253

ifield

In the field. The Art of Field Recording.
CATHY LANE, ANGUS CARLYLE

(Uniformbooks 2013)

Review by Patrick Farmer

“A place is what it is because of its location. Where we are is who we are”
-Alvaro De Campos

If I were to try and comment on all the points raised in this anthology of interviews – positions therein, concerning “contemporary sound artists who use field recording in their work”, it would take as many pages as the publication itself. So I shall just briefly touch on a few of what I consider to be, the more pertinent points, responding to the questions and answers contained in its pages with yet more questions, like a series of parts without a whole. What I mean by this is, herein I shall attempt a reflected sense of a jarred multiplicity. If the reader senses reflection he or she is asked to consider that my words are simply gazing back at the words that caused them to exist in the first place.

From the very first page the grounds of the book are read out loud:

“This book provides evidence for the sense that these technical and creative developments need always to be considered in the context of a conceptual or philosophical frame”

Followed by and following:

“For field recording, how the field is defined is at least as important as how the recording is itself has been accepted” (sic)

The inevitable reduction / the unmarked representation.

For a book that claims its purpose is to provide “evidence for the sense that technical and creative developments need always to be considered in the context of a conceptual or philosophical frame” there is an apparent lack of self-critique, and of separation. This observation, from its outset, stems from the lack of diversity and uninvolved questions put forward, I can’t reason why such an approach was considered in the first place. Anything that attempts to borrow from the omni-experience of field recording, as it is laid out here, and attempts to portray this embrace, through written language, will always arouse suspicion, as many of these experiences exist, outside of language, written or spoken. But what does this mean? That the language of listening need be different from the existence of audition? Perhaps we should concentrate on the dissimilarities… Perhaps instead of always looking back at Ludwig Koch, the mythos of his adolescent passerine, creating a comfortable backdrop of nature from which to project, we might consider that the present is a plane where we are able to listen to that which is not implicit and sounding, to consider that every word, or every anecdote, is as varied, loud, or as quiet as the next. Sound is unspoken in all that is spoken, and here I would proffer the advise of Basil Bunting, (being as I am not here considering electronic field recordings, rather the textual recollection and conceptual etching of such experience) the poet of Briggflatts, in his suggestion that we: “fear adjectives, they bleed nouns.” Sound has never needed us to speak for it.

It’s the reductive element of language, of inquiry, not necessarily response, that I feel needs consideration here. It’s as if hundreds of years of literary history (and here I am not only referring to the in the field publication, but field recording, in whatever guise it chooses to exist) never occurred. The San Francisco poet, Jack Spicer, once said that, and here I am paraphrasing -poets should read everything they can, as much they can that is seemingly unrelated, that poems can not live alone -we need ask everything we can, otherwise we find ourselves in an analogous position to those expert ears that permeate the pages of in the field, serving to cut an environment into pieces, guided by the constant warble of overt audible catechising… But do we concentrate on the ever forming semantics or the content therein? The repetition of the questions or the responses that follow? With text there is no need to deal with sound implicitly, in terms of bang crash and wallop; words will always be permeated with sound, leaving no need to dress sound with sound.

In nadja, Andre Breton tells of the constant encounter, the lasting loves portrayed, through extra-literary preoccupations, anecdotes, personal documents, the chance and divergence that instil in him a “supreme sense of proportion.”

“(Victor) Hugo, toward the end of his life, took the same ride with Juliette Drouet every day, always interrupting his wordless meditation when their carriage passed an estate with two gates, one large, one small; pointing to the large gate, Hugo, for perhaps the thousandth time, would say: “Bridle gate Madame,” to which Juliette, pointing to the small gate, would reply: “Pedestrian gate, Monsieur”; then, a little farther on, passing two trees with intertwining branches, Hugo would remark: “Philemon and Baucis,” knowing that Juliette would not answer; we have reason to believe that this marvellous, poignant ritual was repeated daily for years on end; yet how could the best possible study of Hugo’s work give us comparable awareness, the astonishing sense of what he was, of what he is?”

