About Your Whistle Tells Of Landscape
Developed over three years across residencies, tours, and periods of deep listening, “Your Whistle Tells of Landscape” finds Australian sound artist Alexandra Spence continuing her investigations into the perceptual entanglements of sound, place, memory, and imagination. Like much of the artist’s work, it unfolds at the liminal edge between the real and the imagined — between what is heard and what is remembered.

Composed from a constellation of materials gathered across sites and seasons — snowscapes recorded in Vancouver, insect choruses from a Sydney backyard, ceramic fragments unearthed while mudlarking with tinysound — it renders an intimate cartography of experience: one shaped equally by ecological resonance and internal drift. Each piece traces a kind of imaginary geography, where sonic ephemera become proxies for topography, weather, or myth.

The album is informed by time spent at EMS (Stockholm) and MESS (Melbourne), where Spence deepened her engagement with microtonality and tuned feedback systems, and by dialogues with sympathetic artists such as Tashi Wada and Patrick Farmer. Sound materials were sourced from Serge Modular systems, a custom lyre built by Tim Wall, amplified objects, handmade electronics, and Spence’s own field recordings captured within rockpools, beneath sand, and among a flock of sheep in the French Pyrenees. On “Magenta,” a collaboration with Delphine Dora, the domestic and mythic intertwine, as layers of voice, environmental recordings, and Halldorophone feedback drift in and out of one another like overlapping weather systems.

Despite its diverse material palette, the album resists spectacle or accumulation. Instead, it moves with a quiet sense of continuity and a rich interiority — less a sequence of compositions than a set of situated attunements. Across its duration, sounds seem to murmur, glint, or hover right at the edge of presence, invoking a listening practice that is as much about orientation as it is about reception. These are pieces not simply about place, but of place — etched with the grains of time, vibration, and breath.

About Alexandra Spence
Alexandra Spence is a sound artist and musician living on unceded Wangal land in Sydney, Australia. Her aesthetic favours field recordings, analogue technologies and object interventions, reimagining the intricate relationships between the listener, the object, and the surrounding environment as a kind of communion or conversation.

Alex has presented her art and music in Australia, Asia, Europe, and North America including AB Salon, Brussels; Ausland, Berlin; BBC Radio; Café Oto, London; Cave12, Geneva; EMS, Stockholm; The Lab, San Francisco; Liveworks Festival, with Liquid Architecture, Carriageworks, Sydney; Phoenix Central Park, Sydney; Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid; MONO, at the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane; Punkt Festival, Kristiansand; Radiophrenia Festival at the Centre for Contemporary Arts Glasgow; Soft Centre, Sydney; Sound Forms Festival, Hong Kong; Standards Studio, Milan; The Substation, Melbourne; & Volume Festival, Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney.

She collaborates with Moss Hopkins as Banana, and together they run the Sydney sound series Humming Grotto. She has released solo albums on Room40, Students of Decay, Longform Editions, Mappa, Canti Magnetici; and with More Mars & Infant Tree as Banana. Alex has received Bandcamp recommendations and acclaim in the likes of The Quietus and The Wire Magazine: "Her sense of field is broader. It's as if she is trying to capture a whole landscape of sound entire... We ought to spend more time with Alexandra Spence, with our ears simply & honestly open.”

(She holds the belief that electricity might actually be magic).