Hi everyone, thanks all of you for coming. Thanks also of course to Mark for that introduction and to Eka and Rory for getting all of the kit ready. I'm just going to go through three things before we begin. I've already done the second which was the thanks. In terms of a content warning, I've monitored the playback of different media, both textual and acoustic, and I'm pretty confident that although, as you will hear, many of the subjects that I'm going to discuss are very closely aligned to questions of trauma and pain and suffering,
Nothing that I will directly or indirectly bring to the surface this afternoon would, I don't think, amount to a trigger. What I'm doing this afternoon, and I will show you an outline of what we're doing, which is based on this piece of paper that I'm holding in my hand, which you'll see again transformed into a PowerPoint slide, is finding a route through the different projects that I'm involved with. The projects like the Decoys project that I've been working with Mark Peter Wright on and various other projects. So I was trying to think how I could bring all of this different work together in a manageable form.
And it just so happened that this book here called A Dog at the Edge of Things is coming out at the start of next month. And I thought this could be quite a nice way of organising the thematic concerns for this afternoon, which are largely about note-taking and notes. So there will be lots of different kinds of work, pre-work, so a kind of contextual pre-history to what I do now. and so I'm hoping that there will be lots of inspiration but also challenges and ideas that we can take up when we have a discussion. But what I'd like to do to begin before we get to that PowerPoint slide that has that
plan of what we're going to do is just begin with a little bit of listening. And I'd like to do that listening while looking at a particular image. Thank you.
I don't know. So this image and that sound will be explained as we go on. We'll be hearing more examples of water pressing its energy into different coastlines, and
hopefully those different surf sounds will provide us with a way into what we're going to talk about later in the third section of this afternoon. So I'm going to talk about writing, hence the notes of the title. And I'm going to start that by talking a little bit about some zines that I produced in the 1980s. Then I'm going to talk about constraints, which will become clear. And both of those things will become precursors to this book, A Dog at the Edge of Things. That allows us to think about field notes from a different perspective. We're going to talk about where these field notes come from, look at some notebooks from
the last year, look at some phone notes, blogs and social media. And the purpose of looking at these field notes, reading them again, listening to them, is to consider the possibility that these notes might constitute field recordings and that vice versa. The field recordings that I do, like the one that we just heard, might become perhaps like a field note. But field notes can be other things too. And as we move on in the afternoon, we're going to shift to thinking about field notes as voice, the horror, but also as voice in anthropological terms. We're going to think about those field notes as having another life on screen. and then we're going to think about those field notes as something in and of themselves.
So not a resource that needs to be extracted and then cultivated in some fashion to make it the proper thing, but the note as the note and the work itself. And then finally, after having spent the time looking through these different works over the last 20, 30 years, we'll start to think about what imagining a world in which field notes are repositioned becomes a world where we can listen and sound against something that might be called sonic exceptionalism which sounds really daunting but when we get to the final section of this afternoon I'm hoping it's not intimidating at all and something that we can engage with in debate.
So, writing zines. So these are zines that I was involved with the writing and the design of, not on my own, in 1989 and 1988. This is me offering in 1988 an explanation of what house music was. And I'm pleased that despite not mentioning Derek May, much of the rest of what I talked about remains valid to me today. This is an interview from 1988 that was published in 1989 that Mark Fisher and I did with a guy called Gerald. and again it's really interesting to go back to that material and to hear it with my much older
ears and obviously that hearing comes with a degree of poignancy because of Mark's passing but it also comes with a degree of understanding the distance in time and space between myself in 1989 and the person I am now. Here I am, this is now 1989, in my own zine called Interference, talking about Googie Down Productions, and here about world music. So these are the kinds of precursors to the writing I went on to develop in a number of different ways. Around 10 years after that period of zine production,
I started to incorporate a writing methodology into what I was doing. And that writing methodology is the one that I alerted you to earlier on, which is the use of constraints. Now these constraints can be all kinds of things that limit the production of legible knowledge through my writing. So one of the first ones I did in 1998 was using automatic translation engines. At that time they were Babelfish on Autovista. But I've also used transcription software, text analysis software. I've used Google Earth as a writing platform. I use word erasure. I use alphabetic constraints, syllable counters, limits on word length, and limits on the number of words.
