Crickets

Ambient art

For “Crickets,” artist Mungo Thomson has collaborated with composer Michael Webster to transcribe field recordings of crickets from around the world into a musical score. The result is a dynamic composition for a 17-person classical ensemble: violin, flute, clarinet, and percussion. The score contains 25 chapters, or “movements,” such as “12. Reunion Island, the Cirque de Cilaos at 1,300 m altitude, February 1998, nightfall in a banana plantation.” “Crickets” was performed in Los Angeles as part of The Pacific Standard Time Public Art and Performance Festival (2012), and this year a concert will take place on the High Line in New York.

Mungo Thomson is an artist whose work frequently touches on silence, blank space, and cultural motifs around reception. “Crickets” sums up Thomson’s interests in ambience and in audience succinctly: crickets are such a ubiquitous aural backdrop that they have come to stand in for silence, and in the realm of performance, crickets are what is heard when a performance bombs.

Mungo Thomson has had solo exhibitions and projects at SITE Santa Fe (2013); the Times Museum, Guangzhou, China (2013); Aspen Art Museum (2012); the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2008); The Kadist Art Foundation, Paris (2007); and GAMeC, Bergamo, Italy (2006), among others. His work was included in The Istanbul Biennial (2011); The Whitney Biennial (2008); and The Performa Biennial (2005), among others. He has produced many artist’s books, including “Negative Space,” with JRP|Ringier, in 2006. He is based in Los Angeles.

The publication is part of the series of artists’ projects edited by Christoph Keller.