Aquasonos: An Interview with Dameun Strange

Dameun Strange is an acclaimed sound artist, multi-instrumentalist, and award-winning composer. Ahead of Dameun’s upcoming two-part Aquasonos workshop series on listening and watersheds, CRWD’s Artist-in-Residence Sarah Peters posed some interview questions about his work.

The full interview is included below the following abbreviated conversation. Enjoy the insightful dialog and then register for Art + Water Workshop: Aquasonos – Sounds of our Watershed on April 25 from 1:00 to 3:00 p.m. at our Watershed Learning Center.

Condensed Interview with Dameun Strange

Sarah Peters: Tell us about your interest in water as a musician and composer.

Dameun Strange: My deep-seated fascination with and simultaneous apprehension toward water is inextricably linked to the very geography of my origins. My childhood unfolded in Washington, D.C., a city cradled by the majestic banks of the Potomac River. The Potomac, a vital artery, flows into the vast and ecologically significant Chesapeake Bay system.

When I was awarded the prestigious Jerome Fellowship in 2019, I resolved to dedicate the funds to an in-depth, creative exploration of my personal and ancestral relationship with water. This artistic inquiry initially took shape as the Chesapeake | Potomac project, a title that grounded the work geographically. As the scope and depth of the exploration grew, it evolved into the much broader, conceptual framework of the AquaSonos canon—a name that speaks to the sonic, narrative, and historical dimensions of water.

What began as a deeply personal journey toward healing and understanding led me across continents. This quest took me to one of the most solemn and emotionally charged sites in the world: the Door of No Return on Gorée Island, Senegal, West Africa. Standing on that threshold, facing the Atlantic, transformed the project from a private act of self-discovery into a communal effort of sharing and learning. AquaSonos ultimately became a vehicle for underscoring the universal, critical importance of water to our very existence—not just for survival, but for spiritual and cultural connection. The project now advocates for a much-needed collective responsibility: the imperative for all humanity to repair our complex, often damaged, relationship with water.

How did you become interested in field recordings? And as a composer, how do you integrate them into your compositions?

Dameun Strange: My deep-seated interest in the art of field recording is an organic evolution stemming directly from my early fascination with sampling. Having been born, essentially, at the same time as Hip Hop, sampling wasn’t just a musical technique—it was the vernacular of my formative musical experience. The sonic tapestry of my childhood was woven with borrowed sounds, layered beats, and repurposed fragments, making the decontextualization and recontextualization of sound a fundamental principle in how I listen to the world.

For me, environmental sound has never been background noise; it has always been inherently interesting. The act of world-building through sound, for me, is less about mere documentation and more about supporting the narratives I feel called to tell, using the found sounds of the world as the most authentic, evocative building blocks.

Are there any particular instruments you like to use when composing a work about water?

Dameun Strange: Since the focus is on embodying the behavior (e.g., flow, turbulence, diffusion, crystallization) rather than the literal sound, any instrument, from a traditional acoustic source to a complex electronic patch, can be abstracted to represent water. A sustained violin tone might represent laminar flow; a burst of percussion could signify molecular collision; a complex algorithmic texture could score the chaotic nature of turbulence. The score itself transforms into a dynamic map of aqueous phenomena, using notation to signify not pitch or rhythm in the conventional sense, but molecular movement, state change, and energetic transfer, allowing the composition to mirror the elegant, yet powerful, complexity of water.

You are CRWD’s neighbor in Frogtown! Do you have a favorite body of water nearby that you visit or is meaningful to you?

What I enjoy about Como Lake is its duality. On the one hand, I love how active it is—a hub of community life where you see runners, bikers, families picnicking, and boats gliding across the surface. It’s a dynamic, ever-changing portrait of urban recreation. On the other hand, the lake provides incredible moments of serenity, particularly in the early mornings when the mist hangs over the water and the sounds of the waking city haven’t yet taken hold. These peaceful hours, often shared with only the wildlife, are a powerful antidote to the day’s coming noise.

Beyond simple enjoyment, Como Lake serves as a wonderful, year-round “lab” for field recordings. The diverse sonic landscape—from the crunch of boots on snow in the winter to the calls of migratory birds in the spring, the distant laughter of summer revelers, and the gentle lapping of waves against the shore—offers a rich tapestry of sounds that are both unique to this environment and endlessly fascinating to document. This blend of urban energy and natural calm makes it a truly special, indispensable part of my life here.

About the artist:

Dameun Strange is an acclaimed sound artist, multi-instrumentalist, and award-winning composer. His body of work encompasses conceptual electronic and improvised electro-acoustic compositions that delve into the narratives and themes of the African diaspora, frequently incorporating surrealist and Afrofuturist aesthetics. Through sound and poetry, Strange’s artistic aim is to articulate the beauty and resilience of the Black experience, drawing upon ancestral influences to convey stories of triumph and forge connections across the past, present, and future.

