M-0ther - Bending the Channel: An Offering for the River of Deep Time

Bending the Channel: An Offering for the River of Deep Time is the first public presentation in a long term project by M-0ther called "Sounds of the River Machine." 

Highways is situated at the westernmost reaches of the River Machine - a phrase that refers to the vast and complex fossil fuel powered infrastructure that extracts water from the Colorado River to sustain 40 million people living in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Tucson, and Northwestern Mexico. This River Machine is the subject of her ongoing sound recording, sampling and compositional work, through which she reconceptualizes her inherited relationships produced by metanarratives of colonization, extraction, domination, and separation into personal, intimate and expansive gestures and sounds.

Bending the Channel: An Offering for the River of Deep Time is composed as a graphic score for instruments including live electronics, modular synths, voice, and bespoke instruments such as melting ice and a/c condensation sounding on amplified objects. The score is interpreted by some of the most exciting performers in the Los Angeles underground, and projection mapped visuals create an immersive stage and lighting design. This work uses sound as a primary medium for reshaping both social and physical spaces and relationships, much in the way that water shapes the earth. It is an offering towards bending linear extraction towards circular modes of stewardship.

Content warning: blood and nudity, strictly 18+

About M-0ther

M-0ther is a project by musician, composer, performer, and visualist Heather Gray. The motivation behind her diverse creative background has been to reveal, document and transform modern systems of relationality, healing and belonging through personal and collective practice.  Her past work has traversed performance art, community organizing work, immersive art and projection mapping, vjing, djing, tv and film production, audio engineering, songwriting and music production. She is currently the synthesist of the band The Education led by Grammy nominated (for Anderson .Paak) band leader and trumpeter Emile Martinez. She has released solo music on LA-based LGBTQ+ hypnotic imprint Delusional Records, and performed at numerous synth and electronic music festivals, performance art and audiovisual festivals as well as DIY spaces and underground venues in LA and across the southwest. She runs a recording and sound design studio called Jungle X in Los Angeles, and is a member of the grassroots Flowers and Bullets Collective in Tucson, Arizona, who are restoring a 10 acre abandoned school into a sustainable urban farm and community healing space by reclaiming and amplifying cultural roots in the neighborhood. She began the project M-0ther in 2019 and creates music and immersive experiences from field recordings, samples, live electronics, installations, and performance. More info at m-0ther.com Instagram and Tiktok @m_0ther the “o” is a zero