Visible Light Turn El Yunque’s Electrical Impulses into a Living Album

In February 2025, the Minneapolis duo Visible Light recorded hours of nocturnal sound inside El Yunque National Forest. The result, Sierra de Luquillo: A Living Soundscape, does not simply document the landscape. Cellist Amy McNally and sound artist Matthew Hiram shaped the material into four movements, treating the forest less as a backdrop than as a contributor.

El Yunque is the only tropical rainforest in the U.S. National Forest system, roughly 29,000 acres with 250 tree species — as many as all other national forests combined. It shelters the critically endangered Puerto Rican Parrot and 13 of 16 known coquí frog species. A 2018 study found that warming has reduced insect biomass there by 10- to 60-fold, with cascading losses in frogs, birds, and reptiles. The album arrives with that fragility audible around its edges.

The instrumentation includes cello, Moog, alto flutes, gongs, and singing bowls, alongside field-recorded crickets and coquí calls. The plants themselves enter through electrodes on leaves, their tiny electrical signals routed into MIDI — a method Hiram explored on 2024’s Yucca Music. The 17-minute opener “La Oscuridad” makes the collaboration explicit, with insects and amphibians carrying the first movement while strings and synthesizers rise beneath them.