic expressions of a building block, keep rhythm beneath the stuttering shrillness of the same thing at some other register. Like atmospheres, these are sounds that, in their ooze through the things around them, imbricate themselves, too.
Nath’s accompanying photographs visualize the stuff his music sets to sound. Taken while drying concrete blocks were made to vibrate at their resonant frequencies, the images register, in almost cosmic terms, the formative interaction between sound and substance. At once earthy and astral, they are odd, intimate looks at the most manufactured material on the planet.
—The Editors
Brad Nath is developing listening techniques that compose new forms of empathy between humans and their environments. His material research, live performances, music, and sound structures intend to expose the ways humans are terraforming Earth by revealing the sonic processes below the surface of the world we are building for ourselves — often his process involves amplifying bricks in an effort to deeply listen to one of the fundamental modules of the Anthropocene.
Nath is currently enrolled in the Masters of Solo/Dance/Authorship program at HZT in Berlin and holds a Bachelor of Architecture degree from Cornell University in New York where he studied Sound Art with Marianthi Papalexandri-Alexandri in the Department of Music. His thesis, titled “Acoustectonics,” was advised by professors in both the Architecture and Music departments and was awarded a medal by the faculty for its outstanding merit. He has performed and exhibited his work at the ARSENĀLS Exhibition Hall of the Latvian National Museum of Art, the Berlin Performing Arts Festival, Potsdamer Tanztage, the Amplify residency at ACUD Macht Neu, the Ferrara Sotto Le Stelle in Northern Italy, the Field Kitchen Academy, the In Parallel Spaces Festival in Leipzig, the Cesis Art Festival in Latvia, the Faculty of Music in the University of Toronto, the AIAS event Crit X Live in New York, and spaces throughout Berlin where he has been living since the summer of 2018.