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tarab

Reflections

by Tarab -Eamon Sprod- *

Having read many of the posts on The Field Reporter recently which might go under the heading of “debate” (although I have not followed the “discussion” elsewhere not being a facebooker etc) I am more than slightly disturbed by what seems to be an increasing interest in the creation of a “genre” and perhaps more alarmingly, with it a set of orthodoxies. Yiorgis Sakellarious recent posting mentions a discussion elsewhere on the uses or misuses of volume, and this I can understand, people discussing and arguing about what the hell it is that we are all doing. However I find the fact the someone feels the need to post an article upon a site such as this to defend their choice of volume levels used in concerts against “group disapproval” to be a worrying one indeed. Surely if the volume choice is relevant to whatever is attempting to be achieved then that is the volume it needs to be. While Yiorgis states that he feels that his use of dynamic range “motivates the audience to listen more acutely”, given the same circumstances another person might choose a totally different method in an attempt to achieve the same result. Or simply decide to do something totally different altogether. To me this is what makes art interesting; each person (or group of people) finding their own ways and means to express or explore what ever it is that they feel is necessary to them. The creation of self imposed limitation can be a useful creative tool. For example George Perec writing a book with no E’s in it or Eric La Casa’s air.ratio constructed from many 2 minute air conditioner recordings. But the tendency to create or adhere to a musical or artist style, within something as open ended as what might simplistically be described as the exploration of sound and the effect it has upon it’s location and inhabitants seems to be alarmingly reductive. Surely the choices we make for one project will not be the right ones for another, from compositional strategy to the choice of sounds and indeed choice of dynamic range or volume (to name but a few) will change to fit the nature of the project and its desired effect?

John Grzinich, in his response to Yiorgis’s article posted on his website, mentions some of his issues with volume, ideas on amplified and acoustic sound and the concert hall format in general. However rather than suggesting that any particular path be taken in response, he outlines how he has attempted to responded to or resolve these issues within his own practise and how this process has lead to various avenues of further exploration. Surely this is the point? There are many things that concern me about how what quite plainly has developed into a set of clichés within “field recording based composition” and how what I call the current “orthodoxy” is further entrenching those clichés. (I am not arrogant enough to claim to successfully avoid them, though I try). And of course there are many musical choices that others make that I don’t find particularly interesting. But rather than air them here or suggest to anyone else that they should or should not do whatever they like (really, who cares what I think?? Far too many have already heard me lament the over use of what Simon Whetham termed ‘ambient drone with random field recordings’ in his comments in post 227), my response to the things I find problematic in the work of others is to question myself and my own work, to tackle things head on or to attempt to explore other avenues, to find other ways and means etc. I am more often influenced by what I do not like rather than by what I do. The things I choose to avoid inevitably shape the things I do choose to do. Everything raises more questions and I don’t think that there are any answers. Well I don’t have any anyway.

Field recording or art making in general is for me much more interesting as an activity; as a means to explore. Whether it be a specific location, whatever is bouncing around in my head at that particular point or simply whatever I stumble across. The things I produce are the artefacts or by-products of this activity, rather than a chance to tell others what it is that I think that I know. Of course these can also function as a form of communication, most often with other artists, but if we are all saying the same thing then this quickly becomes a fairly uninteresting conversation.

Many of the views expressed in this “debate” regarding the purpose or potential uses and interpretations of “field recording” have almost nothing to do with my own interest in the activity of collecting existing sounds from my environment. Which is what I would expect and to a large extent want. After all who wants to be surrounded by people who all think the same as them? I know it is somewhat of a human trait to seek the comfort and safety of the group, but what I see as the increasing desire of many people to find a clearly defined space to slot themselves into, is what makes so much of the sound work that uses the term field recording to define itself so uninteresting to me. As John Grzinich has pointed out already elsewhere in these pages, surely field recording is a method or activity. Not a musical style or genre. Not something for critics or curators to define, impart meaning upon or somehow grant validity to. To my thinking the only validity you need is your own, which you give yourself by doing whatever it is you need to do. There are so many more interesting and varied things that can be done around with these activities and their results that I am simply puzzled as to why there seems to be a desire to narrow the possibilities by constructing a collective container to put ones self into.

Nothing is true.

Everything is permitted.

* Guest editor and sound artist.

The Field Reporter only claims authorship and responsibility for the material written by its editorial team.

