Artist-alchemist Navid Navab discusses their project Organism, how it harnesses the emergent properties of life – and how this battles against the domination of nature. This article is part of Writing Wildness, an editorial collection of reflections and insights emerging from the 2025 edition of FIBER Festival. Writing Wildness gathers a constellation of voices reflecting on art, sound, and technology, tracing the many ways creative practices can open new pathways through which to sense and imagine the world.
In the stately, imposing concert hall of the Orgelpark, a Casavant organ from 1910 is brought back to life. A living organism, in turbulence, whose many mouths emanate sounds unsettling, comforting, ecstatic, and primal all at once. Not a composition in the traditional sense, Organism: In Turbulence is an unfolding, an improvised dialogue between machine, matter, and gesture, held within the reverberant architecture of a century-old organ (whose pipes have been reconstructed into a new Organism), and that of an old church. Navid Navab radically reimagines this historic instrument as a volatile acoustic ecology shaped by fluctuation and instability, which here act as generative forces. Throughout the entire performance, the artist stands behind the interface that controls the robotics integrated with the organ, fully absorbed, locked in a state of hyperfocus. Occasionally, they step out of this concentrated engagement to address the audience, offering brief moments of context and reflection.
The organ becomes a transductive, sculptural being, its hidden wilderness exposed. Its pipes erupt in drony soundscapes, organic textures, shedding vortices and jumping edges, becoming something like sentient throats of turbulent song, interrupted occasionally by Navab themselves blowing into organ pipes like horns: raw, breathy interjections that cut through the machine’s chaotic whisperings, grounding the otherwise otherworldly atmosphere in something bodily and immediate. And then, almost as if to ground us again, Navab closes with an unexpected encore: rhythmic, ‘techno’-esque (in their words), dense and airy, chaotic and structured, ritual and rave.
Performance report by Eleni Maragkou
It’s a ritual. It’s a rave.
This is an exalted affair, so how is it so wild? It’s exalted on so many levels – from the location to the subject matter, to the very physics taking place here: what Navid Navab describes as a process of ‘engaging with the energetics of the aerodynamics of sonic formation as lively sites for intra-agential comprovisations.’ This is, to the extreme, technical, cerebral, brain-ticklingly interdisciplinary stuff. But it’s also thrilling.
It’s a ritual. Here we are in this former church, listening to the remnants of the most exalted of instruments, the organ. In deference to these historically grandiloquent tools of influence, but also to the artistic context: this is a Serious Concert, preceded the day before by a talk from Navab that is as dense with technical complexity as my conversation with them several weeks later. But through the complexity, whether or not you comprehend this molecular-level exploration, there’s something undeniably visceral taking place. ‘It’s alive,’ as Navab affirms many times – not unlike Frankenstein, or a cultist invoking some ancient, long-sleeping entity.
It’s a rave. The aliveness is the point – there’s a very real ‘liveliness’ taking place here on many levels. In the precisely tuned physical phenomena instigated by Navab (though, as they rightly insist, they are not the only or primary performer here). In the resulting music, ranging from breathy washes of gasping pipes to rhythmic, robotically sequenced stabs. And in the listening: a trippy, heady experience that Navab rightly calls psychedelic: a gut-level sense that you’re experiencing something fundamentally attuned to the secrets of the universe.
In our conversation, Navab opens their arcane lab notes for a glimpse into these cosmic machinations. As it will turn out, the colourful story of Organism reveals not only the bizarre miracles of sonic formation but also a struggle for the ages between ‘liveliness’ and attempts to control it – from physics to music to politics. An epic battle between wildness and the domination of nature.
The reanimator: exhuming the bones of a defeated Titan
There it lay sleeping. Destined for the scrap heap, a museum, or… a new life?
‘The pipes found their way to me,’ Navab explains. The organ was a 1912 Casavant, Canada’s best known manufacturer, behind some of the most respected organs of the Edwardian period. And it sat in disrepair, gathering dust in Montreal’s second-oldest church, which was about to be repurposed. As part of wider gentrification, these hallowed halls would soon become a wedding venue – so the new owners had little use for the organ, nor any plans to restore it. Did Navab want to do anything with these rusty old pipes?
