Re-enchantment and resolution take place at RCAH music festival

“Listening is starting to sound a lot like love,” was one of the many phrases used within artist Alexis C. Lamb’s performance in the Re-Enchantment and Resistance Music Festival that took place from 6-8:30 p.m. Thursday night in the Residential College of Arts and Humanities LookOut! Gallery.

The line accurately fit the bill of the sonic art showcase driven by a love for the environment. RCAH graduate fellow in arts and community engagement and event organizer, Melody Broski-Laing, came to the fellowship program with a strong interest in the use of music to build community and work towards justice. 

Through the program, she needed a project. As founder of Bogue Street Records, a record label launched out of RCAH in Dec. 2025, assistant professor in RCAH, Austin Oting Har, had the connections to help fuel Broski-Laing’s ideas. 

“There’s been a lot of work done on think about moments … thinking about moments in our environment and places that are overlooked, overshadowed and kind of taken over by pollution,” Broski-Laing said. “This idea of re-enchantment comes from thinking about how we can appreciate [these] spaces and how can we find what’s really beautiful in those hidden places.”

Har reached out to one of the founding members of the label, musician and ecologist Josh Epperly. Performing under the name bioPrism, he often utilizes sounds of nature and embraces environmental themes within his music. As the three collaborated, they realized they shared the interest of bringing music and action together and developed an event for that purpose. 

“Even in heavily urbanized environments like Lansing, I think it’s kind of a damaging perspective to be like, ‘Oh, well, it’s completely urbanized, there’s nothing here, there’s nothing to appreciate,’” bioPrism said. “I think even in [these] places, there are really interesting sounds all around us. There are lots of interactions between urban, heavily developed spaces and pockets of wildlife.”

Ahead of what is “always [his] favorite piece to perform,” “Microcosmos,” bioPrism went into details about the song. He started off with field recordings of cicadas on his street as what he described as feeling like a “hot summer night.” Slowly, he added riffs on his electric guitar and utilized pedals for delay and granulation, distortion, a touchpad for effects and an Ebow. With the tools, bioPrism built upon layers and loops until the conclusion of the piece. 

“It’s always different every time, depending on my mood,” bioPrism said. “It’s a vulnerable piece. It has a lot of narrative to it. I’m just grateful that of all the times I’ve performed it, I’ve always trusted the audience and felt that they were very receptive. Even though it gets very loud at the end, it’s still a song about quietness, and about how paying attention to the insects around us can kind of bring deep emotions out of us.”

Due to previous collaboration with bioPrism in another festival, Lamb was brought into the team as the second artist. 

Her research in Southeast Alaska and Northwest Ecuador influenced the piece “North South” that Lamb presented. Audio files with clips of Zoom interviews with essayists helped spread a direct message. As a percussionist, Lamb sat on the ground and improvised with a collection of instruments such as shakers, wood blocks and even goat toes that she took with her during her research. While performing, Lamb’s goal was to stay present with the track and to supplement the natural sounds. For her performances in nature as well as in the gallery, Lamb noted “resonating” with the sounds from nature or the field recordings. 

“There’s a big element of love and respect for silence,” Lamb said. “[There’s] the complexity of wanting a connection and wanting to preserve environmental spaces with as much richness in that space as we can, while also recognizing that there are so many things that can’t be undone by us, that we do coexist in these worlds.”

With both performances as an almost guided meditation drawn from the artists’ experiences, audience members were provided with an opportunity for personal immersion into the soundscapes of Lansing and East Lansing areas during intermission.

The two sound installation stations for field recordings were equipped with computers and headphones. Designed by students in Har’s RCAH 316 Sound Art class, the webpages displayed images of the recording locations along with a brief explanation of the location, its significance and a description of the sounds in the recording. 

The same students helped curate the field recordings across campus at locations such as the Bell Tower, Red Cedar River and The Rock. The Lansing recordings were gathered by Har, bioPrism and Vanessa Hanson at locations such as the then-proposed data center, Rose Lake and Bancroft Park. 

As a continuation of environmental advocacy, Broski-Laing planned a letter-writing campaign activity for attendees at the end of the event. Describing herself as someone who “highly values working towards social justice and climate justice,” Broski-Laing offered participants to join a collective effort in support of environmental policy and action. 

“Sharing letters from this letter writing event [will] hopefully be able to capture that our communities are concerned and caring for these issues and want that to be represented,” Broski-Laing said. 

The event served as the first installation of what is hoped to become a series of “Re-enchantment.” Bogue Street Records is currently working on an entire album of re-enchanting the Lansing area. They hope to expand to East Lansing and beyond in future projects.

Member of Bogue Street Records’ booking and A&R teams and business management and information science freshman Ava Crozier wanted to attend to support the label and the members of her team involved in the project. 

“It was really immersive… a great ambience performance,” Crozier said. “The audio tape of the speakers [in Lamb’s performance] walked us through with the ambience in the background. It really felt like you were there, and could see the scenes that she described beforehand in Alaska and Ecuador.”

Another factor in her attendance was her care for the environment and she even wrote a letter for the event.

“They walked us through some really important, relevant issues in Michigan right now,” Crozier said. “I think it was really important that they called on attendees to speak to the representatives and demand action instead of just saying they care about something.”

Nearly wrapping up his first year at MSU and in the Lansing area, this project helped Har and his wife to experience the city as they went out to collect field recordings of both sounds of nature and of humans. Har credits this “familiarity and intimacy” with the area to the project and stated that at the end of it, “We felt we knew Lansing.”

“Disenchantment of nature, [is] brought about through human-centric, anthropocentric, capitalistic attitudes and divisions between humans and environments,” Har said. “On the other hand, re-enchantment is recognizing our inseparability as a part of nature.”

“When we fall back in love with the Earth, the environmental crisis will be over,” was another phrase used in Lamb’s performance and speaks to the message of the event through the collaboration of Broski-Laing, Har, bioPrism and Lamb.