Listening After Nature. Field Recording, Ecology, Critical Practice

218 Pages·2022·7.93 MB·English

by  Mark Peter Wright

LISTENING
AFTER
NATURE
Field Recording, Ecology,
Critical Practice
Mark Peter Wright
ll L OOMSllURY
Contents
Acknowledgments vi
Introduction
l Recoding the Field 11
2 Constructing Nature 43
3 Stretching Site 79
4 Following the Flow 115
Conclusion: Pressing Record and Pressing Play: On Suspicious
Listening and Affirmative Ethics 147
Notes 159
Bibliography 191
Index 209
Acknowledgments
It is difficult to pin down the beginning of any creative process, but it was at an
altitude of approximately 35,000 feet that the questions and themes for this book
emerged. I was on a flight from Helsinki to London, listening back to a field
recording I had just made from the departure lounge bathroom. Among the
bustle of people and hand dryers, I heard recorded birdsong filtering into the
space. I barely noticed nature's Muzak at the time but was reminded of it upon
playback. Listening to the recording, as I looked out the plane's frosted window,
I asked myself where the field was in this audio document. Was it the washroom,
the airplane, my phone? When did it begin? Was it the moment I walked into
the bathroom, or when I pressed record? Was it when I pressed stop, or when
I pressed play?
Where was I in these multi-scalar movements, between the signal and noise,
field and its elsewhere audition? And what of broadcasting birdsong within
the bathroom of an international airport? Avian sonic agency was deployed
alongside detergents like a cleaning product, used to erase any evidence that
our waste exists, that it is managed and moved. Nature is the perfect auditory
commodity: calming, restorative, cleansing. It is extracted, packaged, and sold
with limitless ease. I am sure no bird gave consent for its song to mask the sound
of a toilet flush.
My own movement was perhaps the most ironic of all. I was flown in and out
over two evenings to examine a student work made in the context of ecology and
performance studies. My energy-intensive footprint could not have been more
trodden. Space, time, and events therefore matter. Although porous, they have
to be acknowledged as influences that set this book in motion.
More personal inspirations are found in those who have helped steer its
journey. Angus Carlyle and Salome Voegelin are two people who have had an
immeasurable influence on my creative and critical trajectory over the years.
They have pushed and pulled at my practice, inspired interventions, and, not
least, encouraged a belief in me that what I do matters. Both are allies and
collaborators, and now, perhaps most important of all, I simply call them
friends.
Acknowledgments vii
This book has germinated over time, across various spaces and discussions,
both formal and informal. I am grateful to Cathy Lane, Director of CRiSAP at
the London College of Communication (LCC) along with the center's members
and research students. It is a community that nurtures expansive thinking
and practice: I am fortunate to be part of it. I want to thank students across
undergraduate and postgraduate levels including my PhD students at LCC, who
at various points along the way have helped test, push, and refine many of the
concepts developed in this book. Above all, the arena of learning reminds me
that critical intervention must be coupled with hopeful alternatives. I have taken
this lesson into my writing as a constant note to self.
Thanks to Leah Babb-Rosenfeld, Amy Martin, Rachel Moore, and the
Bloomsbury publishing team for giving me the opportunity to put these ideas
into the public domain. Like any process, the chapters of this book have been
through various stages of tuning. I owe a debt of gratitude to my early readers,
those who have questioned, prompted, and reminded me of things I could not
see along the way: Rui Chaves, Christopher DeLaurenti, Sasha Engelmann,
Sally Ann McIntyre, Marina Peterson, Leandro Pisano, and Andrea Polli.
Friends and critical allies include Chiara Ambrosio, Andrew Brumwell,
Daniela Cascella, Michael Gallagher, Jennifer Gabrys, Lisa Hall, Laura
Harrington, Ernst Karel, Mikey Kirkpatrick, Kevin Logan, Robert Pacitti, Jussi
Parikka, Colin Potter, Andrew Ray, Autumn Richardson, Wood Roberdeau,
Susan Schuppli, Richard Skelton, Cheryl Tipp, David Toop, Susan Trangmar,
and Lynn Turner.
