Oiled Blossoming Synthesizer has the kind of disquieting calm that is most often seen in depictions of alien climates, the deep sea, or the world of the microscopic. There is no menace to it, merely a not-humanness which raises uncomfortable feelings of isolation, displacement across great distance / time, or (perhaps most uncomfortable of all to the human perspective) irrelevancy. Brunel’s piece, even documented as it has been in a mundane, everyday location, creates a sense of looking in on something not for you.

There is also a peacefulness to it, despite the ominous synthetic drone of its soundscape, which I find is often lacking from horror media. All too often the uncanny is relegated within horror to the already played out and expected territory of knock-off Lovecraft monsters, spooky faces, and cultish chanting. Overt intrusions into the established and comfortable realm of human activity. The more affecting uncanniness of being the intrusion, of setting foot within a place, or an entire ecosystem, where one’s frame of reference is completely absent, has not been nearly so thoroughly explored. At least, not without eventually stumbling and introducing some recognizably monstrous element into the mix.

An apt comparison for Brunel’s Synthesizer would be 2018’s Annihilation, or Tarkovsky’s earlier work Stalker, which the former very clearly draws upon. Both place their protagonists (and by extension the viewer) within zones of unchecked, and distinctly non-human-centric growth. Despite their alieness, however, as well as their seeming toxicity, both landscapes are ultimately peaceful and fertile ones. Excepting of course what those on the outside bring in with them.

Both stories ultimately see their human characters destroyed by their own projections, the traumas, fears, desires and expectations which they cast onto the strange and robust settings which surround them. It is only those characters who learn to interact with the uncanny ecosystems they encounter on their own terms who manage to survive, and return back to the world they know. Not unchanged, mind you, but still alive.

And in this I think there is an interesting lesson; one which Brunel’s simple yet highly evocative sound-sculpture reminds me of and reinforces. Much of the discussion around climate change is focused on the reclamation and recovery of nature, but only so far as that recovery still results in a human-viable world. It is almost singularly focused on a return to what existed before humanity’s intervention; to wind back the clock, or unring the bell, as it were.

This is understandable, obviously. People want to keep on living, and those of us in the disempowered and exploited majority, who feel climate collapse’s effects most bluntly, are naturally not in any rush to be wiped out for the sake of the wealthy ghouls who pushed us all to this point in the first place. However, given the direness of the situation, and what we already know about the nature of complex systems, it may be time to have a different conversation. One in which the continuation of the whole is assured, even if the recognizable human part cannot continue on within it.

One of the core concepts within the Necropastoral is encountering the nature of the now as it truly is. To embrace the post-human, post-plant, post-machine present/future of the mutant, the weed, and the hybrid. These things, while in many ways non or anti-human, are not anti-nature. They are, in fact, essential and long-proven necessities within the natural scheme. Adaptation, symbiosis, ambiguity, decomposition, and many others beyond them are a part of the process by which nature overcomes, heals, changes, and carries forward. It is these same elements which are most apparent within Oiled Blossoming Synthesizer, which blurs the manifold boundaries of nature, technology, decay, and more.

It is a work which speaks to the nature of both the now, and the soon to come. The categorizations and dichotomies which rest at the heart of the human/nature conflict are at peace within Brunel’s work. The Synthesizer is a machine which grows, a plant which sings in electric tones, a simultaneous producer and consumer of precious oil. It presents us with a sliver of a view of somewhere that the Earth of the anthropocene can still arrive at, even if we ourselves aren’t built to see it. Like the few surviving protagonists of Annihilation and Stalker, it has touched the unchecked growth of that other place, reconciled with it on its own terms, and returned changed.

Ultimately, striving for the revival of nature with the explicit goal of maintaining the world we are comfortable with, in which unencumbered human activity is still viable, is not nearly divorced enough from the current order of thought to produce meaningful change. The drive to rebuild what was by any means is just as corrupting and anthropocentric a drive as the one which led to our current state of devastation in the first place. While our own survival and continuation shouldn’t be abandoned, of course, the time has come to re-investigate what we recognize as natural and what we do not, and to begin to engage with the recovery process on nature’s own, often troubling, painful, frightening, and not-for-human terms.

It’s time to let the strange grow forth, unchecked, and to let the alien blossom.