Wittgenstein’s allusion to the photograph—transposed into our terms as the recording—is suggestive of a suspicion that the depression of the shutter or the record button might mediatize a scene which when viewed or listened to afterwards as media becomes the substitute material for our memories of that scene. “I hear us still,” but hear us now through the discernible textures associated with the specific recording technology used in the field.4
Squatting on my haunches, a little unbalanced, I lean the pistol-grip towards the metal rungs of the fence. A sharp tang of wet straw. The buffalo’s eyes are fringed with delicate lashes, its jaw swings to the left and then to the right, bubbles of snot expand and contract from its nostrils. I shift my weight and my knee cartilage cracks once, the plastic overshoes adjust themselves to my new position. A hot, wet, strong exhalation of breath and then, short pause, a ragged inhalation. A stream of piss hoses from the buffalo’s hindquarters, the chewing and snorting continue uninterrupted.
Before setting aside this account of the implications of technology in relation to sound memory, I want to consider one final dimension and speculate fleetingly on how the use of recording devices in the field may operate to expedite or impede what I remember of my journeys in the mountains. On the one hand, there is the possibility that the cables, the pistol-grip, the headphones, the backpack, the LED lights—the apparatus—might conspire to render the moment of recording a conscious one, to supply the mental and bodily concentration that makes a stage on which to enact the theater of memory, to crystallize our memory-words and memory-sounds. From this perspective, arranging the equipment becomes a ritual that commemorates the shift from the period of open environmental listening into a narrowed temporal episode devoted to the preservation (in wetware as much as in hardware) of the vibrating pulse. On the other hand, is there a risk, when sitting in the deep, sun-splashed snow with a hydrophone placed to catch the drips falling from the first icicles to melt on Monte Polveracchio, that recording might offer a distraction from the sonic detail of the moment, might sing a technological lullaby to send the ears to sleep? Does the shift in focus from attentive, active listening towards the forgetful distractedness of reliance on a prosthetic substitute, raise the media substitute—the recording as Wittgenstein’s photograph—above the memory-sounds and memory-words?
The short indented and italicized texts that I have inserted into this essay represent for me another way of connecting memory-words to memory-sounds and the writing of these is equally dependent on encountering my recordings as imperfect testimonies of “how things were then.” The hundred word anecdotes are less transcriptions of particular audio files and more akin to a textual analogue of my approach to composition—they participate in parallel operations of selection and layering. These texts endeavor to locate me as a breathing companion to the recording apparatus as it slowly depletes its batteries. From one perspective, this writing is an attempt to accommodate the remainder that cannot be heard in my compositional work, whether that appears in performance, in an album, or as soundtrack. The short passages seek to grasp at the wholly other that is still impelled by the chains of agitated molecules that carry origin and path but which is also an excess that may well never be amenable to being fixed in any such media as a recording. Stated less obliquely, the texts are an effort to announce me as a listening subject and a remembering subject, listening and remembering in the field and listening and remembering at my kitchen table.
Wolf tracks are preserved in the snow by this morning’s hard frost. My mouth is full of the wild garlic that I’ve been plucking from the forest floor as we climb our way higher and higher. Bending to palm water from the rushing stream I spy a salamander padding across the wet beech leaves—patches of acid yellow joining a rubbery black. Returning to the refuge, our bodies feel the cold that our exertions had kept at bay. A fire cracks through its twigs and we unwrap our sandwiches from tinfoil. Red wine from a demijohn and Enzo’s gentle snores.
My aspiration with these shadow texts is that they might perform a partial recovery of the multiply memorial conditions of sound. They are there to evoke origin and path, of course, and device, too, but, equally, they are there to evoke the listening and remembering that occurs in what is traditionally conceived of as the field as well as that re-listening and re-remembering that occurs when I return to the table at home. Reflexively, the site of home should equally be considered a field in its own right, or, better, the field should be expanded to encompass both elsewhere and home, in a partial, multiple, shifting and contingent morphology.5 Moreover, the phantom writing allows me to properly honor the conviction that if the procession of sound can never be begun without a company of memories, it also always attracts other raucous crowds: the senses and the feelings.
If pure phonography is able to abstract itself from embodiment and hover weightless, with neither shadow nor friction, my own fieldwork is a human sprawl of taste, excitement, past associations, tiredness, conviviality, exchange, and messy relationships conducted with the other sensory experiences that inevitably engage me. Thus the apparent vitality of the recording becomes infected by the memory-words and memory-sounds in composition. Mine is also fieldwork—with field stretching between elsewhere and kitchen table—that recognizes that just as these “human” elements will shade my practices of listening, recording and composing—and the memories that attach to these—so too will my own physiology.
