Band of Weeds is a collective formed in 2016 that makes music and sound art in collaboration with plants.
The band’s members are visual artist Kalle Hamm (s. 1969), poet and sound artist Olli Aarni (s. 1988), sound and video artist and writer Lauri Ainala (s. 1982) and visual artist Hermanni Keko (s.1987), who compose music out of recorded plant sounds.
Using a method of converting electro-magnetic impulses in plant tissue into a sound range audible to the human ear, Band of Weeds combines more-than-human voices in a unique chorus of ‘plant song’.
Band of Weeds seeks to raise awareness of a phenomenon known as plant blindness, the Western tendency to underestimate plants as a lower class of living beings and to view them purely as exploitable commodities.
Photo: Juho Liukkonen
Band of Weeds: The Weep of Trees, 2021-23. Helsinki Biennial 8.6.–21.9.2025, Vallisaari Island. Photo: HAM / Helsinki Biennial / Sonja Hyytiäinen
The Weep of Trees, 2021–23
Artwork location: Vallisaari Island
Band of Weeds transforms vegetal stress into music in The Weep of Trees, a sound installation on Vallisaari Island. The work is inspired by a poem from the Kalevala describing the lament of a birch. The birch bemoans its cruel treatment at human hands to the ancient bard Väinämöinen, only to be chopped down by the hero and turned into a kantele (zither).
The Weep of Trees is based on data collected at Hyytiälä Forest Station as part of a University of Helsinki research project studying stress responses in a 60-year-old commercial forest from which half the trees were felled.
Those left standing were fitted with sensors monitoring the volatile organic compounds (VOCs) they released before and after harvesting. The measurements confirm that the thinning of tthe forest elicited identifiable stress responses in the trees left standing. In The Weep of Trees, their lament is converted into music and combined with other sound material collected from trees and forests.