Rachel Shearer

For over three decades, Aotearoa / New Zealand based sound artist and composer Rachel Shearer has researched and engaged with a wide range of Māori and Western practices in listening to the Earth. On the first full length album released under her name, Te Oro o te Ao (the resounding of the world) Shearer has created a bold work of sonic dreaming and remembrance. A personal realization channeled through the Māori concept of whakapapa; embracing the belief that the whole of creation, past/present/future is a dynamic interconnected movement.

With field recordings, electronics, and voice, Shearer creates immersive analogs of earthly processes that move like tumbling avalanches and crashing waves. Subterranean volcanic activity transmutes into super-heated air rising into frequencies beyond human hearing. Shearer posits that consciousness, like the environment, is not a closed system; that the mind is an ecosystem where our thoughts are the 'flora' and 'fauna' and the perception of sound vibrations in the material world is a gateway to metaphysical realms.

Te Oro o te Ao was first realized as an immersive eight-channel sound installation made in response to a close listening to the earth. It was also released as a limited artist's acetate edition of 10. Thin Wrist is pleased to present Te Oro o te Ao in a vinyl and digital edition mastered by Rashad Becker, Clunk Berlin. Housed in a tip-on gatefold jacket with embossed black paper stock, ink pigment foil stamping, with a mounted booklet in the inner gatefold and printed inner sleeves. Pressed at Optimal, Germany.

Rachel Shearer has investigated sound as a medium through a wide range of sonic practices, installations, composing, performing, writing, as well as collaborating as a sound designer and composer for moving image and live performance events. She has received numerous public commissions for sound art including the permanent nine-channel sound installation The Flooded Mirror on the Auckland waterfront. She has been active as an experimental musician since the late 1980's and has released material with labels Xpressway (NZ), Flying Nun (NZ), Ecstatic Peace (US), Corpus Hermeticum (NZ), Family Vineyard (US) among others.

Waha voice performed by Cathy Livermore (Kāi Tahu, Kāti Māmoe, Waitaha). Design by Rob Carmichael, SEEN, Los Angeles. Black Edition produced by Peter Kolovos.