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Tenement Press is an occasional publisher of esoteric,
accidental, angular, & interdisciplinary literatures.
My head is my only house unless it rains
Don Glen Vliet
See here for Rehearsal, an ongoing
& growing collation of original (& borrowed)
digital ephemera.
Tenement Press is an occasional publisher of esoteric,
accidental, angular, & interdisciplinary literatures.
My head is my only house unless it rains
Don Glen Vliet
Were a wind to arise
I could put up a sail
Were there no sail
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I’d make one of canvas and sticks
Bertolt Brecht, ‘Motto’
(Buckow Elegies)
I could put up a sail
Were there no sail
Bertolt Brecht, ‘Motto’
(Buckow Elegies)
See here for Rehearsal, an ongoing
& growing collation of original (& borrowed)
digital ephemera.
Milo Thesiger-Meacham,
Opuntia cacti / Prickly Pear Cacti,
© 2019.
Opuntia cacti / Prickly Pear Cacti,
© 2019.
Audible Heat
Milo Thesiger-Meacham
Tenement Press #17
978-1-917304-08-5
90pp [Approx.]
£12.50
PREORDER DIRECT FROM TENEMENT HERE
Publishing 28th February 2025
With an introduction by Ed Baxter.
A manuscript shortlisted for the inaugural edition
of the Prototype Prize, 2024, a eulogy to the sonic
influence and cultural inferences of the sound of the
cicada. A train of thought on the multiform significations
and significance of the cicada’s buzz and hum; a dissection
and deconstruction of the insect as emblem; a wild and
associative suite of fragments on the evocations of
background noise when brought to the fore.
Milo Thesiger-Meacham
Tenement Press #17
978-1-917304-08-5
90pp [Approx.]
£12.50
PREORDER DIRECT FROM TENEMENT HERE
Publishing 28th February 2025
With an introduction by Ed Baxter.
A manuscript shortlisted for the inaugural edition
of the Prototype Prize, 2024, a eulogy to the sonic
influence and cultural inferences of the sound of the
cicada. A train of thought on the multiform significations
and significance of the cicada’s buzz and hum; a dissection
and deconstruction of the insect as emblem; a wild and
associative suite of fragments on the evocations of
background noise when brought to the fore.
Two flies, pitchshifting
(Thesiger-Meacham).
Milo Thesiger-Meacham‘s Audible Heat is a rich and rambling walkabout of a work that aims to map a reticulated, cultural biography of the sound of the cicada. Equal parts academic argument, travelogue, and critical collage, this synthesis of ideas pulls upon a wide-ranging bibliography of materials to examine the omnipresent sound of the cicada as ‘audible heat’ throughout human history and culture. Herein, this climatic sound of the cicada acts as a conduit between ecology, identity and mortality, and the cicada’s sonic inference emerges as a codification of the unknown and unfamiliar—as a spiritual weathervane in desert settings—and as a means of teasing out the sensorial limits of human understanding.
Thesiger-Meacham sits himself in a field of enquiry and in dialogue with voices various, ancient, and modern, such as Douglas Yanega of the University of California, folk musician Matthias Loibner—author Catherine McNeur—and Gene Kritsky, developer of Cicada Safari (see here), a public app which tracks the mass emergence of periodical cicadas across North America, in a transversal network of interlinked, informational nodes.
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Herein, we’ve the sonic-induced anxieties of 17th, 18th and 19th-century colonists in Northeastern America—notably the largely unknown career of entomologist Margaretta Morris—and the apocalyptic premonitions of the indigenous Wampanoag; Greek tongue twisters; the poetry of Ibn Quzmān and Harry Crosby; African-American mathematician Benjamin Banneker’s lost wooden clock; Socrates's fear of dehydration; the geopolitical tensions embedded in Southern Spain as Al-Andalus (سُلَدْنَألا); Plato’s Phaedrus; a history of the hurdy-gurdy; Geronimo’s hatred of telegraphy; contemporary and historical entomologies; the slurred, slow body language of Clint Eastwood; insects on the film sets of Sergio Leone's Spanish Westerns; squinting; tanning; metamorphosis; acts of violence in Once Upon a Time in the West (1968); military reenactments of the Battle of Marathon; the botanist Donald C. Peattie’s existential dread; ancient cooking implements; riverside trees hills, and their symmetric reflections in still water... All ideas emanating from the acoustical atmospherics inherent to the cicada’s song.
(Thesiger-Meacham).
Milo Thesiger-Meacham‘s Audible Heat is a rich and rambling walkabout of a work that aims to map a reticulated, cultural biography of the sound of the cicada. Equal parts academic argument, travelogue, and critical collage, this synthesis of ideas pulls upon a wide-ranging bibliography of materials to examine the omnipresent sound of the cicada as ‘audible heat’ throughout human history and culture. Herein, this climatic sound of the cicada acts as a conduit between ecology, identity and mortality, and the cicada’s sonic inference emerges as a codification of the unknown and unfamiliar—as a spiritual weathervane in desert settings—and as a means of teasing out the sensorial limits of human understanding.
Thesiger-Meacham sits himself in a field of enquiry and in dialogue with voices various, ancient, and modern, such as Douglas Yanega of the University of California, folk musician Matthias Loibner—author Catherine McNeur—and Gene Kritsky, developer of Cicada Safari (see here), a public app which tracks the mass emergence of periodical cicadas across North America, in a transversal network of interlinked, informational nodes.
