Phoenix Conspires is an audio work that supports and offers individual voices from across Earth to speak to the drastic changes occurring in this historical moment. Through excerpts of conversations, recordings of protests, and the words of world leaders, Phoenix Conspires explores the interconnectedness of police brutality, Covid-19 and the healthcare system, environmental destruction, and economic inequality. It offers collective visions for the future.
AC: COULD YOU SPEAK ABOUT YOUR BACKGROUND AND THE INSPIRATION BEHIND PHOENIX CONSPIRES?
AS: I’ve been a musician for over fifteen years now and have performed in a pretty broad range of musical settings, from jazz and experimental music to rock, pop, and folk. I am primarily a percussionist, although I dabble with piano and guitar, and I’ve more recently developed an interest in found object percussion and Foley art.
My academic background is in philosophy and religious studies, both of which have deeply influenced my artwork. How could they not? While attending Harvard Divinity School where my research focused on music as an avenue for self-understanding, I joined Vision Lab, an experimental arts and research collective that creates work on the intersection of the philosophical, religious, and creative realms. Phoenix Conspires arose out of Vision Lab conversations that we’ve had since Covid hit. Back when I started this project, one of our members, Kythe Heller, was preparing a book of poetry titled Firebird for publication. After some discussion, we all decided to create works based on the theme of the phoenix. We’ve had some wonderful work that has included woodblock prints, collective dream mythology, and writings on the act of believing in a “post-truth” world.
AC: WHY THE PHOENIX? AND HOW DID THAT COME TO BE THE BASIS FOR PHOENIX CONSPIRES?
AS: It was somewhat arbitrary that Kythe’s Firebird book came out this spring, since she had been working on it for a while; but the phoenix seemed to us to be an incredibly appropriate metaphor for what is going on in the world now. It’s really a perfect metaphor for all time since it’s about generative growth and life force. In the case of my work, a phoenix formed from collective breathing, the idea arose out of a discussion at a Vision Lab meeting. A collaborator mentioned that the Latin root of “conspire” is “conspirare”, literally meaning “to breathe together.” I immediately thought about how amazing it would be to create a sound-based phoenix made up of multiple breaths. Our time is one in which the breath is a focal point for so many important issues. George Floyd was literally asphyxiated by a police officer and protesters across the States chant, “I can’t breathe”. We’re in the middle of a global pandemic of a respiratory illness that causes some people to end up on ventilator machines. And we wear masks to block our breath. The smoke from fires on the West Coast fueled by our destruction of the earth are inhibiting healthy breathing… So I did a call out to friends, family, and acquaintances for recordings of breath, statements about our current times, and hopes for the future. The rest of the project took off from there.
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AC: WHAT AN AMAZING IDEA THAT BREATH IS REALLY A COMMON THREAD THROUGH ALL OF OUR COLLECTIVE CRISES. WHAT WAS YOUR PROCESS IN CREATING THE CONTEXT OUT OF WHICH THE PHOENIX ARISES IN THIS WORK?
AS: Many of our Vision Lab discussions about rebirth and renewal out of chaos and destruction revolved fairly consistently around U.S. politics and the direction the country is taking. There are plenty of serious problems to address. Covid-19, racism, inadequate leadership, wealth inequality, and climate change are just a few. When I started thinking about how I wanted the piece to take shape, the States were in the middle of protests in response to Floyd’s murder. I ultimately decided that starting the work exactly where we were in the moment would be the most fitting way to begin. And seeing so many people from all walks of life rise up in protest of racism was so incredibly powerful. I wanted to make stark comparisons, too, for the listener to really hear the absurdity of the two opposing realities Americans inhabit. After my call for recordings, I ended up with an amazing selection of sound material: protests and prayers, speeches and songs. These became the materials that I pieced together.
AC: SO YOUR PROMPT WAS QUITE OPEN-ENDED THEN?
AS: Yes. I made the prompt open-ended because I wanted the final product to be a combination of diverse voices – friends with very different backgrounds and religious traditions from around Earth. I’ve taken to using “Earth” instead of “the planet” because “the planet” sounds so distant and sterile, a mere object to be manipulated for human ends…. I wanted the recordings themselves to be natural and not overly-curated. And when it comes to addressing many social issues, I figured the best way for me to do this was to support multiple voices, many of whom are speaking from personal experience and saying what needs to be said. I wanted to explore a somewhat de-centered way of making art. The finished piece is still from my perspective because I made the arrangement to make explicit the various connections, but I approached the work more as a curator of voices than as a speaker or director.
