See, hear a coral reef sex party
Audiovisual album about sea life to play at North Miami museum.
You would be forgiven for thinking “Tangerine Reef,” the trippy audiovisual album by New York psych-pop band Animal Collective and Miami art-science duo Coral Morphologic, looks like a coral-reef sex party.
On the band’s website, where the 54-minute album screens for free, an underwater time-lapse video shows a wall of swaying, neon sea creatures with hundreds of mouth-like orifices. Psychedelic-blue sea anemones shoot eggs into lime-green sea anemones. And sea cucumbers with squirming tentacles probe coral crevices for food against a murky, reverbheavy soundtrack of ambient electronica.
Showing the sexual side of coral reefs? That’s Coral Morphologic in a nutshell, says co-founder Colin Foord, a marine biologist who preserves Miami’s coral reefs and grows them in his lab aquarium along the Miami River. The whole idea, he says, is to humanize coral, drawing empathy with surreal visuals as reefs around the world are besieged by pollution and runoff.
“[‘Tangerine Reef ’] is our most sexually graphic coral film. It’s really coral porn,” Foord says with a laugh. “Our goal is to get people to care about something they wouldn’t care about. We tried to show all of the bodily functions that humans can identify with. Is this sea anemone doing what I think that sea anemone is doing? Well, actually, it is.”
Championing coral since they created Coral Morphologic in 2007, Foord and his partner, experimental musician J.D. McKay, will screen one of their hypnotic coral films Wednesday, Oct. 3, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami. Titled “Coral City,” the 35-minute documentary is a companion to the museum’s new environmental exhibit, “Mira Lehr: Tracing the Red Thread.”. The film recounts the duo’s urgent 2014 effort to save a thriving coral ecosystem that was slated to be destroyed thanks to a government dredging project at the Port of Miami.
Spreading awareness about coral is a major mission for Foord, who captured footage for “Tangerine Reef ” in his lab aquarium, where his coral grows organically in DayGlo colors. He found kindred spirits in Animal Collective, who teamed up with Coral Morphologic at Art Basel 2017 for a one-off performance titled “Coral Orgy” at Miami’s New World Center.
After the show, Foord and McKay, both fans of Animal Collective, approached the band about a collaboration. Animal Collective, he says, agreed instantly. (Instrumentalist Josh “Deacon” Dibb and Brian “Geologist” Weitz, who produces the band’s synthy soundscapes, are avid scuba divers and fellow environmentalists.)
Animal Collective recorded “Tangerine Reef ” in April at a Baltimore studio, inspired by a handful of coral videos Foord sent them. “This is not about doing something cool with a national band,” Foord says. “It’s about showing coral’s beauty to as wide a population as possible. We want coral to be the stars of the show, and us the directors behind the scenes.”
Foord says his coral videos share a kinship with Mira Lehr, a longtime Miami environmental artist whose solo show, “Tracing the Red Thread,” is a labyrinth of ceilinghigh mangrove sculptures built with rope and steel. A spool of red thread runs through the tangle of mangroves, symbolizing the ocean’s sickness.
Coral Morphologic’s film will screen 7 p.m. Oct. 3 at the Museum of Contemporary Art. A Q and A with Coral Morphologic will follow the film. The companion exhibit “Mira Lehr: Tracing the Red Thread” will close Nov. 4. Call 305-893-6211 or go to MocaNomi.org.