Though richly varied, Michael Pisaro-Liu’s (born 1961) works are linked through their philosophical and ethical concern for the interaction between music and its sounding environment, their openness to the creative contributions of performers, and their capacity for making felt our belonging to and participation in a world of continuous and often surprising variation.

Radiolorians (2018) finds Pisaro-Liu drawing inspiration from another gifted observer of this world-in-variation, the German zoologist, naturalist, and philosopher Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), who promoted and popularised evolutionary thought via extensive monographs and artful renderings of insects, animals, sea creatures, and embryos. For Radiolarians, Pisaro-Liu creates what he terms “transcriptions” of individual radiolaria species depicted in Haeckel’s drawings.

Radiolarians comprises fourteen compact pieces, each derived from a specific species of radiolaria and ranging in duration from one to nine minutes. Each piece features a mixture of harmonic, melodic, and noise elements corresponding roughly to the structures of each radiolaria, where pitched elements serve as tonal spines unfolding in time as well as spatially within the ensemble, and noise elements capture the twitches and undulations of the protozoic bodies contained therein.

Pisaro-Liu’s inventive transcriptions are brought to life in this sensitively performed and masterfully recorded actualisation by the Muzzix ensemble, whose balance of technological and acoustic elements reincarnate the fragile balance of the crystalline and amoebic in audible form. The ensemble’s heterogeneity and seamless blending of technological and traditional elements recapitulate anew the sense of enmeshed temporalities and a cross-cutting of the natural, cultural, and mechanical in Haeckel’s monographs.