And the first example of where I did that was in this magazine, Theme Park, which was a magazine that I became editor of during that time. And it was a way of thinking about how you could parcel up a number of different approaches, whether they were ones that existed in photography, in fashion, in writing, in ideas, according to different themes. And that idea of using these constraints was one that I've employed in lots of different kinds of writing. So in 2017, the introduction to Lana Pagnuti's book, Reception, the radio works of Robert
Rauschenberg and John Cage, uses a great number of these constraints. And one of the difficulties of using these constraints to force me out of my normal way of writing is to produce something that is legible because sometimes the constraints get into the way of communicating meaning. So in this short introduction to this book there are many many different constraints sometimes simultaneously active. This is another kind of constraint, and you can see how it affects the text here. So this is a text that was commissioned to engage with the notion of atom and atomicity,
and I thought I'd go back to Aristotle's ideas of the atom, but instead of working within Aristotle as a kind of canonical source for Western knowledge, what I wanted to do instead was to draw out many other knowledge systems at the time that were active in how we understood the world from an atomistic perspective. And so we start with Aristotle's text here, which is the one at the top. And then what I do is I translate that text into the other languages that we might think of as forming part of a wider scientific knowledge that have since been removed from the Western canon. So I'm translating between different Arabic languages amongst others.
And so the text takes a journey from its original form. And with each iteration, I'm also erasing parts of the original text. So we start off with the full and the empty are the elements, which you can see at the top of the page. And then in the final version, the final translation becomes this. Data is complete, empty. It does not exist on other lists. Others, stable, stable, zero and rare. So the world has nothing to say because every step is good for everybody and everything. And I think what this for me, and it may not for you, but what this for me demonstrates is the way that the operation of these textual constraints functions to produce knowledge
knowledge and a language that I wouldn't be able to generate myself. So it's a way of kind of constraining the ego, I guess, or at least constraining my own subjective sense. When I started to produce these texts, what I was really interested in was trying to get away from what I saw as the banality of my writing. I became concerned that what I was writing was conventional and I needed to disrupt that convention and these constraints offered a way of doing it. I think when we move on, we'll hear how those constraints also connect field recording and field note-taking. So this was a text that was commissioned by Yanni Ruskica, and here the constraint I adopted was using Morse code.
So all of the punctuation in the essay spells out a series of terms in Morse code, which was really, really hard to do. It was one of the hardest constraint-based writing that I've ever done. The reason why that became important, and this is an issue, that the thematic constraints are not arbitrary, but they're connected to the material, was because the original work was based on censorship and how Morse code and other kinds of languages, like those that you might be able to see referred to in the bottom left image, are ways of subverting and moving around conventional language. And then here is a much more recent use of constraints,
and this is where I'm using Google Earth as a textual prompt. So I'm finding different longitudes and latitudes that relate to the life of an author who I've been trying to sort of defang and subvert. And once I've got those longitudes and latitudes that represent three biographical locations in this writer's life, then I go there on Google Earth and start to pick street signs and other language and use them in the production of these texts. What these texts also have is something that's common for almost all of the other texts that we're going to hear today, which is they have a limit of 100 words. So all of these texts are 100 words long. and that hundred word writing length becomes something that I use a lot in my practice.
And that text that we just saw is part of this wider project called Miasma of Decay, which is using a number of different writing strategies and constraints to subvert Ovid's metamorphoses, to try and defang it, to detoxify it, to take it away from some of the difficulties of misogyny and hatred that are in that text, but also to keep some of the other elements, the energies of metamorphosis and change. So the final writing constraint, this limit of a number of words, becomes the one that's really powerful to me. And although I've been doing it for a long time, it was writing about photography that really helped me understand what these constraints could do to my writing and how they could take me out of a particular style of writing.
And this book by Ina Hansen, the photographer, the Norwegian photographer, The Fog Will Clear, The Snow Will Melt, was really important for me. And I want to start the readings that we're going to go through this afternoon by reading what I hope is on page 87 of this text. The floating architecture of an ocean liner. Brilliant white beneath the northern sun. Gleaming angles rendering its bulk graceful is surrounded by ice. Banks of cloud are tamped down on the horizon ahead. Mist wisps around the harbour and my breath floats away. This is the coldest I have ever been. My nostril hairs bind together in the arctic chill.
My gloved fingertips are quickly losing the sensation. Any exposed skin is a taut sheet of agony, and the resultant tears freeze on my cheeks. In the dog-side cafe, all is heat and smell and taste and sound, the radio and voices. Here is that book that I'm going to be reading from this afternoon. So what are these field notes? How do they function? They function in lots of different ways and they are not, as I hope I'll convince you by the end of this afternoon, solely attached to words, but have a much broader compass that connects lots of other kinds of meaning making, including field recorders.
