John Levi Masuli
PHILIPPINES
Levi, who is based in the Philippines, used a grant from the PARDICOLOR Creative Arts Fund to complete his project ‘They Prefer Night Swimming: a soundchasing journal’. This journal is a multimedia catalogue of Levi’s experiences searching for lost frog and toad populations in Quezon City, Metro Manila. Through sound, text, video, and a collection of knick-knacks picked up on the way, the work documents his soundchasing journey throughout the city. At the end of the journal Levi says “After all, the best mic one can have is the human body. The best recorder is the mind and the heart.” which we think is kind of wonderful.
Here we share visual extracts from Levi’s project, to download the full PDF journal including audio clips (best enjoyed with Adobe for the full effect) you can visit Levi’s website.
“I decided to make a map of these frogs and other sound-making anurians, perhaps a field guide for people who wanted to hear another kind of concert.”
When asked if there was particular aspect of his project he wanted the world to know about Levi answered the following:
We can think of nature as a gigantic and incomprehensibly complex “bio-synthesizer” that incessantly produces biological soundscapes or “bio-drones.” Frog and toads, acting as bio-speakers, modulate their calls according to their needs and the properties of their surroundings. These subtleties may escape a casual passerby, but an attentive listener will learn that these modulations, impossible to isolate from the immediate sonic context, provide a glimpse of our species’ complex relationship with other living things. We might never know why an ensemble of frogs chooses to lower their voices by a few kilohertz since it is impossible for us to assume the subjectivity of a frog. But at least we can surmise that it may be because a predator is nearby, or maybe because the neighbor is belting out an off-key rendition of “Dynamite” on the karaoke. How cool is that, knowing that by just living we’re already sounding out something, unconsciously turning and flipping knobs in the world’s largest living synth?
‘Frogs Along the Highway’ (2023) by Levi.
Exhibited as part of the group show 'Guided Agitation' at Gravity Art Space, Quezon City.
Several smartphones play a single resource-heavy video file. Each smartphone is connected to different servers around the world via VPN. Playback of the sample depends on the connection speed from each server. The harmony varies according to the ebb and flow of each connection. The work is presented in a glass enclosure containing plants from the site on which the frog calls have been captured.
“For me, the real work of field recording is not in capturing the clearest sound but in the act of chasing. Much like riding a wave, there are flows and swells that are way too immense for a human being to consider in catching the perfect sound or wave (literally the same thing)...The task of a field recordist, therefore, is not simply to hear and register, but to imagine - to expand one’s perception, stretch one’s concepts and notions or come up with new ones, and to listen beyond the audible. They Prefer Night Swimming is a documentation of one such attempt.”- Levi.