Although our fleshy pinna contribute very little to the perception of sound, nevertheless, the distinctive form of our outer ears speaks usefully of the fundamental individuality of hearing. Up in the mountains in Italy, my sound memories depended on biometric individuality: an older person, I heard differently, less responsive to higher frequencies, slower to detect inter-aural distance (and hence to locate sound events temporally and spatially) and very sensitive to the onset of abrupt increases of amplitude, especially when fatigued. I had at first missed the owls that the forest ranger pointed towards through dripping trees. I stood pained and shocked in the fumes that hung suspended in the air after the motocross bikes roared past, my younger friend exhilarating in the same auditory experience.
The light fades from the sky above the park bench and the children are arranged by gender and by age. The boys have chosen the left-hand side and the youngest have committed to a game resembling football in its shouts, exertions and elaborate celebrations but without visible goal posts. The older boys stand to survey the scene. The younger girls have linked arms to patrol the right, heads bowed to each others’ whispers. The older girls mirror the older boys. Emissaries dart between the left and the right. My microphone spotted, I am treated to animal imitations of great facility.
It is one thing to accept that what is audible recollects prior origin just as it recalls the path traveled. It is another to recognize that the recording is not blank registration but that it also participates in a selectiveness—a faultiness—that might itself be structurally analogous to remembering and that might, too, impel us to forget our own perceptual presence. It is still something else to acknowledge the injection of memory-words and memory-sounds into processes of listening and composing—in the field of elsewhere and in the field of the table at home—while simultaneously attempting to explicitly hinge those processes to the eccentricities of taste, physiology, and the participation of other senses. To accept, recognize, and acknowledge in these ways is ultimately to commit to an awareness that all sound is memory.
There are internal and external implications that flow from such a commitment.
The internal implications find me solitary in an expanded zone. I listen for memories and remember myself listening. I think sound along the spectrum that spreads between the home-field and the elsewhere-field and struggle to address audiences by soaking dry recordings with the goo of memory-sounds and memory-words and the fleshy gloop of feelings and senses. I can hear these internal implications working themselves through my album Some Memories of Bamboo (2009). The interna
l implications make for the possessive individualism of my sound memories: my sounds, my listening, my remembering and my composing, my memories of bamboo.
Where the external implications open up is at that precise point when here comes everybody, when reciprocity is let inside. The sound memories are still mine—there is no capitulation to the disembodied, pure document—but these memories are no longer exclusively mine. They are concurrently the sound memories of others, too. Others who are collaborators like the Silent Mountain film-maker Chiara Caterina. Others who imitate animal noises in the park in Filetta or who ride motorcross bikes or who use a forked stick to herd goats. Others who, in conversations on wintry mountainsides or at the kitchen table or from the audience, offer up their own memory-words and map their own memory-sounds, who may bring their own recordings. Others who I have tried to welcome into my phantom texts.
The external implications involve exchange and it is the challenge of our work together on Silent Mountain in the years ahead to make that exchange audible.
In the small cobblers in the neighboring frazione, photographs, a calendar, newspaper clippings and religious icons are what I see on the walls. Machines and tools, shoes and boots waiting collection, smells of leather, rubber and glue. The glass door opens again and traffic and voices spill in, joining the conversation that is resuming after our interruption. The card game scopa is being played out on a table. Two grand-daughters emerge from behind the wooden counter and a wave of shouted happiness: “Mamma mia!” One wears my headphones, the other breathes songs into the microphone. I will remember to remember.
Notes
1Silent Mountain began as a residency commission from the Fondazione Aurelio Petroni which involved contributing to the exhibition Viso Come Territorio (June 2012) that was held in the village of San Cipriano Picentino where my fieldwork had been focused. Since then that fieldwork has been translated into: a soundmap hosted at favouritesounds.org (June 2012); the composition “Acqua Bianca” included in the group show Carroussa Sonore in Rabat, Morocco and curated by Younes Baba-Ali and Anna Raimondo (July 2012); a live performance duo with sand artist Lucio Esposito at the Marte Art Centre in Cava de’ Tirreni (October 2012); an eight-channel composition “Camminare Nella Neve”, curated by Soundfjord at Goldsmiths Great Hall (June 2013); the collaborative text-image work “Field Signals” with Chiara Caterina, published in uniformagazine 2, Winter-Spring 2015, pp. 20–23; the collaborative film “Sulla Strada del Polverrachio” with Chiara Caterina shown once at the Jerwood Gallery Hastings (June 3, 2015) as part of Sissu Tarka’s VZ; the performance talk “Memories of Shadows on the Silent Mountain” at the Land/Water Symposium, Plymouth University (June 24, 2015); in the article “Silent Mountain” in Reliquiae Volume 3, pp. 80–83 (November 2015); and in the booklet and microsite In The Shadow of the Silent Mountain (Gruenrekorder, Frankfurt: Gruen 162, 2016).
