For 55 years, Sonoma resident Bernie Krause has documented the world through sound—rainforests, prairies, and beaches—and beginning June 10, he will share the sounds of nature with the world in a new exhibit at the San Francisco Exploratorium.
Krause’s exhibition entitled “The Great Animal Orchestra” includes recordings of whale songs, bird calls and a cacophony of insects as well as other sounds of the natural world and thus fulfills a lifelong dream of the bioacoustician and author.
“My vision of art is to create sonic performances of natural wonders,” Krause said, adding, “Most of all, I want others in this world to hear and see.”
“With this program, visitors can listen to the consonant voices of natural habitats – marine and terrestrial – in a new way.”
The Great Animal Orchestra premiered in Paris in 2016 and, according to Krause, has been seen by 1.5 million people thanks to the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art, which also sponsors the Exploratorium exhibition.
“It’s wonderful to be celebrating Bernie here in his own backyard,” said Kirstin Bach, interim director of art at the Exploratorium. “And that’s why it felt so natural and right for us to really create this exhibition… this marriage of creative practice, science and observation.”
The Exploratorium at Pier 15 in San Francisco has been described as a “mad scientist’s penny arcade,” and the exhibit explores Krause’s unorthodox form of storytelling.
“Typically, as in film, where image dominates the media, sound is used to carry the emotional weight of each scene,” he wrote. “This exhibition turns that model on its head.”
Oppenheimer, rock ‘n’ roll and a dream
Krause pioneered the use of synthesizers in the 1960s, which had a tremendous impact on popular music and film.
He played the synth on the Monkees song “Star Collector” in 1967 and brought the Moog III synth to the Monterey Pop Festival in June of that year to share his vibes with the eclectic audience.
The synthesizer soon became a fixture on the musical spectrum.
A year later, Krause founded the bioacoustic company Wild Sanctuary to document and archive the sounds of the world to preserve them for future generations.
At 2 a.m. on an October morning in 1968, he recorded the Russian Hill Symphony in San Francisco. “I recorded the sound of the splices in the cables running under the tracks as the splices passed over the guide wheels under the road,” he said. “I was trying to record metallic, industrial-sounding beats that we could then repeat and use as opposed to natural sounds — sounds that I later recorded for an album that my late music partner Paul Beaver and I created for our first Warner Brothers Release titled “In a Wild Sanctuary”.
It was an unintended opening night for the future exhibition that would eventually show his life’s work.
A stranger stood in the glow of a street lamp and watched Krause at work. The character then asked what Krause was doing and introduced himself as Frank Oppenheimer, the brother of J. Robert Oppenheimer, inventor of the atomic bomb. Oppenheimer invited Krause over for coffee and presented him with an ambitious idea for the Bay Area.
“He enthusiastically presented his plans for the new museum he wanted to open in 1969 and, since he knew almost nothing about my life or work, asked me if I would be interested in contributing to an exhibition,” said Krause. “At his invitation, I went to the Palace of Fine Arts in the Marina, his future venue. It was clear that the space would be too reverberant for a successful sound installation.”
But Krause cataloged the idea in the back of his mind for a day when he could showcase his work with a suitable venue. He was now working around 80 hours a week in the studio and forming musical partnerships with artists such as George Harrison, the Doors, Peter Gabriel, Barbara Streisand and the Bryds.
“I got sick, the pace and the pressure made me sick,” said Krause about the work in the 1970s until he stopped in 1979. “I couldn’t wait to get out into nature without the egos and drugs that were rampant everywhere.”
The world is a studio
But his fate changed in 1978 when he put on headphones while on safari and couldn’t put them down. Krause has recorded over 4,500 hours of audio from 15,000 different species on six continents.
“The sounds of the wild biomes I sought out were able to calm my raging case of ADHD, and I’ve been using it as a pain reliever ever since,” Krause said.
After being “fired more than half a dozen times” on the set of the award-winning film Apocalypse Now in 1979, Krause went back to school to earn his PhD in Sound Art and Bioacoustics. Then Krause made his way into the wilderness from the arctic tundra to the misty Amazon rainforest.
“I camped on the shores of the Beaufort Sea for several weeks attempting to record bowhead whales as part of a whale bioacoustics study to determine population densities,” Krause wrote. “I was nearing the end of my session…just days before scheduled pickup when I heard the slow rhythmic sound of footsteps outside my tent early one morning. When I unzipped, a polar bear was standing about 20 meters away and slowly closing the gap between him and me.”
Armed only with a flare gun, he loaded the chamber and crawled out of the tent. When the bear approached him just a few meters, he stood on his hind legs and straightened up, “and blocked almost the entire habitat with his mass,” said Krause.
Krause aimed the flare gun at his chest and pulled the trigger.
“The torch did no harm,” Krause said, “except briefly igniting a few tufts of fur when the magnesium was lit.” Smelling the smoke, the animal turned and sauntered to the water, where it was never seen again became.”
Having traveled the frontiers of the animal kingdom and science, the exhibit at the San Francisco Exploratorium feels like home, so many years after that fateful night that cable cars were recorded on Polk Street.
“I remember paraphrasing the late David Bowie’s aphorism,” Krause said, “‘The future belongs to those of us who can hear it coming.’ This program is key.”
Contact Chase Hunter at chase.hunter@sonomanews.com and follow @Chase_HunterB on Twitter.
