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.

This new and extraordinary documentary ranges across continents – from the sound-induced fears of early colonists in Northeastern America and the apocalyptic premonitions of the indigenous Wampanoag to Greek tongue twisters, Medieval Moorish poetry, Socrates's dread of dehydration in Plato's Phaedrus, the hurdy-gurdy, Geronimo's hatred of telegraphy.

And then on to contemporary and historical entomology, the body language of Clint Eastwood, Sergio Leone's Spanish Westerns, the botanist Donald C. Peattie's terror of the inescapable buzz of mortality, and ancient cooking implements.

Commissioned and originally broadcast by Radiophrenia at the Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow, September 2023.