This spoken word/field recording album came about through a sequence of events that culminated in early 2019.

A thrush ate a mistletoe berry and shat out the seed onto a branch of a Norway maple on 1/6 Zakhidna street. The resulting mistletoe growth alarmed the municipal forestry group KyivZelenBud, who dispatched workers to remove it and its host branch. Soon after, spores of a tinder conk mushroom were flying past. They settled into the open wound, growing a network of mycelium throughout the tree. When fruiting bodies emerged, they were discovered by the mushroom-eating picture wing fly, Myennis octopunctata. The picture wing fly was discovered by Lisa Biletska, who collected KyivZelenBud’s online posts, and fed them through a Markov chain. A municipal nature poetry was born. Nadia Parfan read the poetry. It is translated below.

The voice in these poems is radically indeterminate, multiplicitous, split across nodes of desire. Stretched in between is a common language (/parlance) that evokes and inverses the genres of nature writing, promotional copywriting, and the autobiographical Facebook post.

Several “anxieties” are revealed:

the natural/unnatural binary
the commercial modernization of green spaces
the decorative turn in Ukrainian landscaping
the national moment in current Ukrainian history

Interspersed, are field recordings from the Vidradniy neighborhood of Kyiv, Ukraine.