** Top photo courtesy of Forepaw

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[Photo by John Grzinich]

Eamon Sprod website


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  1. john grzinich Avatar

    “Many of the views expressed in this “debate” regarding the purpose or potential uses and interpretations of “field recording” have almost nothing to do with my own interest in the activity of collecting existing sounds from my environment.”

    Can you elaborate more on your own interests?

  2. eamon sprod Avatar

    Ah yes – you have caught me out making an over exaggerated point – possibly for dramatic effect – that I am now going to struggle to explain. My intention was simply to raise the fact that being surrounded by many differing views or practices, even if you don’t agree or like with them, is a good thing. Not to suggest that I my thinking is somehow unique in anyway.

    My primary interest in sound is quite simply sensual. I like the physicality of sound, the direct feeling of huge bass vibration acting upon your body, but also of the shiver down the spine when someone drag’s their fingernail down a blackboard. I like sounds ability to shape your experience of a space but to also confuse it. I like it primarily as something that I feel or experience. And then through that experience, makes me think. I am not so interested in making sound works that are overtly didactic and pedagogical (even though there are times when I like works that are both those things in the hands of a few others). I am not interested in using sounds as symbolic object to express some idea I have. I have always been interested in collage, Kurt Schwitters, Hannan Hoch, Joseph Cornell, Rauchenberg to name a few. Combining three unrelated images to create a a new fourth. And I guess I see my sound works still very much in terms of collage. I am interested in how you can form your own reality through the way you choose to perceive the world, and then reconfigure it in your own head. Be it from behind a microphone or simply by paying attention, or inattention. I am not interested in recording nature or urban noise in some environmentalist cause. I am interested in playing around in the rubbish of our consumer culture and exploring where it cracks, what is over looked and ignored.

    I suppose as much as anything I was referring to my interest in field recording (and art making in general) as an activity. Now of course this sounds like a rather obvious statement, of course field recording is an activity. But I mean that the point of doing these things for me, is the actual doing of them. For me field recording is not just a means to collect sounds to make music to put on CD’s, it is largely (but of course not solely) the point all by itself. Now I know this argument has some large holes and contradictions, and I am not claiming to be some sort of purist who does not care about CD publication and having exhibitions etc. I do. However like many people in our “modern” world I have a tendency to feel extremely isolated from what is going on around me. Field recording has become a way for me to be very much present within whatever situation I am in. Whether it is sitting under a bridge listening to the traffic rumbling across it or crawling around in the dirt dragging rubbish around. I guess this is why I am so drawn to actually playing my the places I record, not just sitting behind the microphone making a clean recording of a space, but dragging things around, bring myself and the m,microphone into physical contact with where ever it is I am recording. I put myself into situations I would not otherwise (most often in very mundane way) and I am more present within those situations than I often feel outside of them. Of course I never really thought about any of this at first, I just did it, but I suppose that is the reason I kept doing it. To me this is very important. I dont go recording solely to document a given situation or location, to then present to an audience, in fact I am increasingly distrustful of ideas of documentation, seeing it as part of the human need to impose pattern and order, to over come what might be somewhat grandiosely called “existential insecurities”. Iain Sinclair suggests photography is in many ways a negation of memory (and I would suggest the same can be argued of experience). Surely that applies to documentation of all kinds?? However partly what has held my interest in sound is that it has lead me to many experiences I would not have other wise had, both by myself and with others. Most often very simple everyday things, nothing exotic. I am not trying to show or teach anyone anything in particular. Instead if I can share the sensation of sound and perhaps through what I make suggest to people the possibilities of a more direct awareness of and engagement with their surroundings, through listening or whatever else they want, then this seems to be a good out come to me. The best compliment I have been given after a performance was by a couple who told me that the performance was good, but the bicycle ride home along the darkened highway to their house on the edge of town was even better as they had never really listened to it before.

  3. john grzinich Avatar

    Great, I think this rounds out your article much better.

  4. TheLondonSoundSurvey (@LondonSounds) Avatar

    “Iain Sinclair suggests photography is in many ways a negation of memory (and I would suggest the same can be argued of experience). Surely that applies to documentation of all kinds?”

    Taking a photograph or making a recording can detract from experiencing the moment in a direct, unmediated way. I think it can also kill enthusiasm at events which rely on participation and a sense of your individual self being merged with others around you.

