Both volumes of this issue ultimately grew from the experience of writing and delivering the ‘On Vibration’ lecture series over a period of two years. The delivery was by far the most vital of the two, bringing with it the gift of spending time with and getting to know the participants and their practises in and out of the lectures (those who have contributed to this journal and not); the rhythm, rupture and continua of remarks and responses that continue to be sensed and considered.

Developing the first volume of the row of trees journal, some of the questions that have both guided and followed the participants are as follows:

Where are the differences between vibration and the word, vibration? What is it doing? Where is it? Where might it be? Where has it been? How can we define something that in essence not only defines everything, but is defined by everything, that is part of the definition of everything?

Surrounding and surrounded by such ouroborotic percepts, a mirrored layer of intimation is felt…

What do we think about when we think about vibration? What do we not think about when we think about vibration?

Are such spaces between vibrations inevitably more vibrations? Are the emergent patterns (what I consider to be fieldless fields, which in unto itself does not pertain to a theory, rather a process, even a methodology) kinds of manifestation? Whether they refer to the ways in which the ear processes frequencies, or glean, roam, walk, a literal field, common yet prone to privation, bordered, they are also subject mattering, the many professions of the amateur, fields of energy and energy ‘itself’.

Vibration is at all times, cultural, animal, botanic, alchemical, mythical, always a spiral, bacterial, contingent, cosmological, mysterious, tricky. It can evidently be something of an impersonal term, alongside such others as polarity, causation, etc. If we seek elsewhere, we might encounter more, could I say, personal, ensouled, attributes, realities of vibration. In these first two issues of a row of trees, the obverse of vibration is found to be present as ‘altitude’, in the work of Zoë Barry; perceived as if a prism, abstracting neither colour nor sound but borrowed edges, or what Rebecca Wilcox calls ‘compezishuns’; as the vapidity of boundaries in what Jacek Smolicki terms ‘arboreal sonorities’; ‘tentacular signs’ thread through a conversation between Emma Somerville and Jodie Saunders; an inherent materiality of engrams (memory traces) in Claire Nichol’s ‘projection trails’; infinite records of resolution underlying the ‘periodical wavelets’ of Daniela Stubbs-Levi’s ‘manic oscillation; bubbles of threaded light excreting from the silent stomata of Lucía Hinojosa; Caterina Gobbi’s fractal descent; the patterned auspices of electric transcription among Kelly Krumrie’s ‘concentric macroscope’; waves of negligible senescence permeating the symbiotic architecture of Anna Jane Houghton’s ‘ascending rooms’; David Lacey’s web-works of aural interconnectivity, slipping through their own stratified membranes into tree-life; the superposition of diatomaceous hum in Sharon Phelan’s ‘soil matrix’; Diana Lola Posani’s lymphatic exploration of ‘joyful permeability’; the imaginal organs of anima mundi and psycho-cellular expansions that resound from the edges of Una Hamilton Helle’s ‘genius loci’; Laura Harrington’s aeolian cloughs; a grotto of cloud papers in Freya Dooley’s ‘temporary commons’; Rebecca Glover’s pink earth, criss-crossing like meteors; an unreality of botanic figmentation in Fern Thomas’s radial poem; the fractured reverberation of Tom Soloveitzik’s ‘gravitational capsules’; the perambulatory transcriptions of Shirley Pegna’s grounded ‘feet in the grass’.

None of this is to say however, that a word or term that can be thought of as a somewhat ‘personal’ artefact set aside from vibration does not respond to the self-same frequency as the word vibration, or even that one can be separated from the other.

The contributions that make up this first volume lead me to feel, time and time again, that a study or preoccupation with vibration is both itinerant and established, a galvanic poetics, a practise of practises. That a field is a vibration that listens. Can we even reduce such a thing as vibration, or is there only emanation, a subtle air body that nourishes miasmic imagination, no matter how far we go?