Your plants can make the most enthralling noises if you listen closely enough.
It may not be apparent at first, and frankly it should’t be. It can only be appreciated once you’ve paid enough attention to the details.
At a point this past summer, I longed to hear something as engaging as this. Anything to break from the repetitive drone of static and pleasantries that I had become cycled into.
My life, like those of everybody around me, had been dragged and dropped into the confines of whatever screen fixtures I had available. This transition was haphazard, to say the least, and after too long of this inefficient and unsustainable lifestyle, I had become jaded. The concept of online engagement physically repulsed me. The unspoken awkwardness and poor function of this “the new normal,” that never truly found a comfortable norm, had me so disconnected from my life and myself that I desperately felt like I needed to go touch grass before I just became an extension of my home and my screens.
So, with my mind set on its one-track and no other passengers in tow, I started my very first garden in an effort to connect with something in a way I hadn’t in months.
I took to it enthusiastically in the beginning, just as one would with any new hobbies. My drive was so palpable that my mother took it on the same summer. But after a few weeks, even as my seeds sprouted, my garden felt lifeless.
The silence I’d hear echoing as I looked out at my plants primed me to the absence of something that had been equally missing in my Zoom calls and classes. Whatever I felt was absent in my routine now felt lost from my life altogether. I conceded, turned from my last ditch effort, and retreated back inside.
Your plants can make the most enthralling noises if you listen closely enough.
I can confidently say I understand this now, could only come upon this understanding when I ventured back online.
The sounds are distinct, but sometimes hard to discern. They might sound like a connection. They could sound like something new coming into its own. It mostly sounds like too much attention to the details to some. But to those present for Civilian Soiree’s “Sound of the Small Plant” livestream, this doesn’t sound too bad. In fact, it sounds like pretty good company.
Between the decorative imagery surrounding the frame of the stream’s focus and the sound off happening in the sidebar chat feature, there’s no mistaking that this is an event born out of the constraints of the pandemic just as the rest of our lives have been. Everyone in attendance is aware of this, though, and interacts more fluidly with the environment because of that shared understanding.
And even with this gem of an online space in his pocket, Civilian Soiree co-founder Tanveer Qureshi is still confident they can still take it a step further.
“I’ve been talking to Ryan and Chloe about using this software called Gather Town. Everybody has a character and they can move around using little keyboards. Then, when you meet someone, you can press a button and engage them, your webcam comes on, and you can talk to them,” he describes.
As you’d be able to tell from the way people engage with one another, Civilian Soiree is not an entirely new virtual presence, having hosted virtual discussions and Zoom calls before. Knowing this, though, a livestreamed DJ set would invoke the idea of a major departure.
Fellow co-founder Ryan Tavares describes it more like a return to form.
“[Civilian Soiree] kind of started off with our love of music, and we saw that we were moving away from it… So we wanted to tie everything back up.”
After all, “we see music as a way to build community,” Ryan says.
Civilian Soiree, as Ryan notes, is self described “multidisciplinary community” that is cultivating a dynamic online presence through the events and online spaces they curate.
This found family of free thinkers’ ability to provide such fine tuned and fluid online settings raises exciting questions about how they will apply what they’ve learned to in-person circumstances, and on how they will retain what they’ve applied during this tumultuous learning period. After working hard to grow this community, it would be a shame to lose it to the notion that all settings worth up keeping are physical ones.
However, Tanveer does understand that retaining this base will be an increasingly greater effort as we approach a time where people’s compulsion to cast their online settings aside is coming to fruition. But that’s where he feels properly developing your environment in detail becomes crucial to its success.
“It’s kind of always been a struggle of some sorts,” Tanveer explains. “There is Zoom fatigue… We’re in front of computers and screens for now, I mean, over 10 hours a day, probably. [But] one thing that we really try to push, or at least I kind of want to push, in terms of what how I want [our events] to be, it’s like, more so create an immersive experience.”
The experience he speaks of has been in the works for some time, dating back to before either Civilian Soiree’s trajectory or the pandemic were ever a factor. Initially, Ryan, Tanveer and a few of their friends at George Washington University were just people with a shared passion looking for a way to get in touch.
Chloe Novi, one of Ryan and Tanveer’s classmates and a fellow member of Civilian Soiree, says the groundwork to community served much more of a personal and immediate need than its current iteration.
“George Washington is a PWI (Predominately White Institution), you know. It’s really hard to find a community, and also build a community, that truly is reflective of our values. And so I think it was way easier to find people online than in person, and we found quite a few people within the DMV area,” Chloe says.
They started by hosting small gatherings that would range from film screenings and analyses to guest presentations on how to use audio samplers and demonstrations on how to chop up said samples. Their niche space began to grow into a realized comfortable space.
But, alas, as all stories in recent memory intrude, the pandemic hit and put the momentum the group was carrying to a standstill.
They did not falter and drop it, though.
They took their time to reassess. They created a Discord server, began engaging their peers, and in time sought to rollout their gatherings again over Zoom with an avid anticipation.
Even if that rollout came with its own set of anxieties that Ryan recounts.
“We were afraid. We were like, ‘will people want to hop on a zoom session to talk about these things when they just got out of class?’” His concerns were soon quell by the fact he knew they understood their audience from in-person interactions.
“People are so passionate about having these conversations, I think they’re willing to hop back on to zoom to talk with people, right?”
Clear in vision and concise in presentation, Ryan was indeed right. These early “study sessions” saw successful turnouts, engaging conversations, and another new crowd of attendees to join the Civilian Soiree community.
One of those new attendees in particular was, by chance but still by design, Emmanuel “Noel” Fernandez.