AC: PHOENIX CONSPIRES HAS SOMEWHAT OF A NARRATIVE ARC TO IT, WITH THE BREATH BUILDING AND FADING THROUGHOUT. HOW DO YOU THINK THIS NARRATIVE SPEAKS TO OUR CURRENT SITUATION?
AS: The transitions in the piece came about quite naturally since all of these issues are connected. Wealth inequality has implications on racial justice issues, which are related to public health and varying mortality rates of Covid-19. Covid is directly related to globalization, which is, in turn, a relevant issue when we think about our culture’s destruction of the planet. This is what I want people to see and understand. Everything relates to everything. Unfortunately, our country is so divided, and not just along party lines. My hope is that Phoenix Conspires offers some unique and interesting perspectives that listeners can connect and empathize with. I hope my work lays bare some common values, whether moral, political, or spiritual. An understanding of shared values is precisely what we need now. I don’t want to be naïve about it. I have no delusions that we will learn about each other, suddenly see eye-to-eye, and turn our society around overnight. That said, I do believe the revolution will be full of creative thought, prayer – or insight or humble acknowledgment of our own shortcomings and inadequacies – whatever you want to call it, and plenty of music. It has to. That’s why I was stoked to include the firebird song at the end, sung by my good friend, Lady Dia Ewila. I told her about this project early on and a few weeks later we were at a (socially-distanced) birthday gathering in the woods. I was drumming with my friend, Randy, and Dia started singing… It was a good time. As I made the piece, there were constantly new parts to add, with Covid peaking, the fires on the west coast, and Ruth Bader-Ginsburg dying. I just kept seeing the themes and connections, adding new clips to the piece, and the narrative kept growing. From a listener’s perspective, I see the work as a time capsule of the moment with the end being an offering of the energy we need to change our direction. There aren’t any absolute statements about what the future should or shouldn’t be, but there are constructive and humble attitudes present, with some beautiful hopes.
AC: WHAT ROLE DO YOU THINK ART PLAYS IN SOCIETY?
AS: It seems to me that artists, at least some artists, are somehow able to foresee the future… Our political ideas are often limited or constrained by language. Art gives us a way to feel and think beyond the limits of language. All art does this, even poetry, which uses language to go beyond language in a koan-like way. Art that is created to be deeply experienced and not merely consumed has the power to reshape our cultural understanding and our way of being in the world. I’m not talking about only highly intellectual or conceptual art. I’m also thinking about art that causes a gathering of 10,000 people to sway together in unison, to lose themselves. Or it can be a work that reveals in the listener a new insight or rouses an introspective tendency. Whether I’m making sound art or drumming in a funk band, I’m always trying to create a sensuous experience for the listener. I want them to move their bodies, or to understand their thoughts and habits, or to be attuned to their body as they adjust to a strange piece of music. With Phoenix Conspires, I want the listener to breathe and be the phoenix, …and maybe start scheming on a community garden.
AC: WHAT OTHER PROJECTS ARE YOU WORKING ON AT THE MOMENT?
AS: I just recorded ‘Tuskarve Roar’ with my group, the Sounds Like Things Ensemble. It’s a work inspired by a 40,000 year-old Lion-Man sculpture carved out of a mammoth tusk. We were asked by Dr. Liane Gabora and Kirthana Ganesh at the University of British Columbia to record a piece of music inspired by it. They’re doing research on cross-domain creative transfer – basically, how something created in one domain, such as music or painting, can inspire creative work in another domain, like poetry. Our cellist, Nicholas Denton-Protsack, wrote a program that takes the frequency played by an instrument and removes those frequencies from a track that is playing in the background. The effect is that of ‘carving away’ sound. So we stretched out a lion’s roar in time, repeated it multiple times, and played sounds over it to create some interesting rhythms. Over that, we added some percussion, cello, and a slightly out-of-tune hammer dulcimer. The result turned out quite nicely, and the project was incredibly fun to think about and create. Other than this, I’m working on the music and sound for Kythe’s Firebird audiobook, which has brought out so many new musical and sound-related ideas in me. I really love collaborating across disciplines. Nothing spurs new creativity in me quite like interdisciplinary art-making.