Though they would turn out to be highly relevant to the artist’s broader aims, organs were not interesting to Navab at the time – not at all in their wheelhouse. Rather, they gradually became convenient instruments (both musical and scientific) in Navab’s broader artistic investigation.
Navab describes this approach and their interests in a way that does little to dispel my comparisons to Frankenstein and the occult. They have a ‘media archeological’ practice:
I find artifacts from the past, from the history of humanity… and look at where we created something that was enabling and good but where we went somewhere and we lost something.
They exhume this lost potential in order to ‘suggest a different future’, tinkering with ‘processes that have an inherent quality for being generative’ – but in a collaborative or participatory way that focuses on ‘giving voice’ to these qualities. In fact, they consider this an ‘alchemical’ method. So far, so arcane.
Music in this approach becomes ‘a way to bring patterns or the patterning of nature into the foreground of perception’ – a task Navab asserts as the real goal of ancient alchemists, rather than just to create gold. The ultimate aim for Navab, rather, is to ‘find out what is happening and how we work with these forces that are generative, instead of conquering them.’ In other words, it’s a cosmic struggle between two camps: an exploitative posture that seeks to control and impose rules on nature, versus a curious, collaborative impulse towards wildness – and letting it express itself on its own terms.
So Navab got to work.
Organism pulsates and twinkles dubwise, staggering offbeat along to a volatile buzz – like the sub-bass rattle between wall and speaker stack.
At the mouth of wildness
At first, not much happened. Navab was ambivalent at best when it came to organs because they represented the extreme of musical stuffiness: there is ‘something really constricting about how we’re always locked into these tones, this twelve-tone ideology’, and organs represent centuries of precise refinement to narrow down ‘perfect’ tones. ‘Traditional organs give every pipe exactly the amount of air pressure, volume, and flow that the designer of the pipe organ thought it would need to produce a pure tone with a certain timbral characteristic.’ Navab explains that this is an artificial imposition on the pipe: ‘The pipe needs nothing. It’s the designer that needs. And that’s where ideology comes in.’
Luckily, by this time Navab already had a long track record of tackling exactly this in their musical practice: in improvisation and especially in using prepared instruments – something they describe as a longstanding ‘struggle against the immediacy of the sexy flux of matter that I was trying to give a voice to.’ You can bypass conventional ways of sounding instruments, Navab explains, like scratching a piano string instead of playing its keys, in order to ‘flip the whole ontology of how you relate to your instrument on its head, and [as a result] the relationship between signal, noise, and timbre changes.’ That way, ‘you no longer have been ascribed by culture or an instrument maker what is signal, what is noise. You get to define that in the moment.’ For Navab, there’s something fundamental taking place here that too often gets overwritten by convention, culture, dogma: ‘often when you zoom into this threshold within signal and noise, you find something that’s alive and lively. It’s a site where nature becomes cultural through us.’ The player is a kind of translator into culture: the inflection point on which this natural, sonic phenomenon gets to speak in a voice we understand. For Navab, it really matters that they don’t speak over that voice. That’s why preparing an instrument, like working with improvising musicians, is ‘not about conquering but collaborating with this format.’
So, like they had prepared other instruments before, Navab set about ‘hacking’ the pipes and valves – experimenting with using micro-controllers and pressurised air, intentionally blowing much less air than the pipes were designed to resonate at. One pipe in particular produced a strange digeridoo-type oscillation that couldn’t be accounted for: a wowowow that got under Navab’s skin. The seed was planted then, but it was a few years before Navab had the lightbulb moment that would turn this into their next big project.
‘The patterns of push and pull of air in this one pipe that was really hypersensitive to exactly that amount of fluctuation were being sounded,’ Navab realised. Counter to its historic programming, this underblown pipe was ‘going between timbre and tone and timbral modulations and signal and noise and wind (breath-like sounds) and pitch.’ And these outlawed sonics were emergent: a term describing a property that arises from the interplay of elements in a system, rather than being designed into any one element itself. In other words, these sounds were not inserted or imposed, but born unruly from patterns of turbulence unfolding, like an apparition surfacing from breath.
