La Orejona Records

[2023]

La Orejona is a vibrational membrane microphone that interacts with vibrational phenomena such as sound waves in the air, caresses from the wind, tremors from the ground, and oscillations induced by touch from both human and non-human entities. In contrast to regular modern microphones that are made to target individual signals, La Orejona operates with the purpose of weaving independent signals into a collective and inseparable muddy noise, a thick mass of sound.
La Orejona is a microphone of noise, a rubbery listening apparatus that centers on the poetics of unintelligibility. La Orejona is not intended to be a precise measurement device. On the contrary, it is a device for confusing signals, fuzzing, mixing up, and obscuring.

La Orejona serves as a focal point for us to gather, as an outdoor recording studio that sets us into collectivity.

As any apparatus, La Orejona is entangled with the phenomena it comprehends and affects how the phenomena can be grasped, thus the types of knowledge that it may produce. La Orejona aims to tell (and be part of) a story of relational collectivity, of conspiring signals, and of the possibility of fuzzing the (arbitrary) rigid, straight, and static lines that tend to delineate reality, our bodies, and our imaginations. La Orejona Records asks: what hegemonic modes of listening can be challenged and what forms of relations emerge when thinking through vibrations?
La Orejona is activated through a program of recording sessions of improvised call-and-response encounters, vibrational attunement, poetry readings, listening moments, collective screaming sessions, cañitas (pan flutes) ensembles, and more. Making up the archive of La Orejona Records, each recording session is materialized into handmade 5” vinyl records and cassette tapes and given away as gifts to participants.”

Thanks to Karsten Schuhl for his work in production and fabrication coordination; Jessie Mindell and Devin Murphy for their contribution and assistance to the sensor system and mapping. This work was originally commissioned for the transmediale festival 2023 (Berlin) and was developed as part of the transmediale residency 2022 thanks to the support of Ministerio de las Culturas, las Artes y el Patrimonio de Chile and the Division of Culture, Arts, Heritage and Public Diplomacy – Dirac, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Chile.