AS: I’ve been a musician for over fifteen years now and have performed in a pretty broad range of musical settings, from jazz and experimental music to rock, pop, and folk. I am primarily a percussionist, although I dabble with piano and guitar, and I’ve more recently developed an interest in found object percussion and Foley art.
My academic background is in philosophy and religious studies, both of which have deeply influenced my artwork. How could they not? While attending Harvard Divinity School where my research focused on music as an avenue for self-understanding, I joined Vision Lab, an experimental arts and research collective that creates work on the intersection of the philosophical, religious, and creative realms. Phoenix Conspires arose out of Vision Lab conversations that we’ve had since Covid hit. Back when I started this project, one of our members, Kythe Heller, was preparing a book of poetry titled Firebird for publication. After some discussion, we all decided to create works based on the theme of the phoenix. We’ve had some wonderful work that has included woodblock prints, collective dream mythology, and writings on the act of believing in a “post-truth” world.
AC: WHY THE PHOENIX? AND HOW DID THAT COME TO BE THE BASIS FOR PHOENIX CONSPIRES?
AS: It was somewhat arbitrary that Kythe’s Firebird book came out this spring, since she had been working on it for a while; but the phoenix seemed to us to be an incredibly appropriate metaphor for what is going on in the world now. It’s really a perfect metaphor for all time since it’s about generative growth and life force. In the case of my work, a phoenix formed from collective breathing, the idea arose out of a discussion at a Vision Lab meeting. A collaborator mentioned that the Latin root of “conspire” is “conspirare”, literally meaning “to breathe together.” I immediately thought about how amazing it would be to create a sound-based phoenix made up of multiple breaths. Our time is one in which the breath is a focal point for so many important issues. George Floyd was literally asphyxiated by a police officer and protesters across the States chant, “I can’t breathe”. We’re in the middle of a global pandemic of a respiratory illness that causes some people to end up on ventilator machines. And we wear masks to block our breath. The smoke from fires on the West Coast fueled by our destruction of the earth are inhibiting healthy breathing… So I did a call out to friends, family, and acquaintances for recordings of breath, statements about our current times, and hopes for the future. The rest of the project took off from there.
AC: WHAT AN AMAZING IDEA THAT BREATH IS REALLY A COMMON THREAD THROUGH ALL OF OUR COLLECTIVE CRISES. WHAT WAS YOUR PROCESS IN CREATING THE CONTEXT OUT OF WHICH THE PHOENIX ARISES IN THIS WORK?
AS: Many of our Vision Lab discussions about rebirth and renewal out of chaos and destruction revolved fairly consistently around U.S. politics and the direction the country is taking. There are plenty of serious problems to address. Covid-19, racism, inadequate leadership, wealth inequality, and climate change are just a few. When I started thinking about how I wanted the piece to take shape, the States were in the middle of protests in response to Floyd’s murder. I ultimately decided that starting the work exactly where we were in the moment would be the most fitting way to begin. And seeing so many people from all walks of life rise up in protest of racism was so incredibly powerful. I wanted to make stark comparisons, too, for the listener to really hear the absurdity of the two opposing realities Americans inhabit. After my call for recordings, I ended up with an amazing selection of sound material: protests and prayers, speeches and songs. These became the materials that I pieced together.
AC: SO YOUR PROMPT WAS QUITE OPEN-ENDED THEN?
AS: Yes. I made the prompt open-ended because I wanted the final product to be a combination of diverse voices – friends with very different backgrounds and religious traditions from around Earth. I’ve taken to using “Earth” instead of “the planet” because “the planet” sounds so distant and sterile, a mere object to be manipulated for human ends…. I wanted the recordings themselves to be natural and not overly-curated. And when it comes to addressing many social issues, I figured the best way for me to do this was to support multiple voices, many of whom are speaking from personal experience and saying what needs to be said. I wanted to explore a somewhat de-centered way of making art. The finished piece is still from my perspective because I made the arrangement to make explicit the various connections, but I approached the work more as a curator of voices than as a speaker or director.
AC: PHOENIX CONSPIRES HAS SOMEWHAT OF A NARRATIVE ARC TO IT, WITH THE BREATH BUILDING AND FADING THROUGHOUT. HOW DO YOU THINK THIS NARRATIVE SPEAKS TO OUR CURRENT SITUATION?
