What Remains After Goodbye
June 24, 2025
At Studio Kura, Mel·lif·lu·ous will embark on a transformative residency to create Wildroot & Amber—an immersive sonic project that explores ancestral memory, the voice of nature, and the terrain of remembrance through sound and touch.
Using violin, vocals, the Push 3, Microcosm, and the Playtronica controller, the project becomes a living archive: a responsive environment where memory is activated through gesture and contact.
The audience is invited to physically engage with the installation, transforming found objects, natural materials, and subtle movements into sound. This tactile approach deepens the connection between body, environment, and sonic memory—offering a space where presence becomes ritual and sound becomes trace.
Wildroot & Amber is an immersive sound installation and performance piece that explores the intersection of memory, nature, and touch. Rooted in the idea of sonic preservation, the project transforms objects into instruments of remembrance. Through an evolving archive of sounds—including ancestral voices, forest recordings, and voices from the past—this work invites audiences into a sensory experience where the past and present echo one another.
The concept emerged from a desire to connect with the earth and with human memory in a more visceral, poetic way. Inspired by the textures of natural environments and the emotional charge of personal and collective archives, the piece becomes a space for reflection and reactivation. It blurs the boundary between installation and performance, allowing participants to not only witness but also influence the unfolding sonic landscape.
Central to this exploration is the theme of connection—between people and objects, between performers and audiences, and between individual memories and shared cultural echoes. Technologies like the Playtronica controller are used as as instruments of intimacy. They make the invisible tactile, allowing touch to become languages through which we translate memory into music.
Together, these elements weave a soundscape that is both deeply personal and collectively ancestral, encouraging audiences to touch, activate, and participate in the unfolding of sonic memory.
Wildroot & Amber is a poetic blend of performance and installation that invites audiences into a space of resonance, ritual, and remembrance. Rooted in wildness and preservation, each sound within the piece is “bottled” like a remedy, evoking the healing properties of memory and the intimacy of nature.
This project seeks to create a world that is at once ancient and experimental. It is a living archive where every sound becomes a remedy, every gesture a ritual, and every interaction an invitation to connect. It excavates memory through layered sonic textures drawn from:
Traditionally, an apothecary was a medical practitioner—part pharmacist, part healer—who prepared and dispensed remedies from herbs, minerals, and other natural elements. Their shops brimmed with tinctures, salves, and elixirs, each carefully labeled and stored in glass jars or wax-sealed bottles. Long before modern medicine, apothecaries were trusted community caretakers, blending science with folk knowledge to tend to both body and spirit.
But these spaces—dating back to ancient Greece, Rome, China, and the Islamic world—were more than functional. They were vessels of curiosity, preservation, and hope. Within them lingered a quiet magic: the kind found in murmured incantations, secret formulas, and the belief that something unseen might still mend the broken.
Over time, the apothecary evolved into the modern pharmacist. But in that transformation, something intimate—and sacred—was left behind.
In Wildroot & Amber, the apothecary reappears—not as a place of cures, but as a keeper of moments.
Not a promise to heal, but a way to remember.
Not a pharmacy, but a sonic shelf.
Each sound a trace.
Each fragment, a container.
I do not offer remedies.
I offer relics. Whispers. Potions made of memory and sound.
In Wildroot & Amber, the apothecary becomes sonic: a collection of sounds, fragments, and touch-triggered traces. These are not prescriptions, but offerings—preserved moments, forgotten voices, echoes from unseen worlds.
If you find meaning, if something stirs—let that be yours.
In performance, Wildroot & Amber becomes a living ritual—a conjuring of sound, memory, and touch. Using the Playtronica controller, everyday objects—water, an old photograph, a patch of earth, a pair of earrings that hold a story, even skin—are transformed into instruments of memory.
Each object is placed inside a glass jar, labeled like a relic in an apothecary of sound and holds symbolic weight and aesthetic depth while functioning as a MIDI controller in Ableton Live. When touched, they trigger sound: a forest echo, a melodic pulse, a whispered voice, a story. Each jar holds a preserved fragment of something once felt or forgotten.
The performer moves among them like a conductor of remembrance, layering sound in real time. Each performance is improvised—shaped by the moment, never the same twice. This tactile choreography transforms memory into a sonic ritual, where each jar becomes a portal to something unseen but deeply known.
The audience is drawn into a sensory space where sound, texture, and presence converge—a meditation on memory, connection, and the invisible threads that bind us to the past.
A ritual of touch. An apothecary of the forgotten.
Each object can hold symbolic weight and aesthetic depth while functioning as a conductor. Pairing them with specific sounds (e.g., water = memory ripple, moss = low hum, photo = whispered voice) can build an emotional and immersive experience.
In performance, Wildroot & Amber becomes a living ritual—a conjuring of sound, memory, and touch. Using the Playtronica controller, everyday objects—water, an old photograph, a patch of earth, a pair of earrings that hold a story, even skin—are transformed into instruments of memory.