Strange has composed for notable artists and choreographers, including Leslie Parker, Ananya Chatterjea, Joanna Lees, and Pramila Vasudevan. His significant accolades include the 2018 ACF | Create Award and a 2019 Jerome Hill Fellowship. Most recently, he was named the inaugural composer-in-residence for the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) for their 2025-26 60th anniversary season.

Art + Water Workshop: Aquasonos – Sounds of our Watershed with Dameun Strange

How do you listen to water? Join Dameun Strange for an afternoon of sonic exploration. Together we will learn about the physics of sound waves, hear field recordings, and explore the sounds of our watershed on an outdoor sound walk. Participants will then learn to make field recordings using simple tools such as a smartphone. Come prepared to tune in, slow down, and reflect on the sound of water in your memories and your environment.

This event is part of the We Are Water MN exhibit at Capitol Region Watershed District’s Watershed Learning Center from April 23 to June 14, 2026. Art + Water Workshops are organized by CRWD Artist-in-Residence Sarah Peters and CRWD Community Engagement Coordinator Maricella Xiong.

Learn more and register at the link below.

Art + Water Workshop: Aquasonos – Sounds of our Watershed with Dameun Strange

Full Interview with Dameun Strange

Sarah Peters: Tell us about your interest in water as a musician and composer.

Dameun Strange: My deep-seated fascination with and simultaneous apprehension toward water is inextricably linked to the very geography of my origins. My childhood unfolded in Washington, D.C., a city cradled by the majestic banks of the Potomac River. Within the familiar landscape of the northwest quadrant where my family resided, the gentle, almost constant murmur of Rock Creek provided a serene, natural soundtrack to daily life—a truly beautiful and calming presence.

The Potomac, a vital artery, flows into the vast and ecologically significant Chesapeake Bay system. This connection afforded my family and me countless opportunities to visit its beaches, transforming the Bay into a highly engaging living laboratory and a cherished playground during my middle school and high school years. The Bay’s rhythm, its tides, and its sheer breadth were early, profound educators.

Yet, this reverence for water is complicated by a more primal, deeply ingrained fear. While I am drawn to its beauty and life-giving properties, the sheer, untamed power of water itself—its capacity for overwhelming force—terrifies me. This aquaphobia has been a defining characteristic of my life, a constant emotional boundary. My creative life has found its most compelling direction precisely in the tension between this profound reverence and this innate curiosity and fear. It was at the nexus of this emotional conflict that I found myself compelled to open a new chapter in my creative pursuits.

For years, I contemplated the origin of this fear. Why did I harbor such anxiety toward a substance I also felt so profoundly connected to? As a child, recurring dreams and frequent daydreams of sailing on colossal tall ships led me to speculate that perhaps I had been a sailor in a past life, a romantic, comforting explanation.

However, as I matured and gained a clearer understanding of the historical narrative—specifically, the devastating journey that brought my ancestors to this side of the Atlantic—a more unsettling and profound interpretation took root. My persistent fear, I realized, might not be a personal phobia but a somatic manifestation of intergenerational trauma, an echo of the collective suffering experienced during the transatlantic slave trade. The water, the very Middle Passage itself, became the source of an inherited terror.

This realization offered not just context, but a compelling artistic mandate. Consequently, when I was awarded the prestigious Jerome Fellowship in 2019, I resolved to dedicate the funds to an in-depth, creative exploration of my personal and ancestral relationship with water. This artistic inquiry initially took shape as the Chesapeake | Potomac project, a title that grounded the work geographically. As the scope and depth of the exploration grew, it evolved into the much broader, conceptual framework of the AquaSonos canon—a name that speaks to the sonic, narrative, and historical dimensions of water.

How did you become interested in field recordings? And as a composer, how do you integrate them into your compositions?

This appreciation for found sound was perhaps inadvertently seeded by the very first song I can distinctly recall hearing: Minnie Riperton’s “Loving You.” While the memory is faint, it is potent. I was a toddler, yet I truly believe it was the delicate, chirping presence of the songbirds within the track’s production that arrested my attention. Ms. Riperton’s voice, a phenomenon of almost superhuman purity and range—especially in that stratospheric F#7 at the song’s apex—was undoubtedly gorgeous. However, the environmental sounds did not feel like a gimmick; they elevated the performance. The songbirds placed her not just in a pastoral setting, but in a sphere of the divine, a pop-goddess serenaded by nature itself.

For me, environmental sound has never been background noise; it has always been inherently interesting. This perspective was honed by growing up on a perpetually busy 13th Street in Washington, D.C. My nocturnal tendencies, having been an insomniac from a very young age, amplified this sonic awareness. The contrast between 13th Street at the apex of rush hour—a cacophonous wall of engines, horns, and hurried footsteps—and 13th Street at 4 AM was a mesmerizing sonic dichotomy. Though traffic never truly ceased, the rhythm shifted dramatically. The aggressive, goal-oriented roar of the day gave way to a smoother, almost meditative flow of lonely cars passing, a nocturnal pulse that opened up space for the sounds the daytime volume had suppressed.

