Site-specific performance project for two improvisers with native flora, electronic feedback, and household implements.
Unscored; variable duration (often 20-40 mins).
Developed by Reed Wixson and Oliver George-Brown at the Burns-Piñon Ridge Reserve (Mojave Desert, CA).
Xylocyclos has been performed in different ecological niches across the USA and in Australia. Recent performances include:
- International Conference for New Interfaces in Musical Expression (NIME); Australian National University, Canberra, June 2025
- Transverse Range Art Showcase; Yucca Valley, CA, May 2025
- Sound + Science 3.0 Symposium; Fowler Museum, UCLA, May 2025
- Sounds of De/Composition Conference; NYU, November 2024
Program Notes
Xylocyclos (2024 - ongoing) is a site-specific project originally developed in California’s Mojave Desert, having since travelled across the United States and to Australia. Each performance features timber native to the performance site. For our performance at NIME, we foraged our timber co-performers — our organic interfaces — up at Galambary/Black Mountain, on Ngunnawal country. Our instruments comprised bark and branches from scribbly gum (Eucalyptus rossi), brittle gum (E. mannifera), and broad-leaved peppermint gum (E. dives), as well as a particularly exciting follicle cone of Wallum Banksia (Banksia aemula). When we perform at our field-research site, our specimens typically include teddybear cholla (Cylindropuntia bigelovii), Joshua tree (Yucca brevifolia), California juniper (Juniperus californica), and Mojave yucca (Yucca schidigera).
When performing Xylocyclos, we attach inexpensive transducers and homemade piezo microphones to create feedback loops within the timber itself. The signal is minimally processed: there are no pre-recorded sounds, only the natural frequencies of the wood reinforcing themselves and being amplified through pieces of bark. Xylocyclos is a portmanteau deriving from the Greek "xylo" (wood) and "cyclos" (cycle). Thinking carefully through the provenance, treatment, and materiality of our salvaged timber, we activate physical and poetic resonances across multiple cyclical scales. The sonic feedback operates at the scale of audible sound-waves. Moving the contact microphone mere millimetres can effect a profound shift in the overall sonic texture. We conceive of this as a sonic reimagination of micro-fluctuations within the natural environment, where minute variations in desert topology determine the way a rivulet chooses its course; where the play of sun and shadows determines the capacity of a plant to photosynthesise; where a pollinator’s peregrinations determine which plants propagate.
At this broader ecological scale, we are also thinking about cycles of life and death: our timber is all biologically dead, all in a transitional phase between aliveness and total decomposition. When reanimating the branches as sonic beings we emphasise their roles as sonically unpredictable co-performers. Rather than attempting to control the timber or its sonic output, we instead afford the branches a degree of agency, performing a non-hierarchical act of creative collaboration with these organic entities.
Further Performances & Documentation
