Alyssa Moxley: The Imagined Trajectory

Photo: Alyssa Moxley

“The Imagined Trajectory” considers how personal mythologies, shared folklores, and intergenerational perceptions of place can be experienced through listening and compositional works.

This research develops out of a collaborative project with Athens-based artist and anthropologist Evdokia Noula documenting oral histories of ‘neraides,’ female nature spirits, still held in the living memory of older generations in villages surrounding the Evinos River. Dismissed by some as mere superstition and considered by others as artifacts of intergenerational trauma, these personal oral histories have not previously been documented. The ‘neraides’ are said to have left with the introduction of electricity and television, their social roles replaced by mass cultural symbols. Working with the local community in these villages, we will create a collaborative archive of these stories and the local sonic ecosystem.

How can we hear stories about the relationship of the natural environment to the human world, as inevitably entangled and complicated by personal experience, ancestry, and history? How does movement through urban and rural environments, media communication, migration, and new technologies, transform shared understandings and stories about nature? How are folkloric ways of understanding power relationships between nature and human communities relevant in contemporary communities of understanding? How can sound act as a kind of touch, contact, communion, and communication within smaller and larger radii, between the urban and the rural context, bridging contemporary and historical notions of nature?

These questions will be explored through compositional, listening, and score experiments that interact with locality, community connections, and timescales. Historical research will include the National Archaeological Museum’s work on nature spirits, research into Constantinos A. Doxiadis’s ekistics studies of Athens, and compositional techniques found within the archives of the Contemporary Music Research Center (CMRC/KYSME).

Stéphane Charpentier

Kareli wire bridge in Evinos.

Creator's Note

The research for “The Imagined Trajectory” considers how to represent personal mythologies and shared folklore within compositional systems. Inspired by diverse readings, including Xenakis’ ideas of composing with space and stochastic patterns inspired by nature, as well as architect Doxiadis’ analysis of human settlements through “ekistics,” I wanted to explore how systematic understandings of space and nature could express—and yet contrast with—the embodied experience of place.

This research emerged from an ongoing collaborative project that began in 2022 through discussions with artist and researcher Evdokia Noula. She told me stories that she had heard from her grandparents, originating from small villages surrounding the Evinos river, about “neraides,” female forest spirits. She asked me if I was interested to make recordings in this place, to explore the sound worlds there, and to develop an archive that could be shared with the local people. As the collaboration continued, the project evolved.

In October 2023, with the help of the Step Beyond Grant from the Goethe Institute, I was able to come to Greece to begin researching. During this trip, I visited the National Archaeological Museum to search for artifacts relating to mythological stories of neraide-like creatures; at EMST, I was able to spend time in the large Xenakis archival exhibition, discovering some of his maps of “Polytopes” and handwritten notebooks of studies on birds he conducted with Messaien. I also visited the Constantinos Doxiadis archive and read some of his analyses of how humans organize and settle wild spaces in ways that maximize contact, protection, and energy. The idea that the neraides, creatures of spirit, are historically entwined with human relationships to the land, to development, and to movement through space, motivated me to investigate how mythological concepts and theoretical ideas alike touch on these themes.

Then, Evdokia and I set out for fieldwork in the villages around the Evinos river, where she introduced me to the local context and stories. We recorded interviews with Evdokia’s grandmother and aunt, a man that lived in a village higher up on the mountains, people in the cafes, and a local hunter. Through these conversations, we learned that certain families felt they had descended from neraides. In a sense, this was a way of claiming, controlling, and extolling beauty. A familiar story, told in various forms, goes like this: a man stumbles on the neraides dancing at night, finds one exceptionally beautiful and steals her scarf (or shroud, or tunic). She cannot return to her world without her clothes, thus she is obliged to stay with him. He marries her, and they have children. However, only people in older generations could tell stories of directly witnessing neraides; the neraides are no longer seen nor heard.

In addition to an assortment of stereo microphones, I also brought with me hydrophones, a geophone, contact microphones, and a VLF receiver, to explore the sonic landscape and the actual sites where the neraides have been witnessed, according to these stories, as well as the kind of places where they were likely to be found.

I also recorded the “Kareli” wire bridge that crosses Evinos, the vibrations within pipes as the river was being moved (through moving stones by a backhoe loader), the sounds of Evdokia’s and my footsteps over the hay on a threshing floor at night, chirping black squirrels in the evening, the natural radio (VLF) that exists in these places, the sheep descending from high pastures and arriving to the “madri” (pen), the sounds of branches, stones, and machines in the river water, hanging vines, leaves falling in the forest, the trickling of springs.

