There is something beautiful in paying close attention to the sounds and movements of activities we often do. Rituals exist in so many places we don’t notice. Somatic Steamed Eggs is a collaboration between Rachel Beetz and Heidi Ross that finds profound depth in one of cooking’s most elemental gestures. Since 2023, the two have been exchanging scores, building a language between taste and sound. When Rachel sent Heidi a composition for two perfect oscillators, Heidi responded two months later with a recipe for steamed eggs. Simple, nourishing, complete. Rachel made them, following each instruction carefully. As she ate, she felt something growing between them, a shared understanding that would become this album. The work documents Heidi preparing eggs while Rachel captures and transforms those sounds with field recordings and modified flutes. Sonically, this is captivating, full of emotive textures, melodic exhalations, and, more generally, life. Each stage reveals itself: the kettle gathering heat, eggs whisked smooth, steam rising, the quiet of eating. Somatic Steamed Eggs is both documentation and transformation. It’s an invitation to experience how sound creates meaning through the simplest of human acts.
Somatic Steamed Eggs is out now on OSO. Rachel’s website is HERE, and Heidi’s website is HERE.
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I’d love to start with early memories. Do either of you remember a moment from childhood where sound revealed itself as something more than background noise? I’m thinking about those experiences that stick with you, where listening became active instead of passive.
Rachel: I grew up in rural Illinois on a corn field. My first vivid memories of listening are to the thunderstorms that would roll through in the summer. I would sit in one of the several rooms of my parents’ home with large windows, watching and feeling these storms cross the farmland: the dynamic variations of thunder from those that roll through the clouds across the sky to gigantic claps that vibrate through your bones, followed by flashing lights. It was a whole body experience.
Heidi: When I was quite young, maybe 7 or 8 years old, my mom took me to see Pink Floyd’s The Wall in IMAX at the science center in Seattle. We laid down on the floor to take in the curved 360-degree screen, the lights were turned low, and the sound came from all directions. I could physically feel the sound coming up through the floor as it transformed in my body into deeply felt emotions. In hindsight, I was having a psychedelic experience, but without drugs, as my whole body was sensing sound, not just hearing it. This experience changed my relationship to sound and music, and laid the foundation for my work in immersive performance and installation.
Rachel, you mention being influenced by natural and mechanical environments. Was there a particular sound or place from growing up that made you want to work with sound in the first place?
Those thunderstorms, of course, and also the grain elevator that my mother and father still manage to this day. I would help them out in the fall harvest season. I remember the sounds of the grain pouring from the semis into the large grates in the ground and the elevator machines clanking the grain through the various systems of the elevator. It is an industrial kind of experience of nature.
Heidi, when did you first notice the sonic dimension of cooking? There’s so much sound happening in a kitchen that we tune out. I’m curious when you started tuning in instead.
In early 2020, after being laid off from restaurant work due to COVID, I took a field recording workshop through an arts organization called LAND (Los Angeles Nomadic Division). We walked the streets of LA, took public transit, and ate at a Waffle House in Leimert Park, listening to the sounds of the spatulas scraping the griddle, the sizzle of bacon, and the hum of patrons from this historic black neighborhood. I’ve always been musically minded, but until that point, I hadn’t given much thought to ambient, everyday sounds. That workshop changed my life profoundly – after that day, I began listening differently. And when I returned to cooking (I transitioned to private cheffing), I used listening as a tool to slow myself down and attend to and attune to the food in a way I hadn’t before. My first performance was a simple amplification of mushrooms roasting over charcoal in my friend, David Horvitz’s garden.
Rachel, how did the flute become your instrument? I’m always interested in those early encounters with instruments, the ones that choose you as much as you choose them.
My mom likes to share the memory that I grabbed the needle during a prenatal test, and that was me trying to play the flute in-utero! There is also this amazing picture of me at age 1 wearing a onesie and headphones with my hands in the position of holding a flute, but the flute is missing. It’s kind of creepy. I only discovered this picture last year. It has been a slow re-awakening that this instrument has always been for me. I started playing in school band. Sadly, many of these programs are being cut! I have slowly reawakened to how this instrument feels like home.
What drew the two of you to this particular collaboration? Heidi, you work at the intersection of taste, sound, and movement. Rachel, you think about sound as touch. How did Somatic Steamed Eggs emerge from those overlapping interests?