Navab heard in this the core of their new topic: ‘I realised control over turbulence, musically, is the site where the becoming cultural of nature happens to produce technology. Technology is control over the wildness of nature.’ But would these dark materials be used for good or evil?
As Navab goes on, a twinkle forms in their eye – partly ironic, mostly sincere in what excites them about this generative moment in the pipe’s airflow. ‘So once I discovered this, I’m like, okay this is alive. Quite literally alive.’
Organism spirals upwards, apparently out of control, dive-bombing skywards through hysterical frequencies into a tense shrillness.
How it (probably) works: ‘controversies at the edge-tone of chaos’
Confused? Me too. Lucky for us, Navab has a whole range of other extremely complex musical and physical concepts to explain what’s going on here – how Organism makes this psychedelic racket, and why that is truly alive.
Let’s start with what’s emergent about this magic pipe’s air flow. Typically, this pipe would be one cog in a very well-oiled organ machine: one piece of a precisely engineered system. But Navab’s interference bypasses this function to reveal the pipe’s physical and sonic qualities – qualities that perform independently from that system, with an autonomy not afforded to it before: ‘the agency of a pipe is the theatre of its energetics coming together to express something,’ as Navab puts it.
What makes this alive for Navab comes down to physics, or more specifically thermodynamics. To explain that, they unpack for me at great length the micro-interactions taking place around the pipe’s turbulence – in terms of ‘prepared air’, ‘laminar flow’, ‘vortex shedding’, ‘edgetone jumping’, and ‘inharmonics’. Apparently the physics of this are so complex that there is scientific disagreement about how it works. (Navab cites a section of a particularly divisive paper they swear was titled ‘Controversies at the Edge-Tone of Chaos.’) Short of a full physics lesson, it’s worth sharing Navab’s colourful illustrations of a few of these phenomena below.
First off, laminar versus turbulent flow:
Imagine if someone blows smoke with tight lips. You get a straight [laminar] flow of air before it turns turbulent, when you start to see curls and deformations. Somewhere between where the curls happen and total entropy and dissipation of air, you have a turbulent pattern.
Similarly, around the organ pipe ‘an edge has been introduced, so the air curls onto itself, creating a vortex. This is similar to putting, let’s say, a stick in the way of a river that’s flowing fast, so you create a kind of mini vortex. And the vortex starts maintaining its shape.’ This vortex shedding also takes place in aeolian harps or wind on a string, shedding inharmonics all over the place. There’s no pure tone.’ Traditional organs are designed to stabilise these vortices and to resonate the more (culturally) desirable tones (whoooooo, Navab helpfully illustrates). ‘But if you underblow that and put the microphone right at the edge where the air is blown… you get something that’s more like upper throat singing.’
At a certain energetic threshold, the colony of vortices suddenly shape-shift and give birth to a new colony, also shifting the perceived pitch. This can cause a pipe to ‘yodel’ and jump up or down by an octave or a 7th: this phenomenon is called edgetone jumping: a discontinuous phase-shifting that Navab sees as ‘the excitable signature of a lively system.’ It is nature’s engine of invention: ‘the same engine that is responsible for the emergence of lively formations such as metabolism and consciousness.’
And this is where the Casavant pipes cease to be an organ and become an Organism. Bypassing their primary function, stimulating their wilder nature and allowing them to do their own thing, the pipes speak for themselves, together.
Organism gasps for air, wheezing and farting in a diabolical, death-driven shuffle.
How Organism plays itself: ‘surfing’ liveliness on queer pipes
Clearly Organism is much more than the ‘wobblations’ created by one underblown pipe. It’s a complex assemblage of robotics, and a performance helmed by Navab – manipulating various controllers and algorithms, gesticulating as if to accompany incantations, blowing directly though individual pipes like the pied piper. How do they do it?
The key for Navab – in this broader fight against ‘twelve-tone ideology’ – is to let the pipes do the talking. They focused on ‘letting go, as a composer, of desires for control and just trying to work with liveliness-preserving practices.’ This is where Navab’s experience in improvisational music came in: ‘it became a question of curating these sites of activity, the same way that a composer working with a bunch of amazing musicians would curate forms of putting them into relation.’ Navab calls this ‘comprovisation’ or ‘structured improvisation.’
