Part 2

Is authenticity an important element for your work? Do you take an issue with cutting, editing, arranging and processing field recordings?

I don’t do this very often, but I’m not opposed to it. It seems to be a common practise. I did it subtly in Church Recordings from Monhegan (Full Spectrum, 2023), which actually consists of not only subtle collaged elements, but also multiple field recordings: one from an iPhone leaning against a large windowpane while it rained outside, and another near the objects I was agitating.

I have no experience using any kind of editing software other than Audacity. I’m coming at all of this from a pretty outsider perspective. I have heard plenty of albums with processed field recordings that I think are incredibly successful and deeply artful. Early Touch albums such as Number One (Touch, 2005) by KK Null / Chris Watson / Z’EV,



Jessamine (Touch, 2006) by Rosy Parlane (those two albums I consider unparalleled),



much of Dolphins into the Future, and Steve Roden come to mind.



I’ve also heard plenty of albums of processed and collaged field recordings which I find uninteresting and banal.

There is a fine line between cultural exchange and appropriation. What are your thoughts on the limits of using field recordings?

I haven’t had much experience recording, say, live music from ethnic or indigenous groups, but at times this may occur during a recording in a city or while traveling. I feel that the length of the recording is important here and how it’s used.

If one attends a performance by a group of musicians or a single musician and records sections of it and then uses it either unprocessed or as layers in a greater sound composition, I would find that questionable. However, if one is moving through, say, a crowded city, or traveling through a town in another country, and passes in earshot of, for example, a street performance, or someone singing, and it exists as a larger field recording document of that specific place, I feel that would be more appropriate.

I agree it is a fine line and I think respectful discretion is really important here. For instance, Geir Jenssen’s Cho Oyu 8201 m - Field Recordings From Tibet (Ash International, 2006) is a breathtaking work and seems to be very well-respected. But I have no idea if he went around asking all the Tibetan villagers and musicians if they minded being recorded and potentially released on an album that would be sold to mostly Western audiences …



I haven’t really come across this much in my travels. It’s been a while since I went out of the country, and when I did many years ago, to Ireland, Russia, South Korea, and France, I wasn’t too much into field recording. I do have recordings of South Korea, but mostly just of cavernous apartment complexes, crowds of people, and factories. Some of those recordings, along with recordings from Chicago and recordings of me playing various bells and radio static, appear on The Tea Merchant and His Atmospheres, an early Notice Recordings album, which began my fascination with certain sonic textures and non-narrative approaches to sound.



That album actually ended up being fairly narrative (in a relative sense), as I do believe it has a certain trajectory to it. But it still remains very much a collection of texture and catharsis through sound collage. It was recorded using the same technique as Travis’ and my project Dense Reduction (plugging various microphones, sound sources, and amplified objects into a mixer and outputting it directly to a 2 track tape recorder), but the result was much more meditative and ephemeral than the Dense Reduction project.

This is a little unrelated, but I often find myself recording myself listening to other people’s music. Or, I will play two types of music simultaneously in two different rooms, start recording, and go about my domestic activities. I have a great recording of Nanci Griffith singing while I listened to Erik Satie’s "Socrate," and another of Griffith singing while simultaneously listening to an Evan Parker and Matthew Shipp duo.



I think Graham Lambkin has done similar things, but I didn’t get the idea from him. It’s not something I would ever release, but I enjoy listening to those recordings.

Once I took a recording of myself listening to a strange and mysterious live Autechre set during a thunderstorm and pouring rain outside with all the windows open, as I walked around my apartment. A record label was actually interested in releasing it, but we decided we should probably ask Warp Records first. After emailing them multiple times, they declined to let me use the recording. A shame! (Back in 1999 in high school, Warp actually allowed me to use an Aphex Twin track in a performance of a play I wrote, which, in retrospect, I think is pretty cute. So I had high hopes, ha.)

Sometimes, field recordings can uncover surprising similarities between "natural sounds" and elements of human music. How do you interpret these and what is your own view on what connects these two realms and what sets them apart?

