Sensible Activities. An Oblique to Eden Box

Eden Box is an album of songs, dances, and vérité recordings written and produced largely on the edge of a South German forest. They all play with the process of mediating, editing, and reframing raw acoustic materials, many of which were captured outside and on the hoof. The album title is a reference to the 20th-century British artist of the same name (or, their pseudonym) whose naive style brought together ideas of nature, man’s place within it, and Christian iconography into strange symbolist compositions. Sensible Activities is an essay and an illustrated book of musical-sensory exercises to be enacted alone or in groups, outdoors. They relate to an ongoing live project by Neil Luck that has manifested as a series of walks and excursions with willing participants and musicians in various countries around the world. Some tracks on Eden Box include demonstrations and encrusted recordings of the exercises. Together, the two objects form an archipelago. They make indirect and abstract connections between music, documentary, score, essay, instruction, soundwalk, or broadcast. CD and book are part of the same body of work. It is all, in the end, music.

The songs on Eden Box all play with the process of mediating, editing, and reframing raw acoustic materials, many of which were captured outside and on the hoof. Several of the tracks link directly with particular Sensible Activities; track two features a prototype activity offered by Athina Vahla during a nighttime walk just outside Stuttgart. Track three is a demonstration of leaf blowing (p. 34), and track six is an encrusted recording of my ensemble testing ‘Internal Snore Monologue’ (p. 20). Listen to Eden Box on Bandcamp.