Robert Thurman :: Cicadas: Broods XIX and XIII (Self Released)

Eerie liquid stringlike sounds lend a darker, horror film soundtrack feel

Groups of cicadas that emerge during the same year in the same North American region on a periodical cycle of 13 or 17 years are known as broods. In 2024 two broods emerged together—the Great Southern Brood known as XIX and the Northern Illinois Brood known as XIII–leading to a massive cicada bloom (or infestation, depending on your point of view) in the areas where the two broods overlapped. As part of his ongoing “Poetic Nature” series of artworks, poems, and musical compositions, Robert R. Thurman crafted Cicadas to memorialize this momentous combined emergence, the first in two centuries. For me Cicadas does a beautiful job using an experimental musical lens to help focus our attention on an often overlooked yet fascinating creature who lives in a world completely different from ours, yet that is also exactly the same (a beautiful expression of German phenomenological biologist Jakob von Uexküll’s concept of the Umwelt or life-world that is specific to the sensory perceptions of each kind of animal).

I love cicadas for their fantastic dinosaur/alien appearance—periodical cicada adults in the genus Magicicada have coal-black bulbous bodies, bright red eyes, orange-veined wings and legs that taper to black at their tips–and for their cascading susurrations of sound that mean summer has truly arrived to North Texas (for photos, recordings, and tons of scientific information you can visit the Periodical Cicada Info Pages. For many of us in the U.S. who grew up listening to annual cicadas (different species than the periodical ones, but similar vibe in sound and appearance) as kids lolling around through long, steamy summer days, their calls bring a certain nostalgia. This nostalgic feeling about summer cicadas is certainly shared by many in Japan judging from how often the calls of cicadas signal poignant moments of transition from youth to adulthood and longing for lost innocence in manga and anime.

Thurman’s Cicadas consists of three long tracks, the first two clocking in at about ten minutes each, and the last at fourteen. The album begins with the appropriately named “Emergence.” Brushed, syncopated percussive elements do a great job evoking the unexpected emergence patterns of thousands of individual animals pushing their way to the surface of the soil at slightly different times. Repeated drones that arise later in the track feel a bit like sirens passing on a distant highway, making me think of the bright red eyes of these unnerving-looking creatures. Eerie liquid stringlike sounds lend a darker, horror film soundtrack feel. Periodic flickering and ringing resounds as cicadas buzz past your ears on their inscrutable errands, like busy travelers jostling one another in the airport as they speed their way along.

Cicadas buzz past your ears on their inscrutable errands ::

On “Aggregations” Thurman leans into the alien invader feel of cicada broods. The sounds here remind me a bit of ELTA Music’s Solar 42 analog drone machine that one of my students used this past semester to evoke a 1950s giant insect film for one of the segments of a cicada-focused soundwalk composition she created. Drones swell and ebb in waves, like male cicadas chorusing to attract females for mating on romantic sunlit treetop branches. Later in the track a phaser-like sound emerges, a laser-focusing beacon sent over the airwaves solely for female cicada listeners. At first the scale feels off-putting: nearly every open surface on each branch and tree-trunk covered with cicadas. But eventually the thick sounds start to feel more familiar and even reassuring, like the summer calls of more well-known annual cicadas.

“Chorusing” sounds almost transcendent: a luminous quality resonating as males with their tymbal-scraping calls and females with their wing-flicks respond to each other, duetting in a language of love only their own kind fully understands, yet with an unearthly beauty this track helps all of us appreciate. The listener gets a clear feeling of many insect bodies packed closely together, wings vibrating in choruses of rising tides of excitement followed by calmer periods. By the end the track becomes much quieter as the chorus stills and the massive brood recedes for another 13 or 17 years.

Cicadas: Broods XIX and XIII is available on Bandcamp.