Herein, we’ve the sonic-induced anxieties of 17th, 18th and 19th-century colonists in Northeastern America—notably the largely unknown career of entomologist Margaretta Morris—and the apocalyptic premonitions of the indigenous Wampanoag; Greek tongue twisters; the poetry of Ibn Quzmān and Harry Crosby; African-American mathematician Benjamin Banneker’s lost wooden clock; Socrates's fear of dehydration; the geopolitical tensions embedded in Southern Spain as Al-Andalus (سُلَدْنَألا); Plato’s Phaedrus; a history of the hurdy-gurdy; Geronimo’s hatred of telegraphy; contemporary and historical entomologies; the slurred, slow body language of Clint Eastwood; insects on the film sets of Sergio Leone's Spanish Westerns; squinting; tanning; metamorphosis; acts of violence in Once Upon a Time in the West (1968); military reenactments of the Battle of Marathon; the botanist Donald C. Peattie’s existential dread; ancient cooking implements; riverside trees hills, and their symmetric reflections in still water... All ideas emanating from the acoustical atmospherics inherent to the cicada’s song.
Top—A cicada in the author’s hand.
Middle—Clint Eastwood on the set of Sergio Leone’s
Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo / The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966).
Bottom—Crew lowering the skeleton of an unknown actress into a casket,
Sad Hill Cemetery, on the set of Leone’s Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo /
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966).
Below—An illustrative plate excerpted from Peter Collinson’s essay
entitled ‘Some Observations on the Cicada of North America,’ as
published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of
London (New Year’s Day, 1764).
As precedent to this publication, Thesiger-Meacham‘s Audible Heat was commissioned for broadcast by Radiophrenia at the Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow, September 2023; as a marker for the radiophonic history of this work, the Tenement Press edition of Audible Heat publishes in tandem with a CD release from WORLD SERVICE, a record label for direct-to-disc avant-radio works.
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Middle—Clint Eastwood on the set of Sergio Leone’s
Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo / The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966).
Bottom—Crew lowering the skeleton of an unknown actress into a casket,
Sad Hill Cemetery, on the set of Leone’s Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo /
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966).
Below—An illustrative plate excerpted from Peter Collinson’s essay
entitled ‘Some Observations on the Cicada of North America,’ as
published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of
London (New Year’s Day, 1764).
As precedent to this publication, Thesiger-Meacham‘s Audible Heat was commissioned for broadcast by Radiophrenia at the Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow, September 2023; as a marker for the radiophonic history of this work, the Tenement Press edition of Audible Heat publishes in tandem with a CD release from WORLD SERVICE, a record label for direct-to-disc avant-radio works.
A wonderful bringing together of natural and cultural histories.
Tom McCarthy
A work of great refinement and intelligence, entailing some beautifully crafted surprises.
Elizabeth Price
Beautifully written.
Bhanu Kapil
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Milo Thesiger-Meacham is an artist, composer, performer, broadcaster, and artistic director of the community arts radio stations Resonance FM and Resonance Extra. In 2022 he was commissioned by the European Capital of Culture to create ‘Body Edit Mind,’ a twenty-two-hour long audio work comprising six thousand discrete pieces of found material, and he has worked on solo and group projects for Tate Modern, The V&A Museum, the Centre for Contemporary Arts Glasgow, London and Paris Fashion Weeks, Radiophrenia, Café OTO, Iklectik, Tenement Press, the European Poetry Festival, Waste Paper Opera, Lewisham Arthouse, Radio Revolten, IvyNODE & Tierra Vivente, Echoraeume amongst others.
Ed Baxter is a radio-artist, writer, cultural producer, and an Associate Lecturer in the Screen School at London College of Communication, University of the Arts London. Baxter won a BASCA Composer Award in 2013, and his previous publications include the co-edited Works of Thomas De Quincey (twenty-one volumes, Pickering & Chatto, 2000). He co-founded Resonance FM in 1998.
See here for details on the 2024 edition of the Protoytpe Prize—judged by McCarthy, Price & Kapil—and co-run by Jess Chandler (Prototype) and Rory Cook (Monitor).
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Tom McCarthy
A work of great refinement and intelligence, entailing some beautifully crafted surprises.
Elizabeth Price
Beautifully written.
Bhanu Kapil
Sergio Leone, on the set of
C’era una volta il west /
Once Upon a Time in the West (1968).
C’era una volta il west /
Once Upon a Time in the West (1968).
Milo Thesiger-Meacham is an artist, composer, performer, broadcaster, and artistic director of the community arts radio stations Resonance FM and Resonance Extra. In 2022 he was commissioned by the European Capital of Culture to create ‘Body Edit Mind,’ a twenty-two-hour long audio work comprising six thousand discrete pieces of found material, and he has worked on solo and group projects for Tate Modern, The V&A Museum, the Centre for Contemporary Arts Glasgow, London and Paris Fashion Weeks, Radiophrenia, Café OTO, Iklectik, Tenement Press, the European Poetry Festival, Waste Paper Opera, Lewisham Arthouse, Radio Revolten, IvyNODE & Tierra Vivente, Echoraeume amongst others.
Ed Baxter is a radio-artist, writer, cultural producer, and an Associate Lecturer in the Screen School at London College of Communication, University of the Arts London. Baxter won a BASCA Composer Award in 2013, and his previous publications include the co-edited Works of Thomas De Quincey (twenty-one volumes, Pickering & Chatto, 2000). He co-founded Resonance FM in 1998.
See here for details on the 2024 edition of the Protoytpe Prize—judged by McCarthy, Price & Kapil—and co-run by Jess Chandler (Prototype) and Rory Cook (Monitor).
