Airs

A collection of poems accompanied by recordings of the wind

“Airs” was published the Spring 2025 issue of The HTML Review, and began as a series of audio recordings made in 2022 while I was catsitting for friends in the Loire Valley. These recordings were made in wide, open spaces, and expressed an ambiguous desire for a kind of airiness. During this period of my life, I contented myself with the metaphor that, as if after a long winter, I was going around the house (of my life) and opening every window I could find.

In the summer of 2023, I began to incorporate these recordings into composed pieces, which I titled “Airports for Music”. Audio convolution techniques provided the foundation for these pieces, which were meant to hover lightly in the air. In alluding to these pieces as “sound fragrances”, I wanted to distinguish them from broader practices of ambient music and field recording, and instead associate them with the artifice and materiality of perfume.

In the winter of 2024-2025, I returned to these sound fragrances after correspondences with the editors of The HTML Review, and composed “Part II (The Screen)” of Airs. As a self-contained and self-generating piece, I consider it to be an installation version of the Airports for Music project. This continuity can be traced to the usage of similar audio convolution techniques in order to generate an infinite soundtrack to a concrete poem that slowly dissolves into a screen-saver. The processed sound itself drives the animation, in which audio samples are translated into pixel data plotted on the canvas. Like an aeolian harp, the music is activated by the the sound of the wind.

“Part I (The Page)” further explores the poetics of air through its interaction with language, flattened onto the surface of the page. An image from Wikipedia’s article on the Santa Ana winds was used as a visual artifact to distort the text, a gesture towards the way in which language is contoured by environmental forces, and a memorial to the Eaton Canyon fire that raged along neighborhoods I grew up in my youth.

Additional documentation and points of reference for this project can be found at https://www.are.na/reuben-son/airs-etc, and a recording of a version of Airs developed for performance at Wordhack can be streamed at https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2410998333.