VP – Cosmosis LP

VP is Victoria Pham, a Paris-based Australian/Vietnamese artist,
composer, writer, & evolutionary biologist. A self-described sound
painter & fantasy gardener.

Pham’s musical & artistic practice cannot be separated from her
scientific endeavours, which both inform & structure her creative
process. A partnership with nature is fundamental to not only her
scientific studies but also to her sound-based & visual work.

Pham has recently created a home for her multi-layered experiments
in Earthly Futures Studio, Paris; a bio-design & acoustic ecology lab/
atelier where she combines her work with sound & scientific research
into bioacoustics, sustainable synthetic biological materials & food.

Although Pham has worked with sound in many guises for an
extended period, COSMOSIS will be her debut album.


VP on COSMOSIS ~
Sound is an ecology—a living organism that hatches, breathes, decays & evolves. In COSMOSIS, I sought to build sonic imagined
landscapes—audible biomes that could belong to an Earth yet to
come or a world beyond our own. This project seeks to listen beyond
musical registers, hoping to bring to the surface the unheard &
seemingly invisible, finding communion with voices often ignored: the
hum of fungi stretching through soil, the exhalation of forests, the
echoing calls of creatures who have shaped our Earth alongside us,
some far longer than us.

Over the past decade, I have gathered a library of field recordings. I
like to think of this as a living archive of our planet’s acoustics, foraged from my expeditions as an archaeoacoustics & bioacoustics
researcher. This archive includes recordings from each biome that is
reimagined in the album. They span early summer mornings in the
English woodlands, the ambience of prehistoric caves in Catalonia,
contact mic-ing tree roots in humid jungles, eucalyptus forests in
tempest on Gadigal & Darug country & underwater recordings of the
Mediterranean Sea. Through bioacoustics, I have been granted access to the voices of canids, gibbons, dolphins, birds, felines & more—an evolutionary lexicon of sound. These recordings are not merely samples; they became the raw materials from which this album is sculpted.

Technology allowed me to extend these more familiar natural voices
into unfamiliar terrains. The howl of a wolf is stretched, becoming a
haunting drone. The friction of a moth’s wings turned percussive,
reshaped into immersive rhythmic pulses. The electrical current of
mycelium sonified into an ethereal choral arrangement. Each track
carries within it an essence of what is known & what is earthly, but I
hope, it transforms into something beyond recognition—a liminal
space between the real & the imagined.

This album is a map of possible futures, a place where sonic
landscapes become speculative ecologies.


Artwork ~
The cover art, accompanying film, & visuals for VP’s live presentations
of COSMOSIS were created by multiple Aria award winning artist/
director Jonathan Zawada. Jonathan’s work in painting, sculpture,
drawing, video, installation & object design echoes Victoria’s in
blending analog & digital, natural & artificial & in its connection to
nature.

Zawada gained prominence creating record-sleeve artwork for The
Presets' Apocalypso & Flume's Skin, & has gone on to create work for
Mark Pritchard & Thom Yorke, Coachella & many others.

Zawada's practice is rooted in his early background in web design &
coding, synthesising the virtual & physical realms. His hyperreal pieces seamlessly oscillate between intricate detail & dynamic expression.