This quietude allowed for an intimate, almost orchestral arrangement of neighborhood sound: the rhythmic, insistent barking of dogs echoing across the alleyways; the almost musical plink-plink-plink of a dripping faucet in the aging plumbing of my great great grandmother Mildred’s classic D.C. row house; the distant, low hum of the city itself. To my young mind, this was not chaos; it was a wonderful, complex symphony, a nightly performance of human and non-human actors.

Further amplifying this relationship with environmental sound was a nearby creek and the valley it carved. Exploring that waterway was a lesson in sonic filtration. The deeper one ventured into the valley, the more the natural soundscape asserted itself. The gurgle, rush, and trickle of the water, amplified by the topography, began a steady, deliberate erasure of the manufactured sounds of human civilization. The distant sirens, the engine noise, the faint voices—all steadily ceded ground to the relentless, pure sound of the natural world. It was a visceral, audible illustration of the manufactured giving way to the natural.

It is precisely these complex contrasts—the tension between human presence and natural persistence, the stark difference between day and night rhythms, the interplay of the deliberate and the incidental—that form the foundation of my work. These relationships intrigue me profoundly and are the basis for the philosophical and technical approach I employ when integrating field recordings into my compositions. The act of world-building through sound, for me, is less about mere documentation and more about supporting the narratives I feel called to tell, using the found sounds of the world as the most authentic, evocative building blocks.

Are there any particular instruments you like to use when composing a work about water?

Dameun Strange: My initial artistic endeavor into sonic studio art, using water as a primary inspirational material, began with a somewhat literal and constrained approach. I was fundamentally focused on the mimetic challenge: how to accurately duplicate the auditory experience of natural aquatic phenomena, such as the rhythmic rush of a river or the gentle, intermittent gurgle of a bubbling brook. This early phase was dominated by technical analysis, involving the meticulous study of sound waves—their frequencies, amplitudes, and spectral content—with the intention of recreating them primarily through digital synthesizers and traditional sound design techniques. The goal was, essentially, a form of acoustic photorealism.

However, as my exploration deepened and became more introspective, this narrow focus on mere sonic duplication dissolved. I found myself increasingly captivated by the fundamental nature of water itself—not just the surface sounds it generates, but the profound, almost philosophical, array of ways water behaves, interacts with its environment, and transforms through various states of being. The transition from liquid to gas (steam) or liquid to solid (ice) became merely the most obvious examples. My interest pivoted to the more subtle, often unseen, processes: the dynamic changes in molecular structure, the complex kinetics of chemical and physical reactions, the properties of surface tension, and the way water acts as a universal solvent and transporter of energy and life.

This paradigm shift was critical. The artistic objective evolved from duplicating sound to representing the processes, structures, and dynamics of water. The work ceased to be solely about what water sounds like, and became an investigation into what water is and does. This means addressing water on both the macroscopic level—the vast, powerful movements of oceans and glaciers—and the microscopic level—the quantum dance of hydrogen bonds, the capillary action in plants, or the formation of a single water droplet.

The core artistic challenge is now to develop a system for duplicating these behaviors and transformations, not just sonically, but also graphically within a compositional score. This new framework allows for a radical expansion of the instrumental palette. Since the focus is on embodying the behavior (e.g., flow, turbulence, diffusion, crystallization) rather than the literal sound, any instrument, from a traditional acoustic source to a complex electronic patch, can be abstracted to represent water. A sustained violin tone might represent laminar flow; a burst of percussion could signify molecular collision; a complex algorithmic texture could score the chaotic nature of turbulence. The score itself transforms into a dynamic map of aqueous phenomena, using notation to signify not pitch or rhythm in the conventional sense, but molecular movement, state change, and energetic transfer, allowing the composition to mirror the elegant, yet powerful, complexity of water.

You are CRWD’s neighbor in Frogtown! Do you have a favorite body of water nearby that you visit or is meaningful to you?

Dameun Strange: One of the things I love most about living in the Twin Cities is the extraordinary access to a multitude of vital and beautiful bodies of water. These waterways don’t just shape the landscape; they are central to the rhythm of life here. The mighty Mississippi River, for example, especially at the western end of Summit Avenue near my alma mater, Macalester College, was a very important refuge for me as a college student. Its presence offered a profound sense of grounding, a place where I could clear my mind and find perspective amidst the pressures of academic life. The sheer scale and enduring flow of the river were always a reminder of something larger and more enduring than my immediate concerns.

This connection to water became a non-negotiable factor when my wife, Corina, and I began looking for a home. I was genuinely excited to find a place that offered such convenient access to Como Lake. Our neighborhood in Frogtown, with its proximity to Como, was immediately appealing to me, and the lake has since become one of my absolute favorite places in the entire Twin Cities metro area.