ryan hooper guest on ‘unknown sounds'

Ryan Hooper (https://heavycloudpress.wordpress.com/) is a Cornwall-based writer, artist and sound maker working across mixed media. His practice explores the intersections of memory and the natural world, reflecting on themes of identity, loss and resilience. Through a range of projects, including Heavy Cloud (https://heavycloud.bandcamp.com/), he produces ambient and experimental music informed by psychogeography and soundscape practice. Drawing on field recordings, found sound and improvisation, his work considers how memory and meaning are shaped by place and environment.

He is the author of A Map and Not a Tracing, a deconstructed novel concerned with remembering and forgetting, and the founder of Heavy Cloud Press, through which he has released works combining collage, sound and text. His writing has appeared in Broken Sleep Books, Azarao Lit Journal, the Winged Moon Magazine, MEANS Magazine, Bad Saturn Media, IceFloe Press and elsewhere.

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"unknown sounds" is intended as a radio archive of experimental artists’ interior worlds, these that are externalized through their work, and the interchange through artist communities. This is an contemporary archive of experimental art-making in communities around the world, the inherent politicism of art, and the social change this may or may not represent. In short, it is intended mostly as a look into these small worlds, with the idea of generating more thought on both human fallibility and potential, and how art can engender hope. Each section here is meant as a studio visit, but also a glimpse into the doings of a wider community and the cultural, political repercussions of experimental sound and art-making.

"unknown sounds" is produced by Elena Botts and organized by the unknown sound collective, an experimental international multimedia collective.

Elena Botts has lived many places in the northeast and abroad. Elena's poems and writings have been published in over a hundred literary and scholarly magazines. Elena has been the winner of four poetry contests and has had many books published. Elena's visual artwork has won numerous awards and has been exhibited in various galleries. Elena has collaborated on, released, and installed sound and moving image artwork, as well as multimedia and conceptual art, and has organized a multimedia collective for this purpose, while pursuing graduate school and academic, policy, and activist work and projects.