It seems that some instruments, both primitive and contemporary, acoustic and digital, have been created indirectly or directly to either mimic or confront the natural world.

The idea of acoustic ecology has drawn a lot of attention to the question of how much we are affected by the sound surrounding us. What's your take on this and on acoustic ecology as a movement in general?
 
I haven’t dived into acoustic ecology too much. I’m glad it exists as a study. It hasn’t informed my work, but my deep respect for nature and its sonic structures, not to mention the intersection and merging of natural sounds (biophony and geophony) with human-generated sounds (anthrophony) are constantly in my aural awareness; however I have not thought about them within the context of acoustic ecology.

From what I have heard by R. Murray Schafer, a figure closely associated with the study, his work seemed very much in the realm of contemporary classical and chamber music, with the exception of The Vancouver Soundscape, which I found fairly underwhelming but still an important historical document. So that left me a little confused. I could be incorrect about the prevalence of contemporary classical in his work, and there’s a good chance I haven’t heard enough of it. I mean no disrespect to him as a composer or thinker. There’s also a chance that I just don’t understand.



Malcolm Goldstein’s The Seasons: Vermont (Folkways, 1983) is an album that has always resonated deeply with me as a successful work that marries contemporary chamber and improvised music with interior, domestic field recordings with exterior, organic, pastoral field recordings, while remaining very stimulating but never imposing or abrasive, despite the occasional sounds of machinery.



That album exemplifies an aesthetic that I love very much. I’m also from Vermont, so that helps. The sound of a woodthrush on a summer’s night is very important to me. On this album there are also multiple recordings of what sounds like traditional music, presumably also recorded in Vermont, layered on top of one another, also with Goldstein’s field recordings and violin playing, as well as other instrumentalists’ playing.

All of this exists as a fascinating analysis of how one perceives one’s surroundings, sonic or otherwise, which transcends the simple act of listening and experiencing in the “moment”, and also becomes about memory and even dreaming, because one’s relationship with the sounds and sights of a given place is amorphous due to one’s memories and dreams. (As a side note, Notice Recordings recently released an archival album by Malcolm Goldstein, a non-field recording album of a live 2003 free-improv violin set with cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm.) The idea of multiple musics acting simultaneously in a given space was also addressed by Charles Ives in such works as Central Park in the Dark, and, to me, this ties into field recording and listening.



But anyway, back to acoustic ecology. I have come across the term “technophony” within the context of acoustic ecology, used to describe the more subtle and often ignored sounds (read: attempted ignorance) created by the abundant presence of technology in our lives. I have used electromagnetic feedback to filter sounds, as heard on Swollen Air (Tripticks Tapes, 2023), where I used a very cheap, prepared, and compromised electric guitar’s pickup to receive field recordings from my iPhone as well as the device’s own inherent electromagnetic feedback (the amplitude and fidelity of which is dependent on the phone’s open-air proximity to the pickup).



I am, however, very off-put by most “technophony” in our lives, such as the quiet yet audible electric hum and buzz from internet routers, poorly-constructed bluetooth speakers, cheap AC adapters, even-turned-off televisions, and the beeping melodies of washing machines, relentless battery-drained smoke detectors, remote car-locking devices, etc.

However, I’m still fascinated by the aforementioned electromagnetic feedback sounds, made audible by moving a device near an electric pickup, and I remember experimenting with this in my college dorm room by pressing random buttons on our TV remote control and pointing it at my friend’s electric bass guitar and being in awe of how the multi-tonal sounds changed.

Needless to say this exists on a much larger scale, for example, in the marine world where massive navy vessels perform their fucking war games, or even just simply exist, under the ocean’s surface, disturbing the beautiful and otherworldly communication between marine animals, not to mention those boats’ sonic disturbance of coral reefs. Obviously, this is just scratching the surface.

From the concept of Nada Brahma to "In the Beginning was the Word", many spiritual traditions have regarded sound as the basis of the world. Regardless of whether you're taking a scientific or spiritual angle, what is your own take on the idea of a harmony of the spheres and sound as the foundational element of existence?

Makes sense to me.