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Sound Passage by Gryphon Rue

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Sound Installation
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Gryphon Rue’s Sound Passage draws from recordings made across varied geographies and temporalities, grounding electronic manipulation within resonant natural and archival environments.

The rear of a white delivery truck stopped in traffic on a leafy urban street. The truck's back panel is wrapped with a large-format print depicting a grand baroque hallway: towering arched colonnades recede in perfect perspective toward a distant doorway, where a sculptural figure is faintly visible.

Sound Passage by Gryphon Rue:
A Sound Installation in the Curve Gallery
Now playing; free with admission

Artist and composer Gryphon Rue presents a layered sonic installation that braids field recordings, wildlife, voice, and electronic sound into a fugue-like cycle of place, memory, and transformation. The composition turns continuously, without beginning or end, allowing sounds to surface, dissolve, overlap, and recur as a single unfolding organism.

Drawn from recordings made across varied geographies and temporalities, the work moves between the intimate and the atmospheric, grounding electronic manipulation within resonant natural and archival environments. Musical saws drift alongside humpback whales recorded in Polynesia; auroral chorus and bat echolocation emerge through transformed voice, percussion, and synthetic birdsong; fragments of water, metal, and distant electronics circulate in layered relation. Together, these materials form a living sonic environment that continuously reshapes itself through repetition, accumulation, and return.

Source material includes:

  • “Glade” (musical saws, humpback whales recorded in Polynesia)
  • “Magenta Beams” (electronics, trumpets)
  • Josephine Baker (collage)
  • Auroral chorus (Sheffield, England; recordist: Mark Dennison)
  • Spring peepers (High Falls, New York)
  • Water well (Les Gras, France)
  • “Squatters Quarters” (percussion, tape manipulation)
  • Echolocation of Indiana bats (North Georgia Mountains; recordist: Richard Devine)
  • Electronic “birds”
  • Propane tank (High Falls, New York)
  • “Operation for Preferred Embodiment” (voice transformation)

Artist


Gryphon Rue is an artist, composer, and musician based in New York. His approach fuses collage, improvisation, and the recombination of materials and recordings to build works in both sound and image. He is a featured performer in Calder Gardens’ Artists as Gardens series.

Sound Passage is curated by Juana Berrío, Marsha Perelman Senior Director of Programs.

Programming at Calder Gardens is generously supported by Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz; The Brown Foundation, Inc. of Houston; Donna Green; Michael Sternberg; and the Friends of Calder Gardens.