2The idea of media registering their facticity through their technological artifacts was a subject I navigated in “Once A Certain Notion”, an essay in Photoworks magazine (2005–2006).
3It was in Nietzsche’s second essay of The Genealogy of Morals where I first came across the term mnemotechnics. For Nietzsche, “perhaps indeed there was nothing more fearful and uncanny in the whole prehistory of man than his mnemotechnics. If something is to stay in the memory it must be burned in: only that which never ceases to hurt stays in the memory”—this is the main clause of the oldest (unhappily also the most enduring) psychology on earth.… Man could never do without blood, torture, and sacrifices when he felt the need to create a memory for himself” (Nietzsche 1989: 61). I am considering memory as an altogether more benign faculty than that which emerges from Nietzsche’s anthropology of horror and I acknowledge that this other side of memory, the brutality of its public management, does need to be addressed.
4The suggestion that the photograph might be substitute for the existence of memory—or conversely that a non-existent photograph might have been “falsely” remembered—was an undercurrent in my essay “From Memory” (2012).
5For more on the condition of the field in sound art see Lane and Carlyle (2013). For a constellation of anthropological thinking on this matter, see Marcus (1995), Gupta and Ferguson (1997). For an insightful exploration of the spatial and social boundaries between the public and private that might be mapped onto a cartography of field and home see Colomina (1996). An extended exploration of the constitution of the field within sound arts practices, one that offered considerable personal inspiration, is found in the work of Mark Peter Wright. See, for example: “Still Listening,” Interference: A Journal of Audio Cultures, 4: 2014, online; and Tasked to Hear (2013, Corbel Stone Press). His conception of “elsewhere fields” has been particularly influential.
Works cited
Beyer, R. T. (1999), Sounds of Our Times. New York: AIP/Springer Verlag.
Carlyle, A. (2005–2006), “Once A Certain Notion,” Photoworks, November/April, 6–7.
Carlyle, A. (2009), Some Memories of Bamboo. Frankfurt: Gruenrekorder.
Carlyle, A. (2012), “From Memory,” Journal of Photographic Culture, 5(2):215–18.
Carlyle, A. (2016) In The Shadow of the Silent Mountain. Frankfurt: Gruenrekorder.
Colomina, B. (1996), Sexuality and Space, 4th Edition. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.
Goodman, S. (2010), Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect and the Ecology of Fear. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Gupta, A. and J. Ferguson, eds (1997), Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science. Oakland: University of California Press.
Ingold, T. (2011 [2007]), “Earth, Sky, Wind and Weather”, Being Alive. London: Routledge.
Lane, C. (2007), “Sounds, History, Memory”, in A. Carlyle (ed.), Autumn Leaves: Sound and the Environment in Artistic Practice. Paris: Double Entendre.
Lane, C. (2014), “Gaoth (Wind)” from The Hebrides Suite. Frankfurt: Gruenrekorder.
Lane, C. and A. Carlyle (2013), In The Field: The Art of Field Recording. Axminster: Uniformbooks.
López, F. (2007), Wind [Patagonia]. Seattle: And/oar.
Marcus, G. E. (1995), “Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography,” Annual Review of Anthropology 24: 95–117.
Nietzsche, F. (1989 [1887]), On the Genealogy of Morals. New York: Vintage.
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Taussig, M. (2011), I Swear I Saw This: Drawings in Fieldwork Notebooks, Namely My Own. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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sonic thought ii
Thaumaturgical Topography: Place, Sound and Non-Thinking
Thomas Köner
This article explains a practise of artistic creation by following the thought process that goes along with the development of a piece, clarifying and defining the directions that my work can take.
First let me assume there is a seed element at the core of my works, around which the creative process will unfold: this seed is a sense of place (topos). Similar to the series in serialism, it provides me with a strategy and serves as the basic intelligence of the piece, radiating from its center to the outside, where it will eventually appear in the aesthetic register, as beauty.
To understand this seed it will be helpful to explain first what it is not. It is not an understanding of place that could be accomplished by the practices known as field recording (a sonic description or commentary on a geographi
c location).
Field recording as a practice actually combines three sets of activities which could more precisely be described as field listening, field recording, and field playback, and I will explain briefly why these are not helpful.
1.Field listening is not it. It is just ordinary listening, unless you claim that listening to This (sonic situation) is more rewarding/interesting/valuable than listening to That. This claim lies at the center of the activity, and in more than one way it is a forced gesture. The notion of being “at a special place” demands the acceptance of a world view that postulates a hierarchy of places, in which the special place on top is attributed more value than the not-so-special. As these places are so special, “Human Disturbance” often is to be avoided, thereby enforcing the view that Nature and Humans are separate and distinct entities. This is an ideology well known from the Bible and so forth, and also not helpful.
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