Metabolism’s 1960s promise of endlessly adaptable, life‑like architecture now lies in ruins: modular capsules dismantled, megastructures abandoned, its once-vital body reduced to scattered organs—ghost buildings fading one by one across Japan. A Sound That Refuses to Be Eaten inhabits this terminal phase, translating the movement’s slow collapse into an audible digestive loop.
At the installation’s darkened core, Natalie’s machine ingests broken glass, fish eyes, belly scraps, bones, briny tank water, and fragments of urban recordings. Salt and electric heat “cook” the mixture, while reactive circuits twitch like peristaltic muscle, grinding field noise into glitches, pulses, and tremors. The output is not music, but a cascade of metabolic distress signals. Each cycle acidifies, absorbs, and ultimately expels what the architecture cannot digest—sudden vacuums, dry clicks, filtered static—before a residual
heartbeat restarts the system. The installation treats the memorial space as a body devouring its own voice, staging Metabolism’s utopian vision in miniature and in crisis. Growth becomes digestion, adaptability becomes survival, and the movement’s once-optimistic dream erodes into a perpetual, visceral
present, where silence is impossible and memory clings to every corroded surface.
Digesting Sound Machine is conceived as an open system—endlessly adaptable in duration, scale, and intensity depending on the space it inhabits. It metabolizes the architecture around it, refusing closure, refusing silence.
SOUND INGREDIENTS: broken glass, fish eyes, eaten fish belly, bones,
