LAVA presents Sounding The Farm with Zemzemeh [Session 2]

You are booking:

Session Two | 4:00 - 5:00PM

Sounding the Farm is an environmental sound installation by Zemzemeh, created from recordings gathered on farms in Doon Doon and across the Tweed region. Cattle calls, birdsong, insects, gates, footsteps, wind, water, machinery, and the subtle pulse of daily labour are reimagined through spatial audio, looping, layering, live Persian instruments, and electro-acoustic transformation.

Presented through a multi-speaker system surrounding the audience, the work invites listeners to sit or lie down, close their eyes, and enter an acoustic landscape where distance, movement, memory, and place are carried by sound. Moments of realism dissolve into abstraction; the familiar becomes musical, intimate, and strange.

Often seen but rarely listened to, farmland holds a rich sonic ecology. Sounding the Farm reveals these hidden textures, asking us to hear rural life not as background, but as a living conversation between humans, animals, weather, and earth.

This is a FREE event with registrations essential. Sounding The Farm requires a quiet audience, so please be mindful when booking tickets for young children.

If you can no longer attend, we ask that you please cancel your ticket via the confirmation email.

Schedule:

• Registrations open at 3:30pm

• Doors will close at 3:55pm

• Late arrivals will unfortunately miss out!

• Session followed by a Q&A with the artists

• 5:00pm close (followed by Poets Out Loud)
  

Zemzemeh is the cross-disciplinary sound practice of Siyavash Doostkhah and Greta Kelly, creating immersive works at the intersection of environmental recording, traditional instruments, electronics, and spatial performance. Working across installation, live art, and site-responsive composition, they transform field recordings, acoustic resonance, and live sound into deeply atmospheric listening environments.

They treat sound as archive, material, and living presence. Rural landscapes, urban spaces, ritual memory, and everyday acoustic phenomena become source material for compositions that move between realism and abstraction. Through multi-speaker diffusion, live processing, and embodied performance, Zemzemeh create works that invite audiences to inhabit sound as place, memory, and encounter.

Siyavash Doostkhah brings a background in experimental music, electro-acoustic composition, and socially engaged arts practice. Greta Kelly brings distinctive instrumental languages, sonic sensitivity, and experience in co-composition, producing, and intercultural collaboration. Together they create performances that are immersive, emotionally resonant, and adventurous.

Committed to deep listening, ecological awareness, and cross-cultural dialogue, Zemzemeh create contemporary sound works that slow perception, heighten attention, and reconnect audiences with the environments they move through.

Learn more: www.lava-arts.com.au