EVAMARIA MÜLLER & THOMAS CATLAW:
COMPOST X
August 2026
Compost X is a collaborative sound work built across two years and two continents, Arizona's Sonoran Desert and Vienna, by sound artists Thomas Catlaw and Evamaria Müller. Beginning as an exchange of field recordings passed back and forth by email, the project evolved into a practice the pair call "composting".
Akin to making a physical compost heap, the artists learned to recover, reuse, and repurpose discarded or forgotten fragments from their sound archives and texts from their unfolding correspondence to create new, unexpected, and vibrant sonic worlds. Each new layer of sound arrived to the other already in relationship with what came before — breaking down, reacting, and remaking the emerging piece into something neither artist anticipated.
The result is four soundscapes (along with a fifth piece, called “+ one,” built from the artists' own correspondence and voices), alongside a long-form essay that both reflects on and enacts composting as an artistic method and an ethical practice of listening- and creating-with others.
Listen to the work here, and explore the textual manifestation of Müller and Catlaw’s collaboration on Soundbleed, AF's online journal for critical writing around sound in Aotearoa.
Thomas Catlaw is a sound artist and field recordist based in Arizona’s Sonoran Desert. His practice centers on transforming, layering, and (re)assembling field recordings into soundscapes that traverse the border between documentation and fabrication.
thomascatlaw.com
@lazy.bird.says
Evamaria Müller is a sound artist based in Vienna. Her soundscapes continuously explore new compositional approaches to examine the complex composition of (and our relationship to) our environment through field recording and sound experiments.
www.evamariamueller.net
@gmorrk
thomascatlaw.com
@lazy.bird.says
Evamaria Müller is a sound artist based in Vienna. Her soundscapes continuously explore new compositional approaches to examine the complex composition of (and our relationship to) our environment through field recording and sound experiments.
www.evamariamueller.net
@gmorrk