Audible Heat

Milo Thesiger-Meacham’s Audible Heat is an extended documentary, a fitful academic essay, a mass-media probe, an idiosyncratic piece of travel writing, a densely illustrated sound-art montage, and a deep dive into man’s complex relations with the seemingly eternal sound of the cicada as ‘audible heat’ in human consciousness.

Featuring original music and field recordings, and spoken contributions by writer and translator Cristina Viti and filmmaker Ahmed Yassin Aldaradji, Audible Heat ranges across continents, embracing Greek tongue twisters, the poetry of Ibn Quzmān and Harry Crosby, African-American mathematician Benjamin Banneker’s lost wooden clock, Plato’s Phaedrus, cicadas on the film sets of Sergio Leone’s ‘Spaghetti Westerns,’ the body language of Clint Eastwood, the apocalyptic premonitions of the Wampanoag, Geronimo’s hatred of telegraphy, and botanist Donald C. Peattie’s terror of the inescapable buzz of mortality.

Equal parts academic argument, travelogue, and critical collage, this synthesis of ideas pulls upon a wide-ranging bibliography of materials to examine the omnipresent sound of the cicada throughout human history and culture. Herein, this climatic sound acts as a conduit between ecology, identity and mortality, and the cicada’s sonic inference emerges as a codification of the unknown and unfamiliar—as a spiritual weathervane in desert settings—and as a means of teasing out the sensorial limits of human understanding.

Audible Heat was written, read, recorded, produced & scored by Milo Thesiger-Meacham. It was first commissioned and broadcast as a work for radio by Radiophrenia, September 2023.

As a manuscript Audible Heat was shortlisted for the inaugural edition of the Prototype Prize, 2024, and was published as a book by Tenement Press, February 2025. Its radiophonic counterpart will be released on CD by World Service, March 2025.

“A wonderful bringing together of natural and cultural histories.”

– Tom McCarthy, author The Remainder & Man Booker Prize nominee

“A work of great refinement and intelligence, entailing some beautifully crafted surprises.”

– Elizabeth Price, artist & 2012 Turner Prize winner

"Almost Borgesian in the levity by which it seems effortlessly to embody encylopaedic multitudes ... we understand – and appreciate the – the intricate assembly of fragments, quotations and images that factor in distance, as much as intimacy, as an engine to the work ... Audible Heat balances both the warmth of genuine passion for its material with a controlled and 'cool' gaze that makes for a singular outcome."

– Gareth Evans, writer, editor, film & event producer

"... nibbling at the edges of philosophy, entomology, anthropology, poetry, music, film and diverse technologies ... like a latter-day Langland, the author “wente wide in this world wondres to here” only to find in a sound at once familiar and uncanny, eternal and pregnant with anticipation and dread, a hall of mirrors for the restless human soul. Like the sun, the cicada looms like likeness itself and we are led down garden paths that form a maze of amazing information, suggestion and nuance ... It also speaks of the limits of species entrainment, of our faltering efforts at empathic behaviour, and tells us a lot about how we act in relation to other creatures, how culture sits with nature. Perhaps more important is how it subtly suggests how we should or might act."

– Ed Baxter, writer, sound-artist, co-founder Resonance, co-editor Works of Thomas De Quincey

“Beautifully written.”

– Bhanu Kapil, poet & Windham-Campbell Literature Prize winner

Many thanks to Max Syedtollan and Dominic Jaeckle. Thanks also to Cristina Viti, Ahmed Yassin Aldaradji, Dr Gene Kritsky, Dr Douglas Yanega & Matthias Loibner for their kind contributions. Thanks to Tom McCarthy, Bhanu Kapil and Elizabeth Price for shortlisting the text, and to Mark Vernon, Jess Chandler, Rory Cook and Gareth Evans. And for their help and encouragement, a heartfelt thanks to my dear friends Ed Baxter and Valentina Bacci. 

Milo Thesiger-Meacham is an artist, composer, performer and creative director of the community arts radio stations Resonance FM and Resonance Extra.