It begins with what sounds like surf. Or maybe static, or both. The first gesture of Fire Ecologies (New Focus Recordings) balks at certainty — opening a work fascinated by fading boundaries between the natural and the artificial.
During the 2020 wildfire season, composer Christopher Stark traveled across the American West, making field recordings along the way. The result is a six-scene electroacoustic work for the New York-based Unheard-of//Ensemble that treats sound as an ecological environment. Fire Ecologies is fragile, deceptive, and guided more by tenderness than by anger.
Scene 1, “Terra incognita,” unfolds at a glacial tempo. Noise becomes air, and air becomes gesture. From a gauze of filtered hiss, a cello and violin rise into being. Clarinet trills and piano harmonics shimmer like heat mirages. The pacing feels geological, the musical equivalent of erosion revealing shapes and layers and colors beneath.
Scene 2, which borrows its title from Ravel’s Jeux d’eau, answers with motion. Filigreed cascades in the piano, the clarinet’s suggestion of a dance, and darting string figures reveal more familiar harmonies. The resemblance is intentional — the bright, liquid sparkle of Ravel’s fountain piece refracted through a digital lens. The textures move from complexity to clarity, from the elemental to the human. The pattern repeats throughout the album, glacial stillness giving way to pulse, complexity yielding to song, like seasons cycling.
In Scene 3 the music exhales. A long cello line stretches upward, a supplication. The fires, one imagines, have burned out; what remains is the quiet inventory of what has been lost and what might be rebuilt. Stark calls this scene “Louange à l’éternité de Mère Nature", a nod to Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time. The instrumentation is identical to that famous work: clarinet, violin, cello, and piano. To this, Stark adds electronics as a fifth, spectral participant. Where Messiaen sought eternity amid war, Stark finds fragility amid collapse. Both composers propose listening as a moral act. Messiaen asked listeners to imagine eternity within captivity. Stark asks us to imagine endurance — a way to move forward, and perhaps past, the crisis he evokes.
Scene 4, “Infernal Dance,” jolts the album awake. Here Stark borrows from the vocabulary of electronic dance music: a sampled piano ping becomes a hi-hat, and textures build like a DJ’s snare crescendo. The acoustic instruments join in a start-stop groove that feels both propulsive and doomed, a “dance” whose energy feeds the very industrial systems it critiques. Stark’s humor is sly but pointed. This inferno is neither hypothetical nor mythological, but the very real consequence of human industry, appetite, and denial.
The final scenes are spatial as much as musical, opening toward the world and imagining our future on both intimate and planetary scales. High tones chirr like digital crickets or perhaps powerlines, the sound of infrastructure humming to itself. Against that hum the clarinet’s melody rises like a mantra, equal parts plea and remembrance, echoing the deep reach of John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme or perhaps the quiet contemplation of Nick Drake’s Five Leaves Left. The quartet’s harmonies settle into something unexpectedly consonant, even devotional, before the human sound recedes and the powerline drone takes over completely. The world continues, indifferent and electric.
Fire Ecologies began as a live, site-specific performance at Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal, a federally designated Superfund site whose toxic waters serve as an accidental mirror for the music’s themes of damage and restoration. Capturing that experience on record could have flattened it into mere documentation, yet the album feels startlingly alive and immediate. The production keeps the electronic elements integrated rather than pasted on, and air seems to circulate through every frequency.
What emerges is less protest than prayer. Stark’s music never scolds; it listens and asks us to do the same. The piece moves between the time of nature — slow, cyclical, patient — and the time of industry — fast, linear, and extractive. Those incompatible tempos generate its tension, its beauty, and its ache. By the end, the surf and static are indistinguishable again. What once sounded like ocean now sounds like interference, and somewhere in that confusion lies the truth. As the earth responds to the consequences of our own making, Fire Ecologies reminds us to listen.
