David Dunn, an American composer/sound artist of the post-Cage generation, is a leading figure in acoustic ecology and bioacoustics, and delivered a lecture at the ICC exhibition "Silent Dialogue" (2007) — he's at the cutting edge of that field. His CD debut, "Angels and Insects" (1992), is an astonishing, all-encompassing album focused on communication with two extreme worlds: the names of supernatural, celestial angels, and the insects that dwell underwater in the natural world. At the same time, it firmly lays out the direction of his post-soundscape work on the interaction between living beings and their natural and social environments as mediated by sound. (Mistake this for "environmental music" and you'll be filing a complaint and returning it, 100% guaranteed!)

One of the included pieces, "A Table of the Forty-Nine Good Angels," is a work for computer-processed voice based on the mystical investigations of Renaissance mathematician/astrologer John Dee and the medium Edward Kelley. Using as its text the "Enochian" language Dee invented 400 years ago and promoted as the tongue of the angels, this occult experiment attempts to render the voices of angels (= aliens) in sound; the eeriness and sheer coolness of it — as if space were tearing open above a magic square and voices were leaking through — is utterly devastating!

The other piece, "Chaos and the Emergent Mind of the Pond," is an audio collage built from digital field recordings of the micro-sounds emitted by insects living in the water, inaudible to human ears, adjusted to fall within the range of human hearing. Here too, a close encounter between another world and humanity is engineered through sound, but the sounds these insects (= aliens) use to communicate are staggering — "as if organized in sequences more complex than most music humans have made" (from the liner notes) — leaving humans with nothing to do but listen. An important work that marked a turning point for Dunn.