Deep Dive at Bathers

Deep Listening Session with Kiril Bolotnikov & Geoff Saba

2310 Telegraph Avenue, Oakland

August 23, 2025

If you do a deep dive on Google, you’ll discover that the Bathers Library in downtown Oakland, self-described as “a rogue art school”, borrowed its name from a like-minded bath house in San Francisco’s Australian sister city, Sydney. The Library’s annual Summer Symposium extended through five evenings and two daytimes earlier this August, with performances, talks, and workshops on everything from botanical illustration to analog video to songwriting to collective poetry.

This contributor, in the company of fellow journalist Ken and several dozen other folk, dove into the Deep Listening session on Saturday evening. Seated on folding chairs between walls of books about art and psychic aspiration, we were guided by Kiril Bolotnikov, an Oakland writer, editor, and translator who hosts the eclectic music show Sonic Artifact on Psyched! Radio San Francisco, and fellow Oaklander Geoff Saba, a multi-instrumentalist, sound artist, recording engineer and producer with their own Itinerant Home Recording studio.

“We’re not really a culture of listeners,” Bolotnikov reminded us, before briefly delving into the guiding legacy of the late R. Murray Schaefer, who’d warned that modernization “detracted from our soundscape,” and Pauline Oliveros. Oliveros, a faculty member of Oakland’s Mills College where — full disclosure — I interviewed her in 2001, “distinguished between hearing and listening” and coined the term Deep Listening after experiencing the sound of her accordion (her lifetime instrument of choice) and the trombone of Stuart Dempster in a cistern 14 feet underground in Port Townsend, Washington, in 1989. Her coinage was applied to a number of popular recordings and a series of writings and workshops which she maintained, up until her passing in 2016.

Since that long-ago assignment rendered me rather familiar with Oliveros’s valuable theories and practices, I didn’t really learn much new at the Bathers presentation, as well-meaning as it was. But, I was ready and willing to participate in the experiential exercises. The first was based on what Schaefer termed “ear-cleaning”, where all of us taking note of what we heard in moments without speech. For me: a pen dropping, a page flipping, a chair creaking, and a fan (it was warm).

There followed a series of questions from Bolotnikov: What were this day’s first sound (the purr of my cat Martina); last sound (the click of my bedside light); loudest sound (a honk on Oakland’s 23rd Street); softest sound (Martina again); loveliest sound (that perennial purr); and most memorable sound ever (there are many, but I settled on the heartfelt throb of McCoy Tyner’s “Fly With the Wind”, heard as I returned to my car on a balmy evening outside the Monerey Jazz Festival, many moons ago).

Three of the exercises involved listening, deeply, to a trio of recorded music in a genre mostly unfamiliar to and uncategorizable by me but favored by the two presenters and imbued with a menagerie of electronically generated sounds. Brief comments from attendees were invited after a couple of the playbacks. The first — “Yèzi”, by Hyph11E (aka Tess Sun) — moved from oscillating blobs to growls and pastel vibes. The second — “Again”, by Oneohtrix Point Never (how do they imagine these pseudonyms?) — started with kind of a chamber music structure (as I pointed out) but didn’t bother with balancing the elements of the electronic ‘ensemble’, instead defaulting, as much modern music does (IMHO), to attention-grabbing bass booms.

The third was a creation of Saba’s, under their own more user-friendly pseudonym, Forest Floor, a section from “Wild Herd”, titled “Scrying the Vine/Language Twisting Twisting”. To my ear, subjectively inclined towards the musics I cover for this and other publications, the piece pleased with a gentle jazzy intro and an attractive interaction between textural layering and a John Cage-like kaleidoscope of many genres.

Bolotnikov followed with a sort of mini-interview with Saba about their compositional process. I’d have preferred that the questions come from us attendees. But, at the end of what seemed too brief a workshop, I left with a sense that the overall mission of the Bathers Library is very much in keeping with Oliveros’s working belief that attentive listening can lead to a culture of love.
In that spirit, Ken and I walked a few blocks up Telegraph Avenue to the Double Standard bar, a much more spacious setting to try to drink and deep-listen. Good bartenders and good vibes, we recommend it.

Here, then, is an exercise for you all: turn up your speakers or earphones and take in this video. Listen while you look, and make a list of everything you hear —the obvious, the subtle, and incidental sounds.