Band of Weeds is a sound collective, which was founded in 2015. At first, it was only a conceptual band created by Kalle Hamm and Dzamil Kamanger, and existed only on a paper. It became a real band, which releases LPs and gives live concerts, in 2017. The first album – Other-Than-Human – was released in autumn 2017, and the EP Waiting for the Extinction 🙁 in the spring 2019. The current members of the band are now Olli Aarni, Lauri Ainala, Kalle Hamm, Hermanni Keko and Anniina Saksa featuring different plants depending on the project. All the sound material is recorded from the plants using the method developed by the Soviet botanist Ivan Gunar. There are ionised liquids running inside the plant tissues and the changes in their electro-magnetic field can be converted to the sound range audible for the human ear.
The Band of Weeds questions anthropo- and zoocentric worldviews. The plant kingdom has been considered the lowest class of the living beings in the Western thinking. Contemporary researchers call this ‘plant blindness’. People don’t notice the plant kingdom, even though plants form the most significant part of the visible biomass. Plants are everywhere, but they are seen only as a background for human and animal life: milieu. At the same time, the importance of the plants are underestimated for the mankind, despite of their vitally importance in terms of producers of oxygen, nutrition and shelter.
OTHER-THAN-HUMAN