To finish this review before it begins I will say right away that such, a turning of the head, a looking or listening elsewhere, is missing from all over this book, the ability, or the desire, to talk about relationships in sound without talking about sound about sound about sound. Implicit in all language is vibration, in all things, bridges, cotton, yellow, connection. Nothing vibrates in and toward itself, as we perceive it, yet I feel the content of this book is very much a literary equivalent to a particularly anthropic impossibility of a singularity. But that’s just it. Implicit, and assumed. As I read through Breton’s initial anecdote, setting the scene, I think of how he relates the tale to love, yes! How can we do this, and I do not mean, how can we seek to emulate, but how can we listen to something other than sand without getting it in our mouths. Elsewhere in the book he speaks of the painter, Giorgio De Chirico, announcing that nothing can be said of him before: “…we have taken into account his most personal views about the artichoke, the glove, the cookie, or the spool.” I’m not saying we need adapt, fix ourselves into the selves of others preponderance, not at all, rather that this speaks volumes, and that we should, ironically, listen. There is surely more to the ear than the ear itself. What would this even mean for listening? Surely the ear does not end with listening? Surely listening does not end… So why do we coddle it so? This book, as it is, a specialist trope, makes me wonder and wonder and wander, from whom is it we are trying to wrestle back audition? Is anyone hoarding it but us?

My experience whilst reading in the field is in no way comparable, and neither should it be, to listening to the works of the individuals involved. But again, here is the point, arrived at once more, commented upon once again, why should this anthology seek to emulate the field, the appendage, it stems from but can easily survive without? The assertion that listening only concerns listening, that it only refers to that which is heard or felt, is as reductive as assuming that love is only concerned with love, that it borders only as an image of itself.

To repeat. There are so few references outside of direct auditory experience and as such it leaves me coldly considering whether this book and its always potential of multiplicity, something that evidently exist outside of the book itself in those questioned, is not even more reductive than a field recording? Imagine, between the twenty people involved, how many, shall we say, environments (the earth, the world), are attached and always attaching in a variety of encounters between imagination and the realities that frame themselves all over degrees of laterality and symmetry. I can’t help but pine for the depth of narrative, the wealth and abundance of spores, grown from individual practices. Why, even in a book concerned with a practise enmeshed in an already always enmeshing audition, would an artefact that need not lend itself to any one particular consciousness and train of experience? wWhy would it try so hard to then reduce itself and all concerned to a singularity?

I am reminded that field can indeed dissolve into field, a field, quite literally, is not only about agriculture, just as a field is not just about the ear. And what is the ear actually about anyway? Or field? We all know that we perceive the earth with the entirety of our bodies, that the ear stretches for miles and miles. Perhaps we should investigate further threads within dialectics of, for example, the digression and stasis of the ear, the written ear, the latent auricular, the gesture of Francesco Maria Grimaldi as he plugged appendage, immanently greeted by the infinite well of the intramural, Kafka’s mole, the invisible ear, the recorded ear, Guillame Apollinaire’s extreme disparity of structure, Thomas Browne’s mandrake and clouds, I could go on, and I’m not saying this is all there is, but considering the unique place from which such a book arose, I would have liked to have at least experienced a modicum of totality.

Why are we still talking about listening as if for the first time it were being given its due? The phenomena, the content of the ear, is everywhere, seemingly doomed to try and learn what we should simply recognise  In all this listening we seem to have forgotten that we’ve been listening all along. We cant any of us be aware of all the developments occurring in all these vast and interdependent fields, but what is remarkable about this book, for me, is that it doesn’t really touch upon anything contemporary when discussing relationships of the world and its representations, but as I stated earlier, I would ask the reader to sense a rumpus borne of the questions of the book, and not primarily the answers, as providing impetus around and around my words. The empty ear struck from within, roaring.

In the field had to happen, but I hope we can begin to stop talking about and considering listening as something exclusive to the distinction of field recording, and, if we are going to talk about it, which I am happy we are, begin to consider that we’ve always been listening, and that the preponderance of attention paid to it as a quasi-eccentricity is not a contemporary notion bar the inevitable nuances that make it so, the distinction, I might add, that enables us to reduce through magnification. Please do read this book.

callane

[Cathy Lane, Angus Carlyle]

Cathy Lane website
Angus Carlyle website
Uniformbooks website


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Comments

  1. thelostexpedition Avatar

    This is perhaps the least helpful and most vaguely-written book review that I’ve read so far this year. The reviewer – it goes without saying that he’s an artist – should learn to DIAL BACK the creativity sometimes.