The next step is picking the right pipes and putting them together. Navab particularly likes ‘queer’ pipes, meaning those with the liveliest, most unpredictable qualities. Then, 60 to 90 of these form ‘tableaux’, configured to maximise their liveliness in interaction. So these individual turbulences interact in an unstable system of ‘pushes and pulls’: ‘an ecology of emergent’ timbres. In other words, Frankenstein’s monster pipe gets many new friends and they form a choir.
And yet Navab is very much still the choirmaster. ‘When I’m performing live,’ Navab explains, ‘I put the whole system into energetic metastability, then into a pseudo-animated state where some things are happening algorithmically, opening and closing different complex oscillators, and some things are directly modulated with my hands.’
But Navab is never fully behind the wheel. The lack of control is precisely the point here, a distinction that they helpfully describe as ‘surfing’ rather than choreographing. ‘As a composer, at no point am I thinking about a note. Never. I’m always thinking about these energetic thresholds, who’s alive, who’s responding, who’s doing what, how do I push and pull on these. You get this kind of timbral wave that as a performer, I’m trying to respond to, deep listen to, modulate, and surf upon – meaning keeping something musically delicate and bringing it to the senses for the audience.’ Organism talks, Navab listens, translates and amplifies – and we hear forces otherwise unheard, which speak in voices that are eerily familiar.
Navab blasts a pipe like an arcane bugle, as Organism trills semi-obediently to its own tune: mad quacks, marsh calls and invertebrate hisses.
Communing with the forces of nature – but not in a New Age way
Okay, so what is it exactly about Organism and the forces it harnesses that are truly alive? And why do we feel it as such?
Navab seems to instinctively keep reiterating that aliveness is not simply a sexy metaphor. The sonic phenomena harnessed by Organism, they insist, are both lively and alive, ‘not just in a way that musicians say to be hip. It’s lively. At the level of thermodynamics, of how matter comes to be alive, to be eventually metabolic.’
If this seems hokey, Navab nevertheless has to get quite cosmic to explain why it isn’t. When we hear these sounds, they explain, ‘some parts of our body go, oh, that’s psychedelically alive. [But] it’s not just a concept. At the level of physics, something self-referential, self-amplifying is happening.’ There are vortices, Navab explains, across infinite levels of physical existence: ‘from the eye of Jupiter … to eventually metabolism stabilizing the flow of energy, to creating cells, to us. So we are, ourselves, expressions of these ways of nature coming to be alive.’ In this way, Navab seems to be saying, we sense instinctually the frequencies and patterning of the universe – the structures and rhythms that make up our own biology and the ecology of which we are part.
The experience of listening to these lively sounds is often felt as psychedelic because it mirrors these actual forces of nature. Navab compares it with how hallucinogenics often make people feel attuned to natural phenomena: fractals and symmetry, geometrics, pattern repetitions, wave phenomena, etc. We recognise in this sensory experience:
something happening at the level of physics that makes us – that we ourselves emerge from… So we are now connected to the music of the cosmos or music of biology: experiencing the world running through us and the movement of life as it shapes us…gives us an experience of something that’s clearly not us, clearly non-human, clearly alive, clearly generative, [and there] emerges an experience of spirituality: being part of something greater than us.
This, Navab insists, is comparable to other psychedelic experiences, but it’s not just New Age delusion. It’s trippy, but we’re not tripping. The experience does, though, often become idealised or theologised – especially by New Age philosophies, which then narrate this experience as connecting to a kind of universal divinity or purity. Navab instead advocates a focus on these phenomena as thermodynamic processes, making sure to avoid narrativising them. In other words, they aim to remain explorative or investigative, rather than asserting a worldview.
Once again, the point here is not to impose culture on this liveliness but to let it speak for itself – and in Navab’s case, to share that experience with others, to guide the audience through a shared attunement ride while not disconnecting from their own deep listening experience.
Organism shudders its substrata, wobbling at a primordial lowness while its smallest pipes death-rattling like suffocating mice.
