Microfauna

Microfauna I
Microfauna II
Microfauna III

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Mosses contain multitudes. In the space between tiny leaves lives thousands of microscopic organisms: nematode worms, rotifers, tardigrades, ciliates. All kinds of transparent creatures make their home in the green branches of the moss forest.

Imagine zooming in with your ears…what kinds of sounds would you hear?
A hubbub of activity. Bustling and jostling. Careening and colliding. Tiny lives, lived out in the space of a millimetre, in a film of water on leaves only one cell thick…

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Microfauna is part of a collection of instrumental, fixed media, and open score compositions I have produced for the interdisciplinary Moss Worlds project at the University of Manchester. Moss Worlds is a research project bringing together artists, botanists, literature scholars, geographers, and poets to explore the affective, botanical, and political aspects of urban mosses in Manchester. Each work attempts a refraction of an aspect of moss ecology, moss imaginaries, or human-moss relations.

Taking as its starting point the rich variety of microfauna which make their home within and around moss communities, Microfauna imagines a world of water, zipping and darting, whirling and clumping, zooming in (and out), flagella, cilia, chloroplasts, translucency, nematodes, tardigrades, and rotifers. The three pieces in this album were composed using a technique of collaged free improvisations using field recordings, contact-mic’d mosses, acoustic instruments and electronics, processed through a series of semi-autonomous granulators in Max MSP.

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To learn more about the Moss Worlds project, visit www.mossworlds.co.uk

Microfauna is © Henry McPherson
credits
released January 4, 2026