In Tonic, Michael Sikkema offers a multimodal image-sound collage. The reader of this text walks two paths, braided. One track follows a series of Niedecker-esque documentations of hyper-local sounds: “11:00 train 3 minutes early”; “motor bike / runs the gears”; “great lake shhhissphssshh”; “low bacon rain.” The other treads on leaves of comic book and nature magazine scraps, assembled into onomatopoeiac collages in which the all-caps snarls, booms, and thups of superhero realms spring from mollusk shells, butterflies, groves of trees, and single leaves. The product of a meditative practice, Tonic makes for a nutritious intoxicant. Drink with us.
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Michael Sikkema is interested in field recordings, foley art, sound maps, animal communication, ecology and symbiosis, the wood wide web, visual poetry, collage, antique erotica, and knives.