Oscillation ::: The Weather

The 2025 edition of the festival Oscillation ::: The Weather will depart from practices around field recording. Field recording can be thought of as the registration of one's listening environment. This registration may happen through microphones and a device, but might also include registration via the ear to memory or language. The field might be inside, outside, urban, rural, or domestic. Field recording can be intended as archival observation, as material for musical composition or radio emissions, or as listening practice. With such a broad scope of practices, it can raise questions from authenticity to ethics of authorship and appropriation, to geographies and changing environments.

The festival will link field recording to the weather as phenomenon, as metaphor, and as concept, able to cause poetic and beautiful effects but also to manifest radically destructive events. In both field recording and the weather we are reminded that environments are in perpetual change. They are affected by outside influences, and much of the surprise and interest in a place is the way it constantly throws up new constellations of events and impressions. There are patterns to weather, seasons and weather systems, but it remains impossible to fully predict and still more impossible to control.

Exploring weather as a general condition, informed by climate, temperature, humidity, pressure, and changes in atmosphere, the festival will present and discuss various practices of field recording and their use in art and science. Performances, walks, on-site workshops, and talks will provide the opportunity to experience different modes of listening to the environment, permeated by the various and varying phenomena that weather comprises.