algae & tentacles: the mouth is a resonant field

A broken telephonic call to the future's past, Algae & Tentacles' The Mouth is a Resonant Field combines solo voice, intuitive free improvisation, minimalist endurance, and noisy accident in order to reimagine the sonic palette of American folk song. Through the filter of consumer grade pedal electronics, old songs become sites where new worlds can emerge. Always with an ear toward the vast, oceanic sonic confusion of these unknown spaces, Algae & Tentacles (John Melillo) works in the undersound of traditional song. Melillo works through old chants, ballads, and melancholic work-songs to create a sound that is both old-time and no-time. Imagine song as a resonating field of vocalization extending itself in shards of audibility passed from mouth to ear to text to recording machine, in a pluralized time and space that sings bodies as much as bodies sing it. Thrown out of the orbit of tradition, these songs are not nostalgic places of return but rather sites from which new worlds emerge. Algae & Tentacles is the sound work of John Melillo. It is an umbrella for an eclectic set of sonic outputs that often hover around song, including verse-chorus-verse constructions, digital sound art, sound poetry, and electro-acoustic improvisation. Algae & Tentacle's first album was released by Lightning Records in 2015. Melillo has released collaborative albums with Cecyl Ruehlen (Where Tremble Heart, Unsilent Desert Press, 2022) and Geoff Saba (Dry River, FREAKS, 2017).