Heidi: This collaboration happened quite organically through a series of conversations that started in person and continued over email – we were ‘volleying’ scores back and forth, her with sound, and me with a food response (I would video my food preparations and send her the video and recipe). Knowing that I was a budding sound enthusiast, Rachel would send me articles, essays, and videos relating to sound and this nebulous thing we were exploring.
Around this time, I began exploring somatic movement as therapy and also in my cooking practice, and we had an opportunity to spend a week together at Nature Art Habitat Residency (NAHR) in central California, where we were able to practice and play with all these ‘ingredients’ we had been talking about. The combination of time/space, deep listening, slow rolling (a somatic practice), shared meals, recording sessions, walks, and silence gave us the fertile ground from which the album grew.
I love that you chose such a humble recipe. There’s something powerful to me about taking this everyday ritual and making it the entire focus. Can you talk about why steamed eggs specifically?
We started our collaboration with a prompt, a story in Chinese philosophy:
“Zhuang Zhou dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn’t know he was Zhuang Zhou. Suddenly, he woke up, and there he was, solid and unmistakable Zhuang Zhou. But he didn’t know if he was Zhuang Zhou who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuang Zhou. Between Zhuang Zhou and a butterfly there must be some distinction. This is called the Transformation of Things.”
After this prompt, Rachel sent me a 15-minute score for two perfectly tuned oscillators. She gave me instructions for listening to this simple yet somewhat advanced sound piece (I didn’t even know what an oscillator was at that point, but I found the whole thing fascinating, and I thought it was pretty bold of her to send me this extremely simple yet very complex piece).
I sat with the piece for months, and listened to it many times, yet I was completely stumped on how to respond. One day, as I was in the shower with the steam coming up around me, it came to me suddenly and without effort (and without thought, it came to me through my body) steamed eggs.
As soon as I got out of the shower, I made steamed eggs, a deceptively simple dish in which the sum is much greater than the parts, as with Rachel’s drone piece. This custard-y comfort dish originates from China, tying it back to our original prompt, and so it felt as if it had to be, and in fact, it always had been steamed eggs.
I sent her a video and recipe of the steamed eggs, and from there she composed a collaborative piece containing my cooking sounds and her drone sounds (a precursor to the album), and she made the steamed eggs recipe, just as I had instructed.
Eating and digesting literally and metaphorically these sounds and ideas, Rachel’s drone taking us on a sonic journey, the egg transformation from liquid to custard, these are all the Transformation of Things.
The album follows each stage of preparation: mise-en-place, the kettle building to a boil, whisking, steaming, eating. What was it like to record these sounds with that kind of attention? I imagine slowing down and really listening to each stage changes your relationship to the act itself.
Rachel: Our recording session was of Heidi making the recipe from beginning to end. We had already practiced playing with ingredients with this kind of attention, both separately and together; We recorded with the same kind of slow attention. After our session, I further played with layers of space: delay, echo, and reverb, in addition to adding flute harmonizing with the tones I heard resonating in the present sounds. I consider the effects as a way to further expand the touch of the sound from my mind’s ear into the room.
Heidi: In performance, I like to add somatic movement and expression, but when we recorded this piece, it was a simple, meditative preparation in which I let sensory pleasure guide my process. Because I’m still relatively new to sound making and sound art, I’m still discovering what sounds feel good in my body. So I play with an egg in my hand or tap it on the table, draw a spoon around a dish a little longer if it sounds interesting. The pleasure is gently building the whole time, and my body is rewarding me with a calm and regulated nervous system. Hearing how Rachel transformed the piece even further, but still kept the integrity of the expression, was the ‘icing on the cake,’ so to speak. I was ecstatic listening to it the first time – her expression matches my expression perfectly. We’re never competing, we’re always complimenting.
Rachel, you work with field recordings and modified flutes. How do those two elements interact in this piece? Are the flutes responding to the kitchen sounds, or creating their own environment?
Rachel: It is all a realization of what I hear in my mind’s ear as I experience Heidi cooking. When she plays with the spoon around the bowl, I hear the spoon echo, reverberate further. When the kettle struggles to boil, I hear notes of the chord that become the drone. My realization of our somatic experience is the externalization of the sound that I hear in my head as we move through the recipe.
When you’re performing this live, what happens in the room? The press release mentions small bites by Heidi. How does the physical act of eating become part of the experience for the audience?