There have been crucial journal contributions along the way. The early seeds
of this book were planted in peer-reviewed publications including Cadernos
de Arte e Antropologia, Evental Aesthetics, Journal of Sonic Studies, Leonardo
Music Journal, and Sensate Journal. Exhibitions and paper presentations helped
cast the written word into the air. I am grateful to institutes and art spaces that
include University College London, University of Edinburgh, Oslo School of
Environmental Humanities, University of the Arts Helsinki, Harvard University,
Critical Media Lab Basel, University of Stavanger, Manchester Metropolitan
University, University of Copenhagen, Arts Catalyst, Auxiliary Warehouse,
Catalyst Arts, IMT Gallery (Mark Jackson and Lindsay Friend), Parasol Unit,
Platform A Gallery, GV Art, Another Space, Centre for Possible Studies, Corbel
Stone Press, and MIMA.
My family has provided support throughout. Thanks to the outlaws, Tim
senior, Tim junior, and Jan Hunter. To my good friends Alex, Greg, and Tai. To
viii Acknow/edgments
my mum, Dee, and brother, Chris, for the openness and generosity they have
always encouraged. To Helena, for her love and for pushing me to do this.
The contract for this book arrived via email early one December morning.
Around the same time my Dad suddenly passed away, the two events almost
overlapped. I never got to tell you I was writing a book, Dad, but I know you
have been with me for every comma, sentence, and full stop. Thank you for all
that you gave me. This is dedicated to you.
Introduction
Induced by the crisis oft he Anthropocene, the proposition of a new epoch in which
humans have become a geological force, we listen after Nature.1 From colonization
to nonrenewable resource extraction, industrial farming to nuclear waste, humans
have wreaked havoc on planet earth and produced irrevocable damage in terms
of biodiversity loss and escalating geopolitical conflict: no visual or acoustic stone
has been left unturned. Of course, some are more culpable than others, some
more at risk, some live with extinction as part of ongoing histories of erasure and
subjugation. There is no universal subject or position.2 In the midst of a sixth
mass extinction event, what constitutes "the human" has been simultaneously
destabilized and reaffirmed. In the context of field recording, the position of the
Anthropos, the recordist-listener, must therefore be reconfigured and reimagined.
The practice of field recording is vast and varied but can be summarized
as an exploration of the acoustic worlds of humans and nonhumans through
the capture, construction, and mediation of sound. This sentence does little
to justify the plethora of methods, contexts, and sites that shape a discipline
situated primarily within sound arts and cultural sound studies. Nonhuman
field recording strives toward matters of environmental curiosity and care,
toward the liveliness of animals, atmospheres, and architectures. It is a practice
enamored by nature's musical associations and affects. The great outdoors, so
the myth goes, is a composition, and its sounds, be they human or nonhuman,
are prime material for capture and repurpose, for hobby, archives, science, art,
healing, activism, or music.
Historically, fields such as acoustic ecology and soundscape studies have
investigated sound and the environment in relation to anthropogenic impact.
The tendency to represent such topics is elegiac, framed through silence, in
the case of species loss, or polemic, as highlighted by industrial noise. This
book is not a dose reading of such contexts, nor does it operate critiques and
deconstructions already available. Furthermore, it is not a technical guide to
L1s1en111g 1tper 1va111re
field recording and does not examine thematic tropes such as sense of place or
memory.~
Indigenous and postcolonial scholarship teaches us that friction-free
wilderness, devoid of human intervention, never existed in the first place, nor
the division of nature and culture.◄ Likewise, the position of a neutral recordist,
or recording, is no longer a tenable position for contemporary practice and has
never been. Listening After Nature pushes artists to be accountable to the entangled
demands of the historic present. The consequences shift across the pages of this
book as I audition water and waste, infrastructures and animals, technologies
and recordists. Ecology intersects these issues and is webbed through cultural
contexts and practice; neither one nor the other can be separated. Artistic
methods, perspectives, and tools must be part of a critical inquiry that fuses the
meshwork that we call "ecology:' The tremors of the Anthropocene accentuate
this point, its effects inscribing every inch of the planet. Field recordists are
embroiled in its epochal footprint and are analyzed here as an integral part of a
post-natural setting.5
It would be pointless to write a book on field recording by standing on the
sidelines and listening at a distance. This is not a plausible position in the Field6
and it is not a recommended perspective when auditioning works elsewhere.
