The Hidden Reverse

The Hidden Reverse is a spatial sound work created for Creative Acts at the State Library of Victoria. The idea of the reverse is recurrent in spiritual and creative practices. In occult lineages and chaos magic, reversal is a working, a way to unfasten habit: mirror-gazing, writing backwards, walking widdershins, turning the spell inside out. In apophatic traditions and alchemy, the reverse becomes a path of unsaying, a refusal of surface that opens deeper attention.

All sounds were recorded to cassette tape so I could turn them over, rewind, and listen back. Tape’s grain allowed me to stretch, smear, and reverse material until it revealed its seam. I built the textures with resonant sweeps and filters that draw hidden harmonics into audibility. When harmonics emerge, they remind me that perception is only a thin slice of an infinite field.

The work is mixed for multichannel diffusion. Spatial shifts are subtle but constant. Rather than leap or startle, the sound holds you, rearranging the room by degrees, inviting attention to what moves at the edge of hearing. Built primarily around 4 asynchronous loops, harmonic beds unfold and recede; threads surface, then return below, as if memory were sounding itself out.

In a library shaped by collective memory, I wanted listening to be both inward and shared. The Hidden Reverse offers a room within a room, a sanctuary for the moment before naming, when imagination first takes shape, guiding what is hidden toward the surface and letting it linger.