Rachel: Heidi cooks the recipe, and I produce the effects and improvise live. It is a little bit different each time, becoming a living language. In our record release show, we chose to each have a kettle and gave them a movement where they got to speak, varying the gas underneath, which varied their scream. I really listened to what my kettle was saying, as if we were in conversation. It was a new aspect of the piece. Later, as Heidi cooked, I would adjust the effects, listening to how the fork curves around the bowl as she whisks, or would watch how she moved her hand over the steam to adjust the music I played on the flute. It is improvisatory, where the rules are made by how we move and interact with materials. At the end, when we ate the eggs, I actually turned off the amplification. I have a close friend who has a real issue with eating sounds; we always have to have music playing at meals. Knowing this, I didn’t really want ‘eating sounds’ as a part of the piece – having silence there in the live performance, while you watch us eat, after listening to the preparation requires the audience to fill in the blank with their ears.
Heidi: For me, having the audience eat a bite of what is seen and heard in performance is an essential part of the experience. I’ve always loved cooking for people; it’s essential and ritualistic, and it’s a profoundly creative and intimate act with oneself and with others. There’s also this idea of transubstantiation (or transformation) with food in performance, except instead of the eucharist, it’s food that has been transformed through sound that transforms those who ingest and metabolize it.
Logistically, I accomplish this by prepping food for the audience beforehand that is heated off-stage during our performance, which is kind of a mirror of how restaurants and cooking shows work. There’s a lot of preparation that goes into a smooth dinner service, sometimes days, weeks, or even months beforehand (which is not unlike a symphony coming together). The eggs I make on-stage during performance are for me and Rachel to taste. Once we finish, an assistant helps distribute the off-stage steamed eggs for the audience to taste.
There’s vulnerability in presenting something as ordinary as making eggs as art. How do you think about the relationship between the conceptual and the accessible? You’re creating sound art, but you’re also just documenting this simple human ritual.
Rachel: Two things here. One, simple ideas are quite complicated as you keep looking and going deeper into them. Sure, steaming eggs sounds simple, but I have yet to get the exact same texture as Heidi in my steamed egg. Hers are perfectly smooth, with no bubbles of whites. I’m not sure how she does it, actually. When I asked her, she said she strained it, but she doesn’t in our show, and it still comes out perfectly! Secondly, I think we often overcomplicate our lives. There are so many demands on our attention. I’m constantly tempted to pick up my phone, or multitask, or try to solve a problem with a big, complicated solution.
There is magic in taking one simple step, regularly, over a long period of time. We’ve forgotten this. We can experience eternity in a simple step.
Heidi: After years of cheffing in top restaurants in Los Angeles, with much attention (ego) on grandiose techniques and executions, I’m happy to be exploring simpler preparations of food in my creative work. But there’s a saying in the food world: simple isn’t easy. With simple food, you can’t hide behind the fluff or extraneous garnish. So it’s equally challenging for me, but it’s also this soft ego death. It’s not about me, the chef, putting out a stellar dish; it’s about the egg, it’s about the sounds.
I think Rachel and I are both interested in showing the beauty and art in labor-based practices and domestic labor. In contrast to the more dominant visual arts, we lean into time-based practices that invite presence, witnessing, embodiment, and transformational participation. These softer senses and practices encourage us to look deeper, to be still, to spend time and attention with ourselves and each other. I think the best artworks force us to confront the systems in which we live, and even our own minds. That’s why I love using everyday tasks and common objects; at any point in the day, we can drop into our bodies with very simple tools, and it’s an incredibly rich source material.
The piece ends with eating. After all the preparation and listening, we arrive at consumption. Can you talk about that choice to include that final stage rather than ending with the completion of cooking?
Rachel: It is interesting to hear you use the word consumption here. The word consumption, to me, leans towards an experience of non-attention to action. Yes, we are eating, but I wouldn’t say we are consuming. More like the eggs are consuming me. In the sense that I have become the egg – an overwhelming you are what you eat situation. By spending so much time sensing so closely, I am consumed by the experience. So yes, perhaps I can see a world where consumption makes sense. In the recording, just before it is time to eat, one of our stomachs growls. You can hear it in the recording still. So there is hunger that can be satiated by tasting. Eating: the ultimate transformation of things.
And finally, to close as always… What are some of your favorite sounds in the world?
Rachel: There are so many good sounds in the world: rain on a tin roof, thunder, crackling of a fire, the tip taps of my dog’s paws on the floor. However, I think any sound, no matter how wonderful it is, can be awful if I am not ready and open to hearing it.
Heidi: Some of my favorite sounds are foods right when they come out of the oven, streams of water, my cat licking his broths, the Hoh Rainforest, and trains in the distance.
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