AS: The transitions in the piece came about quite naturally since all of these issues are connected. Wealth inequality has implications on racial justice issues, which are related to public health and varying mortality rates of Covid-19. Covid is directly related to globalization, which is, in turn, a relevant issue when we think about our culture’s destruction of the planet. This is what I want people to see and understand. Everything relates to everything. Unfortunately, our country is so divided, and not just along party lines. My hope is that Phoenix Conspires offers some unique and interesting perspectives that listeners can connect and empathize with. I hope my work lays bare some common values, whether moral, political, or spiritual. An understanding of shared values is precisely what we need now. I don’t want to be naïve about it. I have no delusions that we will learn about each other, suddenly see eye-to-eye, and turn our society around overnight. That said, I do believe the revolution will be full of creative thought, prayer – or insight or humble acknowledgment of our own shortcomings and inadequacies – whatever you want to call it, and plenty of music. It has to. That’s why I was stoked to include the firebird song at the end, sung by my good friend, Lady Dia Ewila. I told her about this project early on and a few weeks later we were at a (socially-distanced) birthday gathering in the woods. I was drumming with my friend, Randy, and Dia started singing… It was a good time. As I made the piece, there were constantly new parts to add, with Covid peaking, the fires on the west coast, and Ruth Bader-Ginsburg dying. I just kept seeing the themes and connections, adding new clips to the piece, and the narrative kept growing. From a listener’s perspective, I see the work as a time capsule of the moment with the end being an offering of the energy we need to change our direction. There aren’t any absolute statements about what the future should or shouldn’t be, but there are constructive and humble attitudes present, with some beautiful hopes.
AC: WHAT ROLE DO YOU THINK ART PLAYS IN SOCIETY?
AS: It seems to me that artists, at least some artists, are somehow able to foresee the future… Our political ideas are often limited or constrained by language. Art gives us a way to feel and think beyond the limits of language. All art does this, even poetry, which uses language to go beyond language in a koan-like way. Art that is created to be deeply experienced and not merely consumed has the power to reshape our cultural understanding and our way of being in the world. I’m not talking about only highly intellectual or conceptual art. I’m also thinking about art that causes a gathering of 10,000 people to sway together in unison, to lose themselves. Or it can be a work that reveals in the listener a new insight or rouses an introspective tendency. Whether I’m making sound art or drumming in a funk band, I’m always trying to create a sensuous experience for the listener. I want them to move their bodies, or to understand their thoughts and habits, or to be attuned to their body as they adjust to a strange piece of music. With Phoenix Conspires, I want the listener to breathe and be the phoenix, …and maybe start scheming on a community garden.
AC: WHAT OTHER PROJECTS ARE YOU WORKING ON AT THE MOMENT?
AS: I just recorded ‘Tuskarve Roar’ with my group, the Sounds Like Things Ensemble. It’s a work inspired by a 40,000 year-old Lion-Man sculpture carved out of a mammoth tusk. We were asked by Dr. Liane Gabora and Kirthana Ganesh at the University of British Columbia to record a piece of music inspired by it. They’re doing research on cross-domain creative transfer – basically, how something created in one domain, such as music or painting, can inspire creative work in another domain, like poetry. Our cellist, Nicholas Denton-Protsack, wrote a program that takes the frequency played by an instrument and removes those frequencies from a track that is playing in the background. The effect is that of ‘carving away’ sound. So we stretched out a lion’s roar in time, repeated it multiple times, and played sounds over it to create some interesting rhythms. Over that, we added some percussion, cello, and a slightly out-of-tune hammer dulcimer. The result turned out quite nicely, and the project was incredibly fun to think about and create. Other than this, I’m working on the music and sound for Kythe’s Firebird audiobook, which has brought out so many new musical and sound-related ideas in me. I really love collaborating across disciplines. Nothing spurs new creativity in me quite like interdisciplinary art-making.
Andrew Stauffer is a percussionist, sound artist, and scholar from Texas. He is a member of Vision Lab, an interdisciplinary experimental arts and research collective based at Harvard University with collaborators from across the earth. Andrew lives in Kelowna, B.C., Canada, where he performs as a musician, manages community programming and exhibitions at the Rotary Centre for the Arts, and organizes the Living Things International Arts Festival. He holds an M.Div. in religious and cultural studies from Harvard Divinity School, an M.A. in philosophy from Ohio University, and a B.A. in philosophy from Texas State University.