Noel, an old classmate of Chloe’s, attends UC Davis, in a whole other world and sphere of the internet from George Washington University and D.C. as a whole. Yet he found himself enthralled with Civilian Soiree and the way they curated their space both in response to circumstances and their communities’ needs.
“I remember, from my personal experience, it was one of the first things I did that’s like, admitting that, hey, COVID is a thing. We’re too far away from each other. But let’s try to at least do something,” Noel says.
Seeing this model of operation appealed to him in no small part due to how it contrasts with the work he’s been doing to curate an online space for his work.
Noel is currently the General Manager of UC Davis’ historic KDVS 90.3FM radio station. Recently they underwent a project that fits on the complete other end of the spectrum from Civilian Soiree’s online presence by attempting to completely digitize the in-person KDVS experience.
KDVS also created a Discord server, but the ins and outs of this server shows several different channels named after respected physical spaces in the KDVS building. These channels are populated by the respective staff members who would them in person. They even went as far as to emulate the stations massive back catalogue of records and CDs as a space people can engage about music; all from the comfort of his administrative office channel.
Noel found the the development of this server to be difficult. What made it difficult though was how he and his team needed to adapt and refocus how you should engage your community to keep your community engaged.
“It was a really interesting thing because it had to make us think, ‘what are these things that people are actually drawn to? The things that people would actually use?’”
This is what lends itself to Noel’s appreciation for Civilian Soiree.
“What we do [at KDVS], and what Civilian Soiree does, is sharing these passions and having a space, at least, just to talk about that. And I think just with that you have enough to build the community… For community building, we just need to establish that, hey, there’s a shared passion here,” Noel said.
Soon after he started attending, Noel connected with Tanveer and Ryan and they all spoke about ways to collaborate. With their minds still primed on re-centering music in their efforts, Noel workshopped with Civilian Soiree to develop a DJ set that would accurately embody the kind of space they sought to grow in their online element.
This is the “Sounds of the Small Plant.”
The way the set is shot is informal to the point it seems almost impromptu, unorganized, like a blank canvas. Investigating this closely enough reveals where all the attention to detail they speak of peers through the grapevine.
Noel exercises a significant amount of restraint during. He does not hold onto the reigns too tightly or subscribe to too narrow of a vision for the evening. He allows for rougher mixes between songs to cut in requests on shorter notice. He speaks about tracks back and forth with everyone in the chat box with eager. As does Chloe. And Tanveer. And Ryan.
And soon enough, all of us.
It’s connected. It’s attentive. It’s a lot of attention to detail. You aren’t being curated an experience. It’s more like being walked through a selection with an open option to take your pic. The set is far more community discussion than live show, just as they intended.
Promotional screen grab of the “Sounds of the Small Plant” stream, via @civiliansoiree on Instagram 
“The whole point of it[’s curation] is trying to make it seem as if it’s like a record shop experience. Very rough mixing. It’s not a structured DJ set at all. And that’s kind of supposed to be more so interactive and engaging… Interaction is a big part of it,” Tanveer says.
The livestream, while not defining to a group that’s so well composed, did seem to be a watershed moment where many people who were familiar with or some degrees separated from the community began to engage directly.
This rush of new attendees raised a very crucial concern surrounding online community building, though.
There is a not insignificant amount people involved with Civilian Soiree who have never met any of the founding members or organizing members in person. Even Noel himself has yet to meet Tanveer and Ryan in person. A recognizable part of the community is rooted together through the smaller plants and quieter moments, which can be intimidating as states begin to reopen and Civilian Soiree now has a whole forest of opportunity opening ahead.
With how badly the general public want to toss their screens aside and return back to their physical worlds, it would be easy for other organizing groups to overlook what’s been built up as a “pandemic-era” tactic of outreach and in their rush to reclaim what they’ve lost and capitalize on all that’s to gain, leave parts of their audience base behind.
This is why Civilian Soiree being a community is so crucial to how they operate.
“Just because now we have the ability to have physical space, we don’t want to forget everybody that was into [our online platform]… We can’t like forget all of that… That’s a big part of what makes us tick, what we are right now,” Tanveer establishes.
Noel shares his notions. He speaks about how people’s earnest to speak of the pandemic, and all aspects of it, in retrospect may push us to leave behind something best reckoned with.
“We have to admit the things that worked in a COVID world. Those are the only things we could take over,” Eman says. “Everyone [says] they want to leave these virtual spaces… [But] maybe they have some sort of permanence. I do think the post COVID world really emphasizes more of the dynamic of, you can do anything, if you can just find whatever a person is passionate about, and really get them on board with that.”
My time spent watching the “Sounds of the Small Plant” streams were the most communal moments I had in my home while quarantining. I didn’t feel disengaged by the online format like I had with all other realms of engagement I was experiencing. I didn’t feel aimless and isolated in my passions as I did in the garden.
I had something I was passionate about taking place and I had people to share that passion with.
At a time where it felt so easy to be alone I had found community.
As it stands now, there’s no clear answer as to what Civilian Soiree will cultivate next, or what kind of in-person or online iteration that it will take. But being too earnest about the future distracts from what we should be taking away from the moment. There is no attention to detail in projecting ahead. But there is a host of excitement.
“One of the coolest things about this whole thing is if people were willing to hop on a zoom, I’m just excited to see how we’ll be about coming out to a physical space where there’ll be, interacting with people and have a more humanistic experience… I love everything that we learned here, but I’m so excited to see where this grows,” Ryan beams.
The morning after opening my ears to the sounds of the small plant for the first time, I returned to my garden, and could hear my own plants clear as day for the first time.