‘From DMT gnomes to God itself speaking through you’
Here is the crux of why this matters so much for Navab – where listening to liveliness intersects with politics at a grand scale. It is not only New Age philosophy that creeps into such experiences, but the will to overwrite history, to dominate and impose order on chaos – to control nature.
The cosmic struggle therefore occurs between these two ways of approaching how to understand this liveliness. On the one hand, we can let our dominant ideologies or epistemologies interpret or idealise these phenomena – as ‘objects of theology, objects of perfection, harmonies of the cosmos.’ This way, we overwrite these experiences with pre-existing ideas of how the world works, which are generally deterministic – seeing order and purpose – and uncritical. (That ‘things are just the way they are, something’s perfect somewhere, and we just need to capture it and connect to this divine voice.’) Alternatively, instead of attributing stories to them, we can pay attention purely to these emergent forces as they are and as we are part of them, embracing their indeterminacy. This is still a spiritual experience, Navab believes, but not a theological one.
The danger of the former approach – this theological frame – is a logic shared by both musical attitudes and wider ideologies. The twelve-tone ideology, in other words, is just a manifestation of power that already dominates elsewhere: ‘determinism comes into place, which takes us also to the military cybernetic complex, where the history of modern computation and modern music is about controlling nature.’ For Navab, this is violence to both music and life, and it ‘targets both notes and civilians.’
Navab makes a parallel here between how certain stories get told both about psychedelia and in more serious contexts: the imposition of a certain political reality. Take the differing interpretations of events in the news or in a legal trial: ‘everyone agrees that everyone experiences something, but then how it’s described is where things start falling apart from culture to culture.’ Similarly, in a psychedelic experience, depending on the person, ‘you get from DMT gnomes [or] machine elves to some divine light, to outer space monkeys, to God itself speaking through you.’
Of course, it sometimes seems like Navab is channelling just such a divine voice. But the ritual isn’t about sending forth pronouncements or commandments. The ritual is also a rave.
Organism howls to the moon in a cross-species chorus, from throbbing amphibian moans to stilted, drunken birdcalls.
From organs to Organism
This is where the raw materials of Organism turn out to be extremely relevant to Navab’s cosmic aims.
Organs, of course, carry an immense amount of cultural, historical, and theological baggage. What kind of wild synchronicity then brought Navab, completely uninterested in organs, to these prophetic pipes? They confirm that while this context was irrelevant for how and why they began experimenting with the Casavant, it turned out to be fundamental to Organism and the struggle it embodies. Navab says:
It’s definitely not a coincidence that the organ became a topic because the organ represents, through my conceptual framework, Western civilisation’s – or civilisation in general’s – conquering of the turbulence of nature and the site of nature becoming culture. All so we could deterministically control it and impose upon it our ideas of what is harmony, what is beautiful. Organs are the musical pinnacle of that – where it’s the total complexity, total harmony, total beauty, that all come together.
Navab describes how wildly different people’s reactions often are to their performances with Organism. Who knows the associations each person has to the church, to organ music, to the ‘twelve-tone ideology’? But some come away horrified or disgusted – while others speak fondly of the same performance. Navab interprets such reactions as indicative of the exact control vs. wildness distinction they raised earlier: ‘For some people, organs [should] represent humanity on top of the turbulence of nature, capturing this beauty and harmony, whereas my organ is messy, emotional, emergent, noisy, alive.’ In other words, Organism can be experienced as a kind of deconsecration of the organ – a radical upending of everything it represents: ‘It goes completely against the history of what organs mean to the history of music and Western civilisation.’
So it’s a rave – an anarchic, irreverent party on the bones of the defeated organ. But for Navab this isn’t only about defeating determinism, ideology, domination. It’s productive, not destructive; it’s about giving voice to nature, not speaking for it. It’s a font of liveliness: a ritual of life. These pipes, this skeleton of musical hegemony, ‘they uncover something from its past, from turbulent material to nature, and bring it to the surface. And they make us question, are all of these emergent, lively qualities worth dampening just so we could have our notes?’
Callum McLean is a writer, editor and teacher based in Amsterdam. Besides working on a podcast about (electronic musicians experimenting with) organs, he gets off on crab facts, breakbeats, and Dungeons & Dragons.