    But Sinclair is really just reviving an old hostility which writers like himself sometimes express towards collectors – see also John Fowles’s’ novel ‘The Collector’, Gradgrind’s labelled collections of minerals and other objects in Dickens’s ‘Hard Times’ and so on.

    All the evidence suggests that photographs act as retrieval cues for memories, and their effectiveness at doing so depends on the extent of the mental associations formed at the time you took the picture. The more thought that goes into taking the photo, the more memories it’ll evoke when seen years later.

    There’s no reason to think that photographs induce amnesia, and it is telling that Sinclair does not extend this argument to the act of writing down one’s experiences.

  5. eamon sprod Avatar
    eamon sprod

    Surely Sinclair is a collector himself?

    I should probably correct my statement to say that it is the narrator in Downriver, not actual Sinclair himself who suggests this. Although whether there is a difference is debatable I guess. So I may be totally misrepresenting him. I would quote the passage but I have lost my copy so I can’t. I would think that you could probably mount a similar case for writing also, but it is slightly different. Maybe to say photography, or phonography by extension, negates memory is taking it a little far, but it can act as a substitute to memory. We have all seen people taking a photo of something, object or activity, rather than participating or actually interacting with the thing they are photographing. I work in galleries where people come in and take a photo of every single picture on the wall but don’t look at a single one. How can you remember an experience of something you have not had? Photography as evidence of being there only. I remember a specific time I decided rather than hurriedly fumbling around to get out my recording gear out so as not to miss some fleeting sonic event that I would actually just sat and listened. Quite a different experience as I’m sure you all know. I make many sound recordings and take many photo’s. I am simply trying to question my own practise.

    Of course photographs work as memory triggers. My interest in this idea is that memory is fallible. It warps and changes things. It lies. A photograph is fixed. I love many “straight documentary” sound works. But I am more interested within my own work to somehow tap into this fallibility, I am as much interested by the false memory. To push the writing contention too far I guess you could I write fiction. I am not trying to make a faithful document of what happened. I think of my recordings as the product of the action, rather than a document of it.

  6. eamon sprod Avatar
    eamon sprod

    whoops – that should be writing connection – not writing contention – among other typo’s in there

    coincidentally here is a recent documentary recording that I really enjoyed
    http://impulsivehabitat.com/releases/ihab067.htm

  7. TheLondonSoundSurvey (@LondonSounds) Avatar

    Hello Eamon and thanks for your reply. I too have noticed how some people see events and experiences foremost as photo opportunities, and I can’t criticise them for that as I often seek out times and places solely because there might be something worth recording.

    Field recordists have some techniques which leave less distance between them and their surroundings than those typically available to photographers. Perhaps the two most obvious examples are in-ear binaural mics and tripod-mounted mics: the former leave the hands free and the latter can be walked away from.

    Complaints about a throttling of experience aren’t new: “For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern.” I don’t think photography, recording or journalistic reporting negate the experience of the setting or event, but they change it because they change the role you play.

    I don’t know all the reasons why it is the collection of images which has become overwhelmingly the preferred way of trying to preserve fragments of experience. The eye is more ravenous and less patient than the ear, but that only pushes the burden of explanation back a level.

    Cheers,
    Ian

  8. eamon sprod Avatar
    eamon sprod

    I think that sound recording can definitely lead you into an more direct interaction with a situation or location. Crawling around in the dirt dragging a microphone through the debris is quite a different experience than setting up a tripod and making a recording of the space. Both of which I do, and value. I don’t mean to suggest one is better than the other. I once watched Cédric Peyronnet making a recording with a boom pole of a gallery where there was an performance/installation. His movement through the space seemed to me more like that of a dancer and was very much shaped by his interaction with sound and room. The interaction of microphone and space to capture something different from what the ear usually hears?? I am sure there are similar methods for photography and video also.

    I was more wondering about our need to document everything. Is our desire to catalogue and “make sense” of everything actually a desire to impose sense on everything?

  9. TheLondonSoundSurvey (@LondonSounds) Avatar

    For some people collecting or documenting is a means to an end, for others it’s an end in itself, and for many it’s perhaps a mixture of the two. There are all kinds of reasons why they might do that, and you’ll only know for sure what those reasons are if you ask them.

    But I would bet that an awful lot of picture-taking now feeds into social media. That, and Twitter/Facebook updates on who you’ve just met or what you had for breakfast are ways to stay to contact with others and maintain a presence.

    It’s very different to keeping a private diary, or building up a record of weather observations, or collecting coins.

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