Stink Horn: a mycological musical performance-lecture by Siôn Parkinson
Stink Horn: a mycological musical performance-lecture by Siôn Parkinson
Presented by: The John Cage Trust in collaboration with The Flow Chart Foundation
Date: Friday, May 9th, 7pm
Location: Flow Chart Space, 348 Warren Street, Hudson, NY 12534
How can a mushroom’s noxious stench—and the droning sound of insects irresistibly drawn towards it—reshape how we listen to and make music?
Join artist, musician, and author Siôn Parkinson (visiting from the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, Scotland) for an intimate performance-lecture—part talk, part live musical experiment—exploring the strange, multisensory world of the stinkhorn fungus.
Drawing from his book Stinkhorn: How Nature’s Most Foul-Smelling Mushroom Can Change the Way We Listen (Sternberg Press 2025), Siôn will lead an evening of music and mycology. Like composer John Cage, his twin passions for music and mushrooms have shaped a radical approach to sound. Yet while Cage sought silence in his fungal forays, Siôn finds Stink⎯an element that links sound and smell, the real and the hallucinated, opening up new ways of listening and composing.
Siôn’s performance will be accompanied by a recording of John Cage’s “Child of Tree” (1975), a work for amplified plant materials, performed by D’Arcy Philip Gray (2014) and presented courtesy of Mode Records (thank you Brian Brandt of Mode!).
NOTE: for those near the Bard College campus, this event will also take place at 4pm in Blum Hall (Edith C. Blum Institue, 60 Blithewood Avenue, Annendale-on-Hudson). No registration required. A reception will follow at the John Cage Trust (Wilson House), feauting John Cage’s favorite macrobiotic cookies.
