SP* Episode 36: CREATIVE LISTENING – with C. Lavender [podcast]

Sonia Louise Davis – emergence: stardust from tomorrow (2023)

C. Lavender is a sound artist, sound healing practitioner, educator, and author of Transcendent Waves: How Listening Shapes Our Creative Lives. She has worked with labels including Editions Mego, RVNG, Longform Editions, and most recently iDEAL, who have just released Rupture In The Eternal Realm, a sonic reinterpretation of a Tibetan Buddhist meditation practice. In this episode of the Sound Propositions podcast, we discuss the influence of Pauline Oliveros, how working as an educator led to writing Transcendent Waves, and the evolution of the relationship between her practice as a sound artist and sound healer. (Joseph Sannicandro)

Episode 36: CREATIVE LISTENING – with C. Lavender

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Interview recorded August 2023
Produced and mixed May 2024

Whether as sound artist or sound healer, C. Lavender’s work asks us to listen with our bodies, becoming aware of the way our mental state can be transformed by embodied, creative listening. With a background in psychology and art therapy, she later studied sound healing with Jonathan Goldman, founder of the Sound Healers Association, and was assistant to Pauline Oliveros, with whom she also studied Deep Listening. Since 2014, she has had a private practice of sound healing, a live experience working with electronic sounds, as well as with traditional singing bowls and gongs. As a musician, she has collaborated with Aaron Dilloway, John Wiese, Jake Meginsky, Matmos, and others, but most of her work takes the form of solo instrumental explorations. Through workshops, lecturers, and courses, she has developed a pedagogical and philosophical approach to listening which she presented in her book, Transcendent Waves, released by Anthology Editions in 2020. 

Lavender Suarez’s earliest releases, as Paid In Puke and C. Lavender, are mostly in the mold of cathartic harsh noise bursts, but over the years her compositions have slowed down, experimenting playfully with more spacious and gentler tones. Lavender credits the change to her time as assistant to Pauline Oliveros. Experiencing Oliveros—as a performer, improviser, and pedagogue—taught her to be more patient, to allow her sounds more time to develop. Rather than move to NYC, after graduating college, Lavender moved further north in the Hudson Valley to Hudson, which in 2010 was still a small mostly unknown town that has since become a “hipster hub.” It was then that Oliveros, teaching at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute not far north, took Lavender on as an assistant. Working outside of the hype cycles and urban hot spots with Oliveros, carrying out unauthorized performances, such as a rendition of “King Kong Sing Along” at a farmer’s market in Kingston, NY, gave Lavender the opportunity for her practice to develop in new ways.

Last week, my colleague Maria reviewed Rupture in the Eternal Realm, Lavender’s third full-length record, which she describes as “deeply spiritual and healing soundscapes” that offer a means of “experiencing the fragility and the ephemerality of eternity.” The spirituality of the album is reminiscent of 1970s ambient synth music, such as Franco Battiato or Brian Eno. And while it is inspired by Lavender’s experience with Tibetan Buddhist meditation, Rupture in the Eternal Realm is not a sound healing album. In this episode, Lavender explains her desire to maintain some separation between her practices, stressing the importance of live improvisation and spatial embodiment to her practice as a sound healer, something that can’t simply be re-presented as a recording. But increasingly she has drawn on her experience as a sound healer to develop new compositional techniques and influences.

Maria aligns Lavender’s latest with a “forward-thinking genealogy of music makers that blur the boundaries between the spiritual and the technological, such as Laurie Anderson, Éliane Radigue and Pauline Oliveros.” The influence of Oliveros gets special attention in this episode. Working alongside Oliveros taught Lavender not only patience, but reaffirmed the importance of humor to both music and pedagogy. Lavender continues to use humor as an integral part of her meditations and workshops. Such principles of humor, improvisation, and working with bodies in space have informed Lavender’s approach to both music and sound healing.

A feature in the Creative Independent frames Lavender’s practices as “two distinct creative identities: Sound Healer and Electronic Musician.” A separation between these practices is necessary, as sound healing has a specific intention that, for Lavender, is rooted in a live meditative experience of a resonant body in space listening. But the two practices have become increasingly entangled, and group sound healing, or sound baths, have proved to be particularly useful sources of audience feedback that have informed Lavender’s approach to sound more generally. 

I always enjoy having discussions about sound after I’ve performed a sound healing event, because often people describe these sensations that they’ve never had before, and they’re trying to make sense of it: “Oh, at one point, I felt the sound of the gong in my knee. Well, I never thought about listening with my knee or how sound affects my knee.” But sound is constantly affecting our bodies in every moment, and most of the time it’s subconscious.

She echoes this sentiment in our conversation, explaining that sound baths have made for ideal audiences, capable of deeper reflection and more willing to have substantive discussions about their experience afterwards. Healing spaces can come in many forms, and the body can be sounded not only by the sustained tone of a singing bowl but also by the clanging of a Manhattan radiator in the middle of the night.