Instead, I have endeavored to listen and write with the intersections of practice
and research. The investigations that guide my "ear view" are by necessity both
placed and displaced. Archival documents and contemporary publications are
interpreted as a process of recoding. It is a sensibility led by an understanding
that sound capture captures more than sound, that listening enacts power and
that field recordings mutate meaning rather than ossify it. The ensuing chapters
engage with the shifting terrain of practice as a form of field recording itself.
It is a process that webs historic and contemporary works, cultural contexts,
and critical debate. Within this mix, my practice, as an artist and researcher,
participates through situated present tense audition, anecdotal field notes, and
pedagogical reflections.
The term "critical practice" houses concerns intrinsic to pointing a
microphone toward animals, infrastructures, or atmospheres. It affords a close
inspection of the hows and whys of fieldcraft, matters that become troubled
when we shift a critical lens over the recorded interactions of humans and
nonhumans. What is really being captured? What exists beyond the so-called
signal? How is agency performed and negotiated? How does power function?
What am I not hearing? The latter question recurs throughout the pages of
l11troductio11 3
this book. It is a prompt for hearing more than sound and writing more than I
can hear. Critical practice takes the inaudible seriously: culturally, technically,
somatically, and conceptually. The thresholds of listening matter and always
connect to the privilege of holding a microphone. When we talk of the Ear,7
whose ear exactly do we mean? Who has the historical right to press record, to
be silent rather than be silenced?
The field, nature, and the sounds of modernity have been constructed by a
white Western-centric ear. Cultural theorist Edouard Glissant reminds us, "The
West is not in the West. It is a project, not a place."8 So, too, can we say that the
ear that has built the field is not benign; it is manufactured from the ruptures
of violence, separation, and subjugation across all species. Troubling a de facto
culture of benevolence and inconsequentiality entails recoding the foundational
myths and erasures that permit sound capture to be deemed neutral, the field to
be presumed natural, and sound to be practiced as inexhaustible. In doing so,
I offer parallels and counter versions, both scholarly and practice-based, to tell
new stories and provide friction-based impetus.
Postcolonial scholar Walter Mignolo advocates a delinking from Western
structures in order to shake down the universalisms that underpin claims
of knowledge and truth.9 Pragmatically, this involves a certain amount of
disruption or, as Mignolo calls it, "epistemic disobedience."10 To interrupt the
norms of field recording, I undertake a similar process in an effort to unpick
"truths" propagated by a Western field and to open new possibilities in practice.
Listening After Nature is a time to probe the "whiteness of sound studies,"11 the
cultural root in which field recording sits along with related disciplines that
include ethnomusicology and ethnography. As someone situated within the
context of Western-European scholarship, I believe there is a duty to examine
this position, its actors, histories, and technologies as part of a political and
ecological project.12
Universalisms spun from systemic racism and social inequalities are
infrastructural; they are scaffolded and built. Cultures and practices, which
stem from Western institutes and disciplines, must therefore be recognized and
reassembled. The challenge is to simultaneously question all that is assumed
natural or neutral while offering vibrant and hopeful interventions. I will unpack
these shortly, but to restate my responsibility here, it is to unsettle the silences
and erasures in which universal norms grow. These lacunas are found primarily
through the figure of reticent author-recordists, innocuous technologies of
capture, as well as the historical traces that stalk sonic signals. In other words,
4 Listening After Nature
I hope to trouble the illusion of friction-free sound capture by bending the ear
back toward itself, as a glitch-making intervention.
To do so demands an inquiry of sites, plural: the exhausted landscapes of the
Anthropocene and the bodies of field recordists themselves. Stretched across the
sonic encounter and final published form, authors must be brought into earshot.