  2. Patrick Farmer Avatar

    Dear ‘thelostexpedition.’

    I’m sorry to hear that you found my review so appalling, it’s true that I didn’t even cover 1/10th of the books content ( I entertained and dropped the notion of reviewing the book several times, covering, for example, the strange romantic/bucolic stance still redolent in so much field recording today, etc etc) just as it’s also true that there are people writing for this site that are much more adept at the reviewing process than I. But this piece, for me at least, was a parody of a concept that, unearthed a long time ago, and amplified in this book, I passionately disagree with, and the words I wrote tried to explain this in a way that I can’t.

    This is pointed out at the start of the review:

    “So I shall just briefly touch on a few of what I consider to be, the more pertinent points, responding to the questions and answers contained in its pages with yet more questions, like a series of parts without a whole. What I mean by this is, herein I shall attempt a reflected sense of a jarred multiplicity. If the reader senses reflection he or she is asked to consider that my words are simply gazing back at the words that caused them to exist in the first place.”

    So the form this writing took was a direct response to the form of the ‘in the field’ book, of course it is hyperbolic, idiosyncratic, and I understand that this is often the last thing people wish for in a review, but I’ve never been very good at laying things out in a manner of clarity and or quasi objectivity, if I’m honest that doesn’t really interest me.

    Instead, what I tried to do, was review the book without reviewing it by creating a short and stubby piece that, as it unfolded, reviewed the book for me by creating a work the opposite of what I was reviewing.

    I mean no disrespect to Angus or Cathy, they are kind and talented people, this is simply my position on the matter and as I read through the book I found my position become ever more agitated.

    Thanks

    Patrick

  3. TheLondonSoundSurvey (@LondonSounds) Avatar

    Hello Patrick,

    I remember first coming across some of your work when I was editing the UK Soundmap, and you uploaded an entrancing series of contact mic recordings. It was the first time I had knowingly heard sounds recorded that way, and perhaps my surprise and pleasure at this discovery in some way echoed yours as you made them.

    Your review is a little cryptic to me in some places since I am not sure what it is you would wish to ask in place of the questions posed by the interviewers. Yet, like other pieces you’ve written, I also enjoyed reading it, since you have a knack for phrases of descriptive precision like a watchmaker going about their job (I recall you writing elsewhere of the desiccated atmosphere between stones inhabited by pillbugs and nematodes). And thank you, also, for reminding me of Grimaldi putting his thumbs in his ears, which I remember reading in Toop’s ‘Sinister Resonance’.

    The best part is in here, I think:

    “There are so few references outside of direct auditory experience and as such it leaves me coldly considering whether this book and its always potential of multiplicity, something that evidently exist outside of the book itself in those questioned, is not even more reductive than a field recording? [. . .] I can’t help but pine for the depth of narrative, the wealth and abundance of spores, grown from individual practices.”

    Perhaps we might ask of ourselves: what has listening added to our individual knowledge of the world, our model of how it works and what it is? If asked directly I doubt I could give much of an answer. But if given time to come up with a written answer, perhaps as part of a dialogue by email, it might be easier to resolve the problems of introspective report.

    For someone like me who struggles with the contradiction between a dislike of feeling shut out and a sense of being able to follow only a solitary path, it was heartening to be included and to read the words of others, now neighbours in the same book, and for that I am grateful to Cathy and Angus.

    Cheers,
    Ian

  4. Patrick Farmer Avatar

    Dear Ian,

    Many thanks for your reply here, I really appreciate it, and especially the way you hold yourself in relation to the questions you’ve asked, I hope, if there is scope for such a thing, we can continue this.

    I’m sure you’re not alone in thinking my review a little cryptic, and I’m very sure many would not put it so politely, to cover that for a moment – I didn’t intend what I wrote to be a review, as the way in which we would normally understand a review, for example, a summation of the objects qualities and awareness of contextual dialectics, rather a reaction, a work in itself, albeit a short one, like a cutting of a section of a plant. An actual review, for a book involved in such an infinite field, well, my mind couldn’t quite come to terms with the scale of thing, a veritable babel I’m sure, and as i said, I haven’t even begun to tackle the unsettling environmental considerations that the book pertains to, not just the book of course, and not just field recording. Oh dear.

    So what I’m saying is, and in spite of the presence of the (?), there were no formed questions perse in my reaction, though of course questions are unavoidable. And in my own obtuse way, I think I did begin to provide a number of questions, perhaps its best to think of them as shells that, depending on what angle they are perceived from, either protect or horde their insides, and as they come to the surface, or if they come to the surface, as Bachelard said, they immediately assume their physiognomy, that I feel more pertinent to this amorphous practise of ours. I don’t have the answers, obviously, as I feel this is all terribly complicated, this business of cogitation, or no, not even complicated, but everlasting. Perhaps I should try and fence off a few questions, leaving them in plain sight, easy to observe, until we begin considering our presence, and the effect of our hands in the building of such an enterprise… (and in this context, I think it prudent to recall that I am primarily talking about the book, not field recording itself, but text, and its known and/or/both/and unknown equivalence in the expression of vibration – to paraphrase zizek, there are also unknown knowns)

    Can listening be explained by yet more listening?
    The poet Fernando Pessoa claimed that love is thought, can the same be said of listening?
    And what of the ramifications? Where does this leave us?
    What does this say of relationship, and reception, ones placement in an auditory situation?
    What is listening not connected to, and as such, is there anything that cannot be utilised when discussing it?

    p.s.
    I haven’t laid these questions out to be answered, and they are just the beginning of something that indeed has no beginning, though, having barked all this, if you have any thoughts on any of them, indeed if anyone has any thoughts on them, I’d love to hear please, such things can’t be continued under the table, with muffled complaints.

    And to begin to answer your question, interdependent of your questions just as yours are of mine (How has listening added to our individual knowledge of the world) I think we are always answering it, such a consideration is as omnidirectional as vibration itself, as ongoing as the ear, and as thought. Being as we are always listening, we are always thinking, though I do not feel the two to be mutually exclusive, no matter how much we would like to separate them. And so this gets back to my point of speaking about listening without speaking about listening, I feel that a story concerning Victor Hugo and his irreversible habitude, Breton’s consequent reading of love and anecdote, Flaubert’s attempt at portraying the colour yellow in his novel, Madame Bovary, they are all relevant trains of thought when observing the cosmology of listening, the world of the ear, worlds within worlds, indeed, if I may, far more relevant, to me, than anything directly involved with listening, and here’s the paradox, as if anything is not directly involved with listening, because to me this is merely a facsimile, talking about listening as if it is a distinct and separate phenomena, existing outside of the mesh that is created in part because of our comprehension of it, a singularity not without ontological value of course, but terribly weighty, not at all light, copies of copies of copies.

    And just to confound matters more, in this quagmire of letters, I thought it would be a good idea to end with a poem by Walt Whitman, one that I’ve wanted to include in something for a long time, being as my involvement with this field began out of doors, quite by chance, another story. As I know many people stop listening when such conjecture outstrips the empirical, but it’s all about balance is it not, and I certainly would not be in a position to lay any sort of claim to my thoughts as they are without such continuing experience in the supposed outdoors, ethological or not, it is what it is, and vice versa.

    When I heard the learn’d Astronomer. Walt Whitman.

    When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
    When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
    When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
    When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
    How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
    Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
    In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
    Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

    Many thanks Ian, I really appreciate your time.

  5. richardpinnell Avatar

    Patrick is a good friend of mine, and also I have a great deal of time for his work and so I approach this conversation, of course, from a biased perspective, but clearly his writing here is not intended to be a “review” in the normal sense. Surely that was clear just by reading it? If it is not what readers here expect from a review, then OK, but to call it unhelpful and vaguely written is to me, missing the point entirely. It is meant to be both of those things. A point which, of course Patrick has then necessarily had to outline in his responding comment, before he added a further layer of additional thinking on top again in his own infuriating way 😉

    I have read this book. It didn’t take long. I also discussed it a little with Patrick before he wrote his piece above. I found it a missed opportunity, and not a near miss either. There is nothing wrong with it as such, it is what it is, and I have no axe to grind against it, or its authors, who I have never met. However when the review of the book is so much complex / thought provoking than the book itself perhaps we should learn something.

  6. Daniela Cascella Avatar

    Hello everybody, I hope I’m not too late catching up with this discussion. I haven’t bought or read the In the Field Book yet, so my remarks are going to be related to Patrick’s review and how it works for me as a reader who encounters it, and as a writer prompted by it.
    The first time I read Patrick’s review, I breathed a sigh of relief. I had just spent the afternoon reading a collection of reviews by Pier Paolo Pasolini – marvelling at his ability to weave his artistic, critical, aesthetic and political vision into his reviews, and to do so with a passionate voice not afraid of bold statements – and in turn I was wondering, where can I find similar voices in today’s debates around sound?
    Patrick’s review hits a raw nerve: it calls for a higher degree of involvement with the forms of writing and it prompts to consider our aesthetic agency when we write about sound / when we write sound. We write with words, not with sounds or with thoughts, and these words actively shape our understanding. This review made me think, once again, of how the space of writing is a space of critical and creative activity, that informs the reader’s experience of the work and leads the reader to the experience of the work, and adds yet another voice to the growing polyphony of our cultural and critical milieu.
    Some of you might recall that wonderful review written by David Toop in The Wire a couple of years ago, of Steve Roden’s book and audio collection I Listen to the Wind that Obliterates My Traces. Would you call that a conventional review? And yet, how did it resonate with the spaces of Roden’s work although it barely mentioned ‘anything’ about the work itself. Didn’t it? Perhaps it didn’t describe the work: for sure it inhabited it. And so did Patrick with this book: as I reader, if there’s one thing I get here, is that he’s read In the Field and spent time with it and moved inside it, inevitably with his singular thinking but then again, isn’t it what matters? Not the book in itself as an objective entity, but the reciprocity that can be enacted by our individual selves any time we read it. I get a strong sense of the encounter that Patrick had with this book, and in turn I begin to think of how (similar or different) my encounter might be. In fact, this review tells me a lot. It might not be conventionally ‘informative’ or ‘descriptive’, but then again, The Field Reporter is an online magazine, and with only a couple of clicks I can easily reach the book page on the publisher’s website and get all the information and the descriptions I might want. From reading this review I get that this is a book of interviews where a standard set of questions is asked to a number of field recordists. The style of the questions is uniform (ethics of interviews in academic publications? editorial decisions or guidelines?) I get that the linguistic palette is restricted and the discourse, self-referential. (I’m interested in finding out how). Ultimately, I get the feel of the book by means of a reading event. And since books are there to be read, it’s enough for me to make me want to get there myself, and witness to my own reading event.
    Every time we write, we contribute to a tangle of references and connections and ultimately to the experience of the work we are writing for, with, and about. I always enjoy reviews in which there’s no attempt at explaining or justifying anything, but rather respond to and echo and add yet another thread to this endless texture of thoughts that we weave every time we listen, see, read.
    If I was a magazine editor, I would want to publish reviews like this one in every issue. It’s daring, it’s a wake-up call, it prompts debate. That’s why I’m glad that Patrick wrote this piece, and The Field Reporter did not constrain it or mutilate it into canonical forms. Sometimes a homeless style reaches much farther than a house style.

  7. fieldreportermag Avatar

    Thanks Daniella!

    Patrick Farmer ‘s reviews have to be appreciated for what they are. I think he uses the ‘review’ figure to articulate his discourse an ideas around, which is not only valid but a very interesting way to approach the task. As Chief Editor for TFR I totally support him just like any other Editor by giving them freedom to write and exercise no editing or censorship. I don’t believe there is such a thing as proper or non-proper way to write reviews and this is why we have so many editors everyone of them with their own individual and personal approach. Likewise the whole “if you don’t have anything nice to say don’t say anything” just help for still waters to remain still, and this is not necessarily positive.

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