Mélodie Melak's solo project consists of self-made synthesizers that are hooked up to an array of plants. The plants, who have their own unique timber, shape the sound of each oscillator. Because of physiological reactions, the plants modulate the frequency they produce, creating an alive and ever morphing sound.
On stage, Mélodie composes with the sounds produced and modulated live by the plants. Her music evolves from minimalism to noise drone.
Through the use of technology, she puts sounds where she cannot put words, in her interaction with vegetal elements.

Melak is unarguably inspired by nature. She performs it, she allows herself to be performed by it, she’s a part of it, she hopes it all comes together. Now, we could say her approach is a take on the common anthropocentric approach to nature. That her work promotes the complex interconnectivity between all elements, and ultimately present Nature as a sentient being with inherent worth.
It would be just as true as saying that she plays music.

 

At the intersection of a sound installation and a performance, the duo “condensed and falling in separate drops” creates a resonating territory of frequencies.  Standing waves, physical boundaries of sound that can be felt as they pass through you, sonically materialise the space between walls, physically connecting all present. Amidst this atmosphere, plants attached through an array of oscillators populate, develop and emphasize the delicate stability of the territory.

 

Brian Kiel: standing waves
Mélodie Melak: self-made plants synthesisers

 

The excerpt below is to be listened to with headphones or proper speakers (laptop speakers won't render all frequencies, specially bass)

With their piece Osmosis, the collective bOa in collaboration with live musician mélodie melak, develop further its work on the human body in its relation to nature considered from a vegetal point of view.
Questioning the effectiveness of the human’s tendency to remodel its surrounding to its convenience, Osmosis embraces the idea that humans are destined to harm themselves by destroying their vital environment.
On music made live with sounds crafted by and from plants in realtime, the dancers reconnect with instinctual behaviours by drawing on a vocabulary of visually abstract movements inspired by various processes inherent to the plant life.