In 1747, the French physician and philosopher, Julien Offray de La Mettrie published L’homme machine (Man, a Machine). In this short text, La Mettrie suggested that the human body “is a machine that winds itself up, a living likeness of perpetual motion.” La Mettrie’s suggestion that human beings were no more than sophisticated machines was intensely controversial, forcing him to leave his home country. People were not yet ready to have their commitment to human uniqueness challenged by the new materialism. Today, though, in the modern age, we often think of ourselves as a kind of contraption that must be looked after and trained. The body is a machine that is capable of thought, movement, but also prone to breaking down.

Louise Rossiter’s first EP for Oscillations, ‘Der Industriepalast: Part 1’ takes
its inspiration from another materialist, the infographic pioneer, Fritz Kahn (1888-1968). His famous life-sized 1926 poster ‘Der Mensch als Industriepalast’ (Man as Industrial Palace), depicts the human body as a kind of factory, with factory workers in different departments. Here the human body is imagined as an organisation, with multiple production-lines. To prepare, Rossiter engages in extensive research, mind-mapping and the creation of abstract sound-worlds that mingle the real and the imaginary, the familiar and the strange. For “Der Industrieplast,” she combined pitch-shifted small sounds with recordings from Everard’s Brewery in Leicester and the cellar of her parents’ pub, rich environments for the dank, watery, echoey sound of the insides of the human body. Classically-trained, Rossiter also records various instruments– piano, violin, viola, percussion–before editing, processing and creating a sample library in Kontakt so she can play back the sounds in a musically expressive way with MIDI controllers.

The first track on Der Industriepalast, ‘Homo Machina’ (2018) pulses with the beat of a vitalism tuned into a system of measurement; as hospital sounds encounter great roars. The sound travels through the body–lungs, heart, brain, digestion–revealing the human body as a sonic composition, all gurgles, breaths, rhythms, pulses and obscure noises in the dark.

‘Neuronen’ (2019) takes as its inspiration another Kahn infographic – this time an image that compares the human nervous system to the mechanism of a door bell. We hear the bell ringing as the piece taps into our behaviourist responses. We often react on impulse, as a reflex. ‘Neuronen’ forces us to ask what remains of us when we are so conditioned by our own body? The translation between Kahn’s image into sound creates harsh metallic switches, levers and crackles. On this track and the following, Rossiter recorded the sound of wind up classic car toys and a 1960s Scalextric set, close-mic’ed with a Zoom F3 field recorder. Alongside this, are the sound of mechanical clocks, heavily processed plugins from GRM, Soundtoys and others.

The final track, ‘Synapse’ (2020) again explores Kahn’s work, this time his 1939 infographic “Is the nervous system an electrical system?” More abstract than the previous two recordings, there is nevertheless continuity, as movement tracks from side to side, emulating the process of a synapse itself, where neurons pass electrical or chemical signals to other neurons or cells. Here the human body is an electricity-generation machine, a power-station.

Rossiter’s work is a great contribution to sonic materialism, blurring the physical with the mechanical, minute detail with epic sound.