Mississippi Records and The Oregon Department of Kick Ass present an evening of
Interspecies Communication with Jim Nollman and Rankin Renwick
on November 1, 2026 7 p.m.
at The Hollywood Theatre in Portland, Oregon.
Q&A to follow
curated by Rankin Renwick
A night of film and music and art centered around interspecies communication!
Local artist and filmmaker Rankin Renwick of the Oregon Department of Kick Ass will be in conversation with Jim Nollman about his decades-long career as an avant-garde sound artist, naturalist, author, and lifelong innovator in the practice of interspecies communication. The discussion will include art, photography and video of Jim’s interactions with dolphins, beluga whales and orcas.
Much of Renwick’s artwork concerns non-human animals, including wolves, jellyfish, Vaux Swifts and the Southern Resident Orcas. The evening will include Renwick’s short film Cold Holy Water, with a score by Marisa Anderson, and some snippets of Renwick’s film Translation Please, in which their dog collaborates with the 1982 album Playing Music With Animals The Interspecies Communication Of Jim Nollman With 300 Turkeys, 12 Wolves, 20 Orca Whales
We'll also be having a deep listening to tracks that Jim has made with animals over the decades, including from Orcas’ Greatest Hits, his new album on Folkways Records, drawn from over 60 hours of interspecies collaboration collected in hydrophone recordings.
“Most nights the whales would eventually arrive. From far away, their whistles resounded through the speakers like a pod of bee-bop saxophones. Certain calls rose high above this fray, slithering, soaring, dive-bombing as if Jimi Hendrix himself had been reincarnated as Orcinus orca,”
- Jim Nollman
A unique event you don't want to miss!!!!
.