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Stéphane Charpentier
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Sheep

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Stéphane Charpentier
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Birds

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Stéphane Charpentier
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Kareli wire bridge in Evinos.

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Alyssa Moxley
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Pointing out where the neraides had been seen.

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Alyssa Moxley
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Cable car and kareli

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Evdokia Noula
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Trani vrysi Spring

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Evdokia Noula
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Trees by the Cursed Spring

In April 2024, with the support of the Onassis AiR fellowship, I was able to come back to Greece to make more recordings and spend time working with Evdokia on this sonic and narrative material. Returning to the villages, we met more contacts through Nefeli Myrodia at Onassis AiR who also has family roots in this area. We spoke to Giorgos, whose father knew spells, healing techniques, and how to manage the powerful neraides. He also gave us a book of local history which included written stories about the neraides and accounts of the neraide/human born “gourd children” that burst into water during the mass at church. Giorgos pointed out springs where he, or people he knew, had seen the neraides. Neraides are wild women, made of air, or spirit only, beautiful and dangerous, we were told. We heard from his friend, as we passed a cursed spring which engaged but unmarried women should never pass, that such stories were generally used to scare people, so that thieves could carry on without disturbance. We paused in a kafeneio where the other villagers could chime in and debate on whether the neraides existed or not. We also spoke to two older ladies that used to work in the public baths and knew stories of the neraides, who allegedly beat women and stole their babies.

Throughout all the conversations, we pointedly asked why the neraides left or were no longer witnessed. Some people said they might still be in the environment. However, the development of roads and electricity infrastructure changed the relationship that people had with the nature surrounding them. Since there were roads now, one could drive instead of walking between the mountain valleys, and, because of electricity, the dark night could be illuminated more easily. Thus, the chaos of nature became tamed, organized, and distributed in a more orderly and “understandable” arrangement. The unpredictable, chaotic, beautiful, terrifying neraides had less space to exist. Their reputation faded along with that of the sublime, as cities called with work and opportunity. One story suggested that the fears related to the neraides have only been replaced with the fears we see broadcast on television.

During this trip, I recorded more springs, a small metal bridge, the cable car crossing over the river, vibrations under trees, insects, the dawn chorus, more spots of river water, creatures within the streams, and footsteps over stones, earth, and metal. Next to a tiny spring in a natural amphitheater, where the neraides were said to have danced at night, I recorded a moment of beautifully coincident sounds—turkeys, dogs, birds, wind, bells, yelling—that somehow sounded like a frenzy.

The fieldwork offered no conclusion, only an exploration of what the neraides could mean, or could suggest amongst a web of meanings. The stories told are both deeply personal and shared amongst the community. In the local history book that Giorgos shared with us, the section on neraides was subtitled “All this is real, but only I have heard it,” which became the title of the film performance that Evdokia and I presented on the Open Day evening. Images taken by Evdokia during the fieldwork and photographs from her family archive, as well as silver prints from Stéphane Charpentier (who joined us on the research trip in October 2023), were interspersed with a black screen, subtitles, and snippets of the recorded narratives.

The development of this film constituted the most intensive working time in Athens. With only a month for this residency period, I was thankful for the time to work collaboratively and to dive deeply into the material gathered in the field. Transcribing, translating, cutting and pasting words, images and sounds; storyboarding, stream-of-consciousness arrangements of symbolic themes by experiences, and fragments of recorded moments. In the studio, I worked on developing a live four-channel sound work that supported the emotional resonances of bucolic contemplation, uncertainty, fear, conflict, beauty, frenzy, and abandonment subtly hinted at within the narrative. The music was developed only from the field recordings; frequencies and patterns from the natural environment and animals mingled with the metallic, percussive sounds of the bridges, and footsteps. The possible presence of neraides was suggested with the juxtaposition of these sounds and frequencies, unveiling their uncanny potential.

The project continues, with plans to create a publication together with Evdokia Noula, containing images, stories, and narrative soundscapes that will convey this mixture of personal and local heritage, as well as the possible alienation following the development of infrastructure, alongside the ever-lasting quest of the unknowable.

Finally, for my offering back at Onassis AiR, I had the chance to enact scores based on some of Pauline Oliveros’ “Sonic Meditations.” I invited participants to meet at the Seven Seats on Filopappou Hill, where we listened and responded with sound to the environment, and to each other within that environment. We explored our shared space through sound, movement, and individual processes of sonic imagination. I’m very grateful to have shared this moment and for the generosity of those who came to meditate and sound together at sunset.