Lavender wrote Transcendent Waves partly to communicate these ideas to a wider audience, designed and published as an appropriately beautiful book by Anthology Editions. She had already distilled her philosophies after developing and teaching a middle school science course on sound for homeschooled kids, a course called All Ears – everything related to sound. So many books on sound studies or sound healing are written for academics or practitioners, but Transcendent Waves connects to listening on a more personal level. Broken up into three sections, Mind/Body, Creation/Expression, and Internal/External, Lavender breaks down these binaries using various techniques of creative listening.

Coming from a background in punk and noise, with a respect for doing-it-yourself and little patience for esoteric pretensions, Lavender has tried to model a version of sound healing that resists “wellness” cliches and New Age stereotypes. Working with gongs in that context has helped her understand herself as a percussionist, and that and other epiphanies have slowly transformed her work as a musician and sound artist. On Myth of Equilibrium (2020) and now Rupture in the Eternal Realm, Lavender’s work as a sound healer has continued the dialogue with her musical practice. Following the traumatic experiences of the global pandemic, coming to terms with loss, Lavender was drawn to the imagery and philosophy of Tibetan Buddhist meditation, which also resonated with her early interest in metal music and horror films. Rather than attempt any kind of authentic representation or translation, Lavender uses her personal journey with this meditative practice as a point of departure.

Please enjoy this episode with Lavender, check out her new album and pick up a copy of Transcendent Waves, a perfect beach read for those hot summer days. Sound Propositions will be back in just a couple of weeks for some underwater quantum blues with France Jobin. Until then, happy listening.

LINKS

C. Lavender
Bandcamp
iDEAL
Transcendent Waves

TRACKLIST
ARTIST – “TITLE” (ALBUM, LABEL, YEAR)

Lavender – “The Blue Expanse” (Rupture In The Eternal Realm, iDEAL, 2024)
SP INTRO
Lavender – “Dream Within A Dream” (Ubuweb, Edit from live performance at Union Pool, Brooklyn, 12 November 2019)
C. Lavender – I’ve Become Aware (live edit 2014) (Don’t Trip, NTS, 2014)
Oliveros and Ione – “The Nubian Word for Flowers: a Phantom Opera” (The International Contemporary Ensemble, Live, 22 February 2020)
Bunnybrains – “Foregone Occlusion” (Foregone Occlusion, Bandcamp, 2024)
Matmos – “On the Team” [C. Lavender section] (The Consuming Flame: Open Exercises in Group Form, Thrill Jockey, 2020)
John Wiese – “Magnetic Stencil 1-1” (Magnetic Stencil 1, Helicopter, 2020)
Pauline Oliveros – “Tuning Meditation” (Live at Fuentidueña Chapel, The Met Cloisters, NYC, 2016)
Pauline Oliveros – “King Kong Sing Along Simultaneously” (Good Morning Mr. Orwell 2014,  Live at Nam June Paik Art Center, South Korea, 2014)
Late Music Ensemble / Pauline Oliveros – “Sonic Meditation I” (“Teach Yourself to Fly”, York Unitarian Chapel, 1 August 2015)
Paid in Puke + Buckets of Bile – “Case in Point” (Split, Speed Tapes, 2018)
Wolf Eyes – “Mnesmosyne Moments” (IN SPLATTERED TIME, Disciples, 2023)
Lavender – “Opening The Gates” (Fortitude In Wintarmanoth, Ecstatic Peace!, 2013)
Lavender – “White Oleander​/​Delphic Oracle Enters The Chasm” (Peaceful Protest, RVNG, 2017)
Lavender – “Remedy Potion” (Myth of Equilibrium, Editions Mego, 2020)
Lavender – “Terraforming a Sanctuary” (Installation, The Lincoln Park Conservatory | Experimental Sound Studio “Florasonic” Commission | Chicago, IL | 2019)
Lavender – “Ocean Of Ambrosia” (Rupture In The Eternal Realm, iDEAL, 2024)
Lavender – “Escape From The Pendulum” (V/A: Alone In The Dark, Hot Releases, 2019)
Lavender – “Myth of Equilibrium” (Myth of Equilibrium, Editions Mego, 2020)
C. Lavender – “Assimilation/Incineration” (Serpentine Fever Dream, psychic liberation, 2017)
Aaron Dilloway & C. Lavender – “Secret Destroyed Instantly 1” (Secret Destroyed Instantly, Hanson, 2018)
John Cage / Aaron Dilloway – “Rozart Mix” (Rozart Mix, Hanson, 2024)
C. Lavender – “Transient Seclusion” (Transient Seclusion, Longform Editions, 2021)
Lavender – “Melt Into Light” (Rupture In The Eternal Realm, iDEAL, 2024)
C. Lavender – “Emptiness Itself” (Rupture In The Eternal Realm, iDEAL, 2024)

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Sound Propositions is written, recorded, mixed, and produced by Joseph Sannicandro.