Scoria-Sonics is an on-going research project exploring an alternative methodology of sound composition, with a focus on the context of sonic speculative fiction. Its central conceptual object is the scoria, a vesicular volcanic rock whose topology is re-interpreted as a storytelling mechanism. Its vesicles become ‘carrier bags’ (Le Guin, 1989) of speculation, their material properties allowing for non-linear interpretations of more-than-human entanglements, which, as part of my practice, are most effectively revealed through embodied sound explorations.

In the spirit of Le Guin’s carrier bag (1989) and Haraway’s string figures (2016), I am interested in using the topology of this rock as a way of composing sonic storytelling, and as an interface for sonic speculation. In an exercise of imagining a handful of grains of sand trickling down from the labyrinthine hollows of a piece of scoria, each of its cavities represents its own continuum – perhaps a time that has passed, re-shaping its happenings every time you access it; or a temporal spectre yet to take shape and unfurl. A playground for speculation waiting to be explored.

Sonic composition, through this type of exercise, becomes material play through the overlapping of the geological time of an object, and the temporalities we experience as storytellers.