Whirligig Conversations: ATMOSS
Guerrilla recording studios, birdsong, rain, and campfires. We caught up with ATMOSS on process, place, and what emerged from their Whirligig woodland residency.
ATMOSS was born from a week of recording in the woods rather than a traditional studio.
What changes when you place the act of listening before the act of composing? A part of collaboration is sharing space and sharing power, playing with each other, that can be those who make up the sound of the space that you are in; a collaboration with the world that surrounds us. Listening and composing are essential to the other, if you don’t listen, how can you engage in a conversation?
You describe the project as spotlighting spaces and sounds we often overlook. Was there a moment during the residency when the environment fully took control of the music?
When we were set up and ready to play we really wanted to sink into the woods and get to know each other, so we just sat and listened for hours. There were moments during the project where a sound, a call, something that we had no control over would happen just at the right time, and those make you feel really grounded wherever you are.
How did you decide when to respond to the environment and when to let it lead? It felt like a duality for us, each day we would sit down and play a bit and feel out what our environment was feeling too, some days we worked together, some days it was a challenge, but when we played and captured a moment we could really feel what was right and what wasnt and that would inform our next bit of playing.
The setup itself feels almost performative: battery-powered PA, field recorders, firelight, weather. How did working with such constraints shape the emotional tone of the recordings? Faye was an absolute G!!! Without her essential doing all of the technical thinking, logistical creating of this mobile studio setup there is absolutely no way that we would’ve been able to do what we did. It did mean however that she had an additional role ontop of the playing/performing/co-creating and took up a lot of brain space, she was amazing and absolutely slayed at all of the things.
There’s a politics to choosing the woods over a studio. What does it mean to you to make music outside systems designed for efficiency and perfection?
Perfection is a toxic systemic construct that we do not buy; the systems that “create” are there to churn out disconnected droids to be consumed at a cost. Artists have a moral responsibility, as James Baldwin states, the role of the artist is to “make [people] conscious of the things they don’t see”. We chose the woods because we wanted to co-create with the forest, we wanted to collaborate with each other within the forest’s healing energy, and we wanted to explore our own creative practices beyond our concrete box.
How did the residency context, having permission to “do whatever you wanted”, change your creative risk-taking?
We had no expectations. We’ve made an album out of the improvisations that we recorded during our residency and we’ve got hours of field recordings to play with too. This residency really was an R&D
Birds, rain, wind, and fire all appear as collaborators on the record. If the landscape were credited as a band member, what role would it play? The same as any of us, a collaborator.