A broken telephonic call to the future’s past, The Mouth is a Resonant Field combines solo voice, intuitive free improvisation, minimalist endurance, and noisy accident in order to reimagine the sonic palette of American folk song. 

Through the filter of consumer grade pedal electronics, old songs become sites where new worlds can emerge. Always with an ear toward the vast, oceanic sonic confusion of these unknown spaces, Algae & Tentacles works in the undersound of traditional song. 

Algae & Tentacles is the sound work of John Melillo. It is an umbrella for an eclectic set of sonic outputs that often hover around song, including verse-chorus-verse constructions, digital sound art, sound poetry, and electro-acoustic improvisation. A&T’s first—self-titled—album was released by Lightning Records in 2015. Melillo has released collaborative albums with Cecyl Ruehlen (Where Tremble Heart, Unsilent Desert Press, 2022) and Geoff Saba (Dry River, FREAKS, 2017). Based in Tucson, Arizona and Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Melillo is a writer, teacher, and researcher, and his first book—The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk—was published by Bloomsbury Press in 2020.

​

From Bloomsbury Academic, publisher of The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk:

​

By reinterpreting 20th-century poetry as a listening to and writing through noise, The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk constructs a literary history of noise through poetic sound and performance. This book traces how poets figure noise in the disfiguration of poetic voice. Materializing in the threshold between the heard and the unheard, noise emerges in the differentiation and otherness of sound. It arises in the folding of an “outside” into the “inside” of poetic performance both on and off the page. Through a series of case studies ranging from verse by ear-witnesses to the First World War, Dadaist provocations, jazz modernist song and poetry, early New York City punk rock, contemporary sound poetry, and noise music, The Poetics of Noise from Dada to Punk describes productive failures of communication that theorize listening against the grain of sound's sense.