"The Futile Knocking of My Heart" is a collaborative sound project by Sasha Opeiko and Martin Stevens, with contributions from guest artists. Each episode is an experimental rumination of melancholy, loss or speculation. Each artist is asked to find their inspiration using the sampled and modified sounds of the Deathwatch Beetle (Xestobium rufovillosum), a creature of myth and destructive reality.

The deathwatch beetle is a woodboring insect which occupies ancient buildings, tunneling into the structural timbers. The beetles batter their heads against their tunnel walls with a heart-like rhythm as a way of attracting mates, producing patterns of an echoing knock that resonates through the structure of the dwelling. The knocking is an individual signal to a potential mate, the louder the knocking of the male, the more response it receives from a female. The beetles pair up sonically and approach each other over relatively great distances.

Archaic superstition holds that the deathwatch beetle is a harbinger of death, likened to a clicking of the reaper’s skeletal fingers, and, the deathwatch beetle is named for the vigil (watch) kept over the dying or dead. Medieval myth conjured omens in a demon-driven world, both peasants and kings dying in their beds with this dreadful sonic accompaniment.

The proliferation of parasitic life forms is incrementally self-destructive in that the beetle devastates the host’s habitat or dwelling, as well as its own. Coexistence with the deathwatch beetle can be likened to an uncanny 24-hour immersive inhuman sound installation designed and carried out by parasites.The response of someone subjected to a deathwatch beetle infestation is sensory, an embodiment of the uncanny, a psychological sensation of something familiar but estranged, a primal relation to the echoed stuttering heartbeat of the insects’ calling. .

_______________________________________________________

We are curating submissions for future episodes on an ongoing basis; please contact us to apply opeiko.stevens@gmail.com All Podcast artist receive a free T!