Composed by Mue, feat. Katherine Melançon, “(Untitled) Grapefruit” from Pelures et épluchures: A Discard Study at Mutek, 2022. Performance leftovers. Scanogrammed melon, cucumber, carrots, orange, banana, lemon, ground cherry wraps. Courtesy of the artists.
It begins with dinner. Or, it began with dinner, but dinner isn’t in this landscape. It precedes it. We begin once the dinner has already been consumed. Here we are, hands full of scraps, in the digestive space, scanning. Here we are with the hum and buzz, the bright light passing over and over the soft layered notes. When someone said discard and waste, we imagined the crash and roar of machinery, the clanking of mechanical teeth. Something industrial with steel hooks. We nodded knowingly—all too aware of our fraudulent city, the landfill offloaded to other jurisdictions. A highly litigious recycling contractor who can’t be gotten rid of. We’ve tried and failed to sell our leftovers and runoff to other countries. They’ve cut us off. Our old glass contaminated by the wrong equipment. Our arrogance: parcelling out our worst, and expecting cash. We need a new process.
The equipment in this room could be the correct equipment. Coloured cables snake into assigned portals. Glasses of water ripple beside expectant microphones and piles of leavings. Sounds emit, hushed but insistent. They are guiding our waste along an interior trajectory. They are making images of what we failed to consider.
What’s already been eaten has disappeared. What remains is shard, squelch, after-crunch. We throw the peel into the resonant half-sphere and wait for the echo to bend. We intuit a melody from the mounting array of percussive cues. Tskk tskk tsk tsk tskkkk. Our detritus is being scanned, making a sing-song two-tone flash and hum, into our fun-mirror belly: the screen is digesting everything we left behind. Listen to the slow, soft squirt of melon remnants. Their acidity draws a bright yellow band, undulating between lilac mounds. These lines appear static; we can only detect their morphing movement when we look away and back again. There now, the melon hum has become a staccato lemon rind, pocked and curling in on itself. The sound is growing: click of the knife on the cutting board, papery shuffle of ground cherry wrapper, wet plop of cucumber seed. Magnified, they pile into an uncertain architecture. Spaceship bridges of fruit and vegetable castoffs, superimposed on a carpet of low drones. The cantaloupe sits, porous and waiting, cleaved open to reveal its juicy core. Waxy shards form dizzying arches. As we move through this vestigial edifice, this reactive image, we wonder, “Are we changing it, or does it change us?”
Onward through this rhythm which beats quietly with some jagged punctuation; we continue to feed our waste to the screen. Alternate stomach interior, the insides we could have had. What if we’d eaten the opposite of everything we’ve consumed? On screen, pocked rinds from a fat orange reach like tentative wings across a vaulted pavilion of bell pepper. What does a pepper sound like when it’s reduced to its spongy pith? What’s really inside? Once, I saw you eat the mini parasitic pepper you found growing within. This is called an internal proliferation. It is small and smooth and sometimes shaped like a haggard little face—recognize it?
Leaning forward, we catch a sonic stutter. Several pink flamingo necks protrude from a honeydew husk, surrounded by the crooked purple of tossed cabbage—a bright alkaline splay across the dark like those halved geodes you once found in the gift shop at the end of the world. You were eating trail mix, you were hot off the mountain, and wanted to stick your hands into that polished, sugary rose quartz, full of glistening spikes. You wanted to eat it so that later you’d shit out glittering shards of pink rock.
Imagining this, we miss the architecture shifting again. In our alternate stomach, the skins are beckoning like great green hands. The drone swells and the hands become stems, become bioluminescent shrimp at the bottom of a dark trench, dripping ruby jewels. The pepper again. Remember the flat seeds that were extracted, and the springy white membrane that was ripped out, like a dream you once had in which you removed your own head and neck, cored yourself like a hollow nightshade, leaving a clear, fragrant vegetal void. The dream was calm like the soothing voices that now layer over sonorous harmonics. Calm because all the excess had been removed. We are murmuring suggestions to the fruit. Our heads are safely on, but we can see inside ourselves. We feel soft-bodied and translucent, so vulnerable to the whirrs and clicks, the pulpy tunnels. We’re digesting ourselves. We shiver every time the beat shifts.
Mue is a duo based in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal and is composed of Catherine Debard and Léon Lo. The electronic musical project merges two distinct practices and explores the way they interact with each other, weaving asymmetric patterns, creating spaces, and digesting various sounds.
Katherine Melançon’s practice explores the intersection of the natural and the technological. More recently, she has been interested in the agency of non-human beings; what could become of the world, of Art, if it was created with non-human people?
H Felix Chau Bradley is the author of Personal Attention Roleplay, which was a finalist for the WUC Danuta Gleed Literary Award and the Kobo Rakuten Emerging Writer Prize, as well as the poetry chapbook Automatic Object Lessons. They are the fiction editor for This Magazine and the host of Strange Futures, a speculative fiction book club. They live in Tiohtià:ke (Montréal).