Stink Horn: a mycological musical performance-lecture by Siôn Parkinson

Stink Horn: a mycological musical performance-lecture by Siôn Parkinson

Presented by: The John Cage Trust in collaboration with The Flow Chart Foundation

Date: Friday, May 9th, 7pm

Location: Flow Chart Space, 348 Warren Street, Hudson, NY 12534

How can a mushroom’s noxious stench—and the droning sound of insects irresistibly drawn towards it—reshape how we listen to and make music?

Join artist, musician, and author for an intimate performance-lecture—part talk, part live musical experiment—exploring the strange, multisensory world of the stinkhorn fungus.

Drawing from his book (MIT Press), Siôn will lead an evening of music and mycology. Like composer John Cage, his twin passions for music and mushrooms have shaped a radical approach to sound. Yet while Cage sought silence in his fungal forays, Siôn finds Stink⎯an element that links sound and smell, the real and the hallucinated, opening up new ways of listening and composing.

Siôn’s performance will be accompanied by a recording of John Cage’s "Child of Tree" (1975), a work for amplified plant materials, performed by D’Arcy Philip Gray (2014) and presented courtesy of Mode Records (thank you Brian Brandt of Mode!).

is an artist, musician, performer, and author investigating our sensory relationship with the more-than-human world. He is a research fellow at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, Scotland, UK, where he is investigating the olfactory heritage of fungi—mushroom odors that hold cultural or historical significance due to their associations with particular places, objects, and traditions. Insta: @sionparkinson

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About Stink Horn: How Nature's Most Foul-Smelling Mushroom Can Change the Way We Listen

A meditation on sound, inviting us to listen through the nose and open the mind to the musical potential in unpleasant odors.
The stinkhorn mushroom is one of the weirdest wonders of the fungal world, certainly the smelliest. Ever since it was described by a Dutch doctor in a sixteenth-century pamphlet, the stinkhorn has been reported to emit odors resembling damp earth, dung, rotting cheese, decaying flesh, and even semen. It also happens to look like a phallus, bursting out of a subterranean egg to poke above the ground, where it lures insects towards its slimy, fetid cap. In Stinkhorn, artist, musician, and writer Siôn Parkinson asks: What can the pervasive stench of this mushroom and the droning noise of the flies compelled towards it reveal about how sounds and smells are combined in the imagination?
A heady mix of natural history, science writing, musicology, philosophy of the senses, and illness memoir, Parkinson uses examples of so-called bad smells to argue for a theory of Stink as a kind of “smelling sound.” Alongside images and insights from the author’s search for stinkhorn fungi in nature, the book expands upon the philosophy of listening to consider the role of the nose and the “nasal imaginary” in how we make sense of sound.
In this treatise on malodors and how they can transform the conditions for listening, Parkinson considers John Cage’s silent fungal forays, Brian Eno’s compositions with perfumes, the hum note of a vibrating bell, the “eggy” odor of space, and the author’s own hallucinated stench as the result of an epileptic seizure. What links these disparate ideas and sensory experiences can be found in a single encounter with a ripe stinkhorn mushroom.
Includes 16-page insert of a facsimile of the Neo-Latin–English translation of The Description of the Phallus by Hadrianus Junius, translated by Caroline Spearing.

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About the

The John Cage Trust gathers together, organizes, preserves, disseminates, and generally furthers the work of the late American composer, John Cage, routinely hailed as one of the most influential and generative artists of the 20th century, a creator of groundbreaking music compositions, artworks, and works of literature that continue to expand the very definition of “music” and the ways we might experience and think about music, art, and philosophy.

About

Toward opening new possibilities for discovery, thought, and connection, The Flow Chart Foundation explores poetry and the interrelationships of various art forms as guided by the legacy of seminal poet John Ashbery and promotes engagement with his work through events, exhibitions, and installations that showcase innovative art by creators across disciplines to inspire creative thinking, exploration, and transformation.

Host or Publisher John Cage Trust