Marc Behrens is an accomplished musician and sound artist who has released numerous CDs which would primarly fall into the electro-acoutic category. I am going to go out on a limb here and say that Behrens doesn’t so much compose sounds as manipulate silence. While writing this I have decided to slip on my headphones and listen to his collaboration with Paulo Raposo Further Consequences of Reinterpretation, on which they reinterpret various remixes of Nosei Sakata’s *0 “a CD which contains basically nothing (i.e. sound outside the human hearing range).” I’ve already dragged my laptop out onto the back porch where a line of 100 yr. old Norwegian spruce shelters my property, so i like to think that i've created near-ideal conditions to reflect on Behrens' photos.

Each day i stroll down the back, through the forest and into the conservation area, i prefer the route that cuts through the cedar grove by the falls and then along the river, i cut across the main dam and up the street to the post office to check if i have received any mail. Most days i haven’t. I’ve walked this route 5 or 6 days a week for the past 2 ½ years, but i’ve never wearied of it. There are seemingly endless nuances to the water’s surface and the reflection of the sky upon it; and the forest, barren except for some fern and moss and carpeted with cedar twigs, has an unordered regularity and stately calm architects and city planners can vainly strive for but never achieve.

Yet in these photos Behrens is presenting us with much more than the beauty of nature; for these are photos of planted forests, which together with their sheer beauty and elegance, raise issues of humanity’s inevitable destruction of her environment, as well as her occasionally noble attempts to reverse the damage.

Upon first reviewing this series i was drawn foremost to the almost austere regularity of Feldberg and Hohemark, but over time i have come to appreciate Marc’s wise decision to include the lush unruliness of Sintra – for in the end even man’s most rigid interventions will be transformed and consumed, and revert to a chaos we so often callously dismiss.

Michael Tweed