Jim Nollman :: Orcas’ Greatest Hits
Photo: Jim O’Donnell
Photo: Katy Nollman.
Every once in a while, a cosmic character comes around and flips the sonic script of the music-making world on its head, before landing back on its feet in a complete daze. I guess this all depends on which side of the fence you're standing on when it comes to measuring the cultural significance of an individual’s iconism, the overall impact, and how much you intimately invest in your harmonious heroes. While it seems easy to woo several thousand fans’ hearts and minds with an artist’s ecstatic energy and performance, it’s an even greater achievement when someone creatively conjures the cosmic communication between man and animal. Interspecies founder, conceptual musician, writer, and environmentalist Jim Nollman has been carefully capturing the spiritual species that peacefully occupy the ancient waters of our thirsty planet. Born and raised in Boston shortly after the Second World War had ended, Nollman relocated to Massachusetts to attend Tufts University towards the end of the 1960s before eventually setting up shop in the Bay Area, where he participated in the post-Cage avant-garde, summoning signals for the legendary KPFA radio station. It was here that Nollman discovered the powerful properties of music and its hefty healing powers that his generation, and poetic peers like Fred Neil, had tried so hard to convey during the Vietnam War and the many other injustices of the times, to reach some alchemical agreement for peace. Throughout the 1970s, Nollman set out on an atmospheric adventure filled with environmental expression that would eventually become his very own poetic practice, Interspecies.
“The world itself can only be perceived as a unity upon which we all live and die, grow and collaborate.”
Photo: David Rothenberg
A nonprofit that developed wilderness programs that gave artists access to nature with the objective of co-creating an aesthetic in interactive relationships with wild animals and habitat, Nollman later released his debut album on Folkways Records titled “Playing Music with Animals: The Interspecies Communication of Jim Nollman with 300 Turkeys, 12 Wolves, 20 Orca Whales” in 1982. A primitive proposition that tonally translates the legendary language from one mammal to another, Nollman’s alchemical ability to summon these brilliant creatures from the salty depths is pure magic, and something you would have a hard time believing if we didn’t have photographic evidence or audible proof. “Orcas’ Greatest Hits” captures the elemental essence between humans and the ocean’s ultimate apex predator, the orca whale, between 1985 and 2002 using underwater instruments called “hydrophones”, in what some have safely speculated was the world’s first underwater recording studio. While balancing the intimate influences of John Muir and Gifford Pinchot with the surrealistic seances of John Cage and Marcel Duchamp, Nollman trail-blazes an already enormous mystery by representing the natural world through music and pure poetic bliss. While collaborating with fellow artists, musicians, Tibetan Lamas, the youth, and everyday locals, this crystallized collection of music effortlessly explores a connection between the digitized dimensions of the 1980s and the ongoing revolutionary research from the ocean’s endless exploration. Set for release on Smithsonian’s Folkways Recordings on August 14th, “Orcas’ Greatest Hits” is as much a return to the label as it is to the natural world.