This is not a straightforward task due to the evasive traits of those who point the
microphone. It requires an ethical and aesthetic search riddled with uncanny
hauntings and constant attention toward that which we cannot hear. I recode
authorial presence through a conceptual figuration called the "Noisy-Nonself;'
a hybrid doppelgiinger that emerges out of taciturn recordist histories. It is a
chimerical identity that iterates throughout the chapters of this book. Tangled in
the ghosts of colonization, the Noisy-Nonself is comprehended with the aid of
specific auditory phenomena including white noise and feedback_B
Technology must also be held accountable as part of an ecologically valid
practice. Microphones and recording kits, made from minerals extracted from
the earth through precarious and dangerous labor, imply that neither sound
capture nor its consequent representations can ever be separate from the
geopolitical resources and networks that allow signals to be captured in the
first place. Gripping a microphone confirms there is no impartial position, no
benign technology, no objective recording. Once more, the critical ecology of
field recording practice is my task, not necessarily the sonic signifiers of the
Anthropocene.
Critical practice is also found in the connective elsewhere spaces of audition,
analysis, and learning. I interpret historic and contemporary soundworks
from archives, publications, and broadcasts. This is not a book about gallery
installations, expanded works, and the aesthetic canons such contexts bring. It
is a deliberate and sustained engagement with recordings that lean toward the
documentary side ofp ractice, not in disavowal ofc omposition or postproduction,
both of which are part of this book, but to generatively constrain my own
critical audition. I focus less on field recording as a genre and more on field
recordings as material documents. To put it another way, I am interested in what
recordings do.
In stress testing the basic units of field recording, what it is and what it does,
my critical audition happens among the everyday. On the bus, in the library,
sitting at a desk, in the classroom, alone, or together: listening and learning
happen everywhere. I have accepted the multiple scenes of audition into the
pages of this book as a vital part of my analysis. My engagement with sonic works;
l11trod11ctio11 5
the playback and interrogation of audio documents in time and space, along
with writing and research, amplifies an interpretive grapple with sound and its
affects. Consequently, my writing is a process of recoding built from a listening
full of overlaps, contradictions, and gaps. Within this mesh of perforations, of
knowledge lost and found, I have come to think of my listening analysis as a
speculative search for metadata, hearing above, below, and around the sound
object, reaching for the sensory, cultural, and technological "data" that remain
otherwise absent.
To frame the interlinked settings of the recorded site and my situated context
of audition, I posit a conceptual model called "contact zones and elsewhere
fields:' These two terms are distinct yet merged hypothetical spaces. They locate
the immediate encounter of recording-contact zone-and the postproduction
spaces-elsewhere fields-of critical audition, be they in the studio, armchair,
or classroom. The two are pulled apart yet held in relation to give specific focus
on each in terms of power, agency, and decision making. Drawing a gestural line
between the recorded encounter and its elsewhere audition helps recognize that
recordists do not emerge and dissolve from within the field. Rather, they enter
and leave as a constant process of movement and transgression. In doing so,
Noisy-Nonself recordists tremble the thresholds of the field's nebulous sphere.
Contact zones and elsewhere fields reiterate one of the main arguments in this
book: the field is not a separate space, but more a cross-hatching of relations and
affects over time and space. The result is that no definitive or site-specific field
recording can ever exist.
Two words recur throughout the chapters in relation to critical practice and
the interlocking arenas of contact zones and elsewhere fields: "listening-with"
and "low frequencies:• Both interlace each other. Listening-with is a mode in
which I situate the audition and interpretation of soundworks. It is a method that
seeks to foster critical alliance toward the sounds I hear, or do not hear, rather
than approach them as something to listen to or for. It encourages a listening
practice that strives for meaning as a process of construction as opposed to
identifying sonic signs. Listening-with asserts that there is no singular subject
but instead a plethora of ears, bodies, perspectives, recordings, and mediations
at stake: stretched across site and species, scaled over thresholds of audibility
and equity. Listening-with is not a celebration of such entanglements. It
acknowledges complexity and the consequent demand placed on the ear of
the recordist as much as the elsewhere listener, to disentangle and reassemble
meaning as an ongoing process. It is a mode that accommodates my own