And I've been working with a musician and sound artist, Simon James, on a very local project, one that happens on the coast very close to where we both live in a place called Shoreham. And as you'll see some of the examples I'm using take place many thousands of miles away from where I live and this is a tension for me in field writing, field recording and note taking between the local and the distant. And it's one that rather than shy away from I find that these field notes allow me to engage with it directly to focus on it and to bring it up into and amplify it so we're working simon james the person i'm working with is the musician behind this
electro smog release which is a series of electromagnetic field recordings of the consumer markets in shenzhen and i've just written kieran chen's name there and kieran chen was a student on the BA a few years ago and Kieran Chen helped with the Chinese translation of this text and also produced this really amazing Chinese version of the electro-smoke graphic that you see there. So I'm just going to read a field note and you'll see what I mean by field notes in a minute associated with this project that I've been doing with Simon in Shoreham. March the 6th 2021, the sea swells again. Before the family tread on the XLR cables placed on the coastal defence
boulder, their three voices offering a question, a suggestion, and then the conclusion that my recorder is a radio, the surf spread solely and subsided softly across the shallow shingle. After I rescue the equipment, in two minds whether to keep it running, but I decide that these easy sussurations are as good as it gets, the waves build a more theatrical presence, surging sharper, sending splashing jets, landing forcefully, spinning pebbles, sourcing shells, and sighing sand, gurgling, choking, and hissing. Okay, so one element of this afternoon is that the recordings, the film and audio recordings
that we're going to be hearing have the status of notes. And so a lot of these have not been processed in any way, and so I'm going to have to ride the volume level on this Focusrite, hoping that I can keep it within pleasant and painless limits. I'm going to switch screens now to play back a short film from that Shoreham project field recording. You have seen from the previous slide to the one when I read out the section of field notes
associated with the Shoreham Project, that Simon James and I work to produce a dawn stream as part of International Dawn Chorus Day in sound camp at five o'clock in the morning. And this was the focus of our attention. This is called the hot pipe by locals. It's a sewage outflow pipe. And this is another example of these surf recordings I'm going to be playing this afternoon. So, let's go.
What's the source of all of these notes? Well, here are some of my field recording field notes. from the last year. And this is the kind of physical form they take. They're just cheap black, don't know why they're black, but they're cheap notebooks. And they always get a bit of silver gaffer tape on the front with dates attached. And what do they look like inside? Well, they look like there's lots of different kinds of things. So there might be in the top left, a diagram of how I've attached contact mics to a piece of glass outside my balcony, or they might be things that maybe look more like paintings or drawings or texts or objects that I've found
while wandering around that I stick into these books, which is the one in the middle bottom. It comes with the cryptic, at least maybe for you, but very relevant for this afternoon's message where it says, maybe my thing is irritatingly quiet. So it's just a way of bringing together observations of different kinds, ideas for the future. And some of these notebooks, and here's one from 2011, never really have anything, any future to them, or at least so far. So this is a notebook comprised entirely of photographs I took on my BlackBerry mobile phone in 2011.
I know that I want to do something with this material, but as yet I haven't worked out what that is. And then there are projects which generate very, very few notes. So this is a long-term project I'm doing on the marble quarries of Carrara, which is also one of the places that's significant in the development of European anarchism. So on the big photo behind was one Saturday I'd managed to come up into the mountain when the quarries were empty and just get a sense of what's happening to the landscape. On the photo on the left was the May Day Anarchist Festival in the town of Carrara in northern Italy. So this project doesn't generate many field notes.
The most that it does are things like this, which are just notes that I'll put on my phone. Just very simple notes that I will use to remember what was happening. And that notion of remembering what's happening and timestamping what's happening is really important to these notes. I'm really interested in how all of these photographs related to a project that I'm working with. A number of friends in Norway all happened on the 15th of February this year. So it's important for me to be able to see that information and to understand it. And this is some, the image on the right is another kind of recording, this time a recording that happens with my watch, where I can't do these kinds of distances anymore.
but at that time I was running very long distances and recording the information, the marks and the landscape that my runs made. And I'm interested in how that stamps your presence in a particular way. And so that feeds into other kinds of field notes. With that Norwegian project that I was talking about, I have a blog where I'm constantly updating it with notes from the field, but also readings of books and other things that help me contextualise what I'm doing. And that's definitely true of a series of projects I've done with the anthropologist Rupert Cox. So this was a blog that I started in 2010 that relates to our work connected to military and civil overflights,
which we'll talk about a little bit later. What I really like is when that time stamping, when being in the field, becomes something you can publish immediately. And this was a commission from a photography magazine to publish direct live field notes from that project with Rupert Cox, which is a project called Zawawa, which is a project that's helped me understand what this field notes, field recording beyond sonic exceptionalism might mean. mean. So some of the recordings I'm making in this Zawawa project end up really beautifully organised like this, placed into these folders and then the
folders archived