FIGURE 25 (above): Video. Microphone in stump of Tree B.
FIGURE 26 (below): Video. Microphone in stump of Tree A.
I am not sure what I expected the tree to do to the sound of my voice. The only ambition I had in the exercise was to figure out how sound travels in and around the trees. I do not know how sound travels. The recordings sound like someone singing into a bucket. Naively, I had hoped that the shape of the tree would add some strange quality to the singing. What I was left with was four muffled variations of the same song. In the end I did not discover a beautiful new sound. However, in the moment of singing I experienced an intense focus. The four videos of my singing all sound different, but from my perspective it sounded the same every time. The repetition influenced my experience. I did not think about the words and I did not think about why I was there. It felt as if I would continue doing it, again and again, indefinitely. With my head in the tree, the world seemed to disappear. I forgot about the dog walkers and morning joggers. I felt I was inside of a narrow tunnel, with my voice bouncing back at me from every direction. The sound felt incredibly isolated. I was uncertain if anyone passing on the adjacent path would hear me at all. The last time I performed that song I had done it in a huge room with the acoustics of a chapel. In that room my voice had been booming. The tree silenced me. It enveloped my song in bark.
FIGURE 25 (above): Video. Microphone in hole at the base of Stump A.
FIGURE 26 (below): Video. Microphone at a distance.
At six in the morning I headed out to the forest. When I was biking there a sense of unease crept up on me. What if someone saw me, bellowing out a song with my head stuck in a tree? By the time I had reached the trees, the Scheveningse Bosjes was full of dog walkers and morning joggers. Hesitantly I mounted the camera on a tripod and lowered the audio recorder into the depth of one of the stumps. When I stuck my head into the hollow of the other stump, the unease I had felt faded out. I took a deep breath and began the song.
The song I sang is from David Lynch’s tv-show Twin Peaks. In the final episode of the second season, the protagonist enters the realm of the dead through a clearing in a deep, dark forest. The first thing he encounters is the piercing voice of Jimmy Scott, singing Sycamore Trees (“Beyond Life & Death”, Twin Peaks Second Season). Twin Peaks succeeds in portraying the forest as an entity. It is wonderful, terrible and endless. The forest of Twin Peaks is truly sublime, in the worst sense of the word. In the shadow of the trees lie the mysteries of existence. I believe being exposed to the show at an early age contributed to my romanticized image of the forest as a magical space completely different from anywhere else. As for the song, I had appropriated it earlier in a previous performance where I also thematized the forest (figure 27). In the context of Twin Peaks, the lyrics of the song allude to the show’s narrative of mystery and murder. By taking it out of its context, I felt I pacified it in a way, turning it into the words of the woods rather than the words of the damned.