An anthology of art & ideas

—Issue 4 out October 2021

Eds. Rachel Withers and Nicholas J. Jones

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Issue 3:

The hills are alive

—exploring sound and environment

September 2021

Introduced by Rachel Withers

Somewhere in the literature on the history of ‘disembodied voices’ and recorded sound it’s mentioned that an early rationale for the invention of sound recording was its capacity to preserve for posterity ‘the voices of great men’. This issue of PRAKSIS Presents focuses on sound, the environment, field recording and the idea of the ‘soundscape’, a concept we owe to the founder of acoustic ecology studies, R Murray Schafer. Sadly, Schafer died this year on 14th August, at the very time Nicholas and I started to edit this issue. Celebrations of Schafer’s life, ideas and works now abound online, and alongside them we find the recorded voice of Schafer himself. It is poignant to hear him speak to us now that he has gone – in particular, to hear his reflections on the precious transience and uniqueness of ‘real’ sounds (as in, unrecorded sounds: live rather than recorded speech, for example). From what I’ve heard and read, I imagine Schafer would have shrugged off the designation ‘great man’, but there is also something resonant in the thought that when we listen to his voice now, one of sound recording’s earliest motivations – to keep alive important past utterances, voiced by their original speakers, at least as an echo for future generations – is being fulfilled.

Many of Schafer’s core ideas are carried forward in this issue’s contents. Composer, sound ecologist and former colleague of Schafer’s Hildegard Westerkamp has made available to us Raven Dialogue, a seventeen-minute field recording of the winter soundscape of Saltspring Island, approximately 40 kilometres south-west of Vancouver, and she accompanies this with a short contextualising text. The recording initially seems sparse and austere but (in Schafer’s words) by ‘using our senses properly’ and listening with full engagement, we find ourselves immersed in an acoustic environment that is both saturated with subtle detail and spatially expansive: ‘mapped’ by a 360-degree long-distance ‘conversation’ between ravens in which the hiatuses seem as significant as the birds’ cries. ‘The existing soundscape is made of energy,’ Westerkamp notes, in her talk in this issue. ‘When we listen with intention, we meet that energy with our own,’ and we start to make discoveries. In Raven Dialogue, for example, we find that sound can have a temperature. With its continuous, complex crackle of melting ice and an occasional crunch of snow underfoot, this is the very sound of icy cold. ‘When you listen carefully to the soundscape, it becomes quite miraculous,’ said Schafer, but he also pointed out it is a practice that takes work and reflection. All of the works in this issue are born from processes of sustained and intensely close perception. They offer a great basis for deep listening and, we also hope, for ‘understanding yourself as a listener better,’ to borrow Westerkamp’s phrase.

Schafer observed that real, individual sounds are absolutely unique and unrepeatable. In the past, before the invention of sound recording, ‘every sound committed suicide, you might say, and would never be heard again – not exactly the same way’. The contributions we’ve included by composer and sound artist Annea Lockwood and sound artist and founder of the Gruenrecorder label Lasse-Marc Riek both chime with this idea. ‘Experience doing field recording clearly shows you that sound is unpredictable and can’t be controlled. The accidents that arise demonstrate the infinite number of variables in play’ notes Riek, while Lockwood underlines the centrality of sound’s unpredictability to her own practice as a composer, performer and field recordist. ‘If I like a particular mix of sounds at a certain spot on a river, I need to record it right away; tomorrow, that water riffle will be different, or might have vanished altogether,’ she observes.

Those who record the planet’s soundscapes do so with a deep concern not just for the uniqueness of original sounds, but for the creatures and conditions that create them: they too are under threat of disappearance and this knowledge is central to many of this issue’s discussions. The four recordings by Riek included here are extracted from Helgoland, a larger work sound-mapping the Heligoland archipelago – a wild and biodiverse environment that, thanks both to sheer chance and some recent human interventions, has survived earlier attempts at its annihilation. Riek characterises the work as a literal and metaphorical study in ecological resurgence – of the drive to survive. We experience this drive powerfully, indeed viscerally, when we listen to his recording of guillemots diving from the Heligoland cliffs into the sea. Yes, this is a recording, but when we give ourselves fully to the sound it becomes an electrifying, almost shredding, aural encounter with raw life.

Annea Lockwood’s Wild Energy also immerses the listener in the sounds of powerful elemental forces, but what we hear in the extract she’s provided introduces us to a different order of listening: something we might describe, borrowing a phrase from Walter Benjamin, as the aural unconscious. Benjamin’s ‘optical unconscious’ identified the new, paradoxical realm of unseeable things rendered visible to the human eye by photographic technology. Wild Energy is built (at least in part) from sounds that shape our world but that are inaudible except via technological intervention: for instance, the splitting of trees’ internal water columns at a time of drought, or pressure waves travelling under the surface of the sun, or the ultrasonic cries of bats and the vocalisations of Sei whales. Wild Energy can be experienced fully in a rural outdoor location at the Caramoor Center in New York State, and it was created to be heard within that wider soundscape; it is about connection. Lockwood’s purpose is not to amaze her listener with other-worldly sublimities but to cement our sense of our ‘visceral connection to earth’s forces’. She does this by introducing us to a soundscape that is both extraordinary and a constant underlying, unconscious component of our earthly lives.

Tze Yeung Ho’s essay is importantly a manifesto plea for biodiversity at the level of speech and song. In it, the composer explores the classical music world’s fixation on a mythical ideal of ‘pure’ performance: the reproduction in sung performances of ‘authentic,’ ‘perfectly accented’ articulations of different languages. ‘Accents are an essential part of us as human beings’, he points out. Rather than fetishizing an impossible ideal of perfection, he asks, why not re-focus on the affective and musical qualities of performance and celebrate the constantly-evolving ‘heard identities’ of individual performers? For Ho, individual, local and regional vocal identities are not an obstacle to be eliminated but a rich resource for a composer to be explored and inspired by. In his essay, he shares the approaches and tactics that he uses to put this ethos into practice.

This issue’s theme arose from PRAKSIS’s Residency 17, Climata: Capturing Change at a Time of Ecological Crisis. The scheduled start of this residency in Spring 2020 coincided with the outbreak of Covid-19, but its participants responded resourcefully to the changed formats that lockdown compelled. Working collectively and communicating online, they produced two radio broadcasts that documented their acoustic explorations of the places in which they were sheltering, and thus these two programmes present a montage of intimate “lockdown soundscapes” from three different continents. Alongside the Climata broadcasts are a series of talks that were further rich components of the residency’s programme of learning, discussion and development.

Seamus Harahan wields his video camera in a way that bears many comparisons with the acoustic field recording tactics of our other contributors. He videos the ‘found activity’ that he encounters while roaming in (usually) urban locations, and this forms the starting points for his finished works. In Crow Jane, Harahan’s camera homes in on a crow that has taken fervent possession of a straggly scrap of unidentifiable, presumably edible, stuff. He studies the bird as it defends its prize against all other avian comers. In the process, the scrap disintegrates and the crow’s treasure becomes smaller and smaller; at one point, the bird tries to gather all the fragments up in its beak, but fails. Crow Jane’s soundtrack, a grimly melancholy song by Skip James in which the narrator laments shooting down the woman he loves, forms a pregnant parallel to the bird’s behaviour and signals to us that it is human perversity, not bird logic, that is under Harahan’s magnifying glass. It’s tempting to scale this parable up to global scale and think about the ways that human beings’ extractive activities are dissipating the basic resources we need to stay alive and destroying both landscapes and soundscapes. “You know I never missed my water till my well went dry…” We say thanks to Seamus for letting us use this work as a kind of ironic coda to The hills are alive – and to all our contributors, for their generous and active collaboration in the realisation of this issue of PRAKSIS Presents.