'Cycle 25: A Solar Fiction' is a 9 minute theoryfictional sound-essay. It tracks a number of historical, scientific but also speculative solar myths and strange solar events, as ways in which economics, planetary ecology and social transformation combine. The audio makes use of a written script narrated alongside music, musique concrete, sound effects, samples and field recordings.
It was produced and presented during residency at CAMP in Aulus-les-Bains, France in May 2024, supported by a grant from CAMP. This residency was undertaken to support my research into audio essays as a hybrid theory-fictional format using sound, spoken word and music and to subsequently explore how it can be reconciled with visual forms of essaying and fiction.
'In the midst of a podcast explosion with its glut of spoken word audio content' The residency involved 'a timely exploration of the liminal format of the audio essay, a form and method which, at its most interesting, can hold musical abstraction, argument, narrative and sonic world building in an unholy tension. Occupying a plane of legibility composed through the montage of a full spectrum of sound, audio essays exist in the delicate tension between attention and immersion.' (quoted from CAMP residency outline).
