Thomas Catlaw

Thomas is a sound artist, sound recordist, and musician
based in Arizona’s Sonoran Desert on the
ancestral lands of the O’Odham, Piipaash,
the Yavapai-Apache Nation, and their ancestors. 

My practice centers on transforming, layering, and (re)assembling field recordings into “soundsketches” that traverse the border between documentation and fabrication to explore the rich possibilities of sonic textures, emotions, and experiences that surround us.

My compositions morph the familiar into other, other into the familiar. They play with sequence and forms of repetition to wonder about time, duration, and temporality. I hope the work will provoke personal and collective exploration about how memory, habit, and tradition channel the valuing and imagining—and destruction—of sonic worlds and artifacts.

Rooted in a curiosity nurtured by the Sonoran Desert, water is a primary location for and provocateur in these soundsketches. I listen and record with rivers, canals, pools, irrigation systems, wetlands, and reservoirs. I walk the porous seams between “natural” and “engineered” water systems.

In doing this, I am interested in attending to not merely the “meditative” and recuperative aspects of water and “natural” settings but also their power, unpredictability, and precariousness in the face of climate change.

My practice recursively informs conservation efforts on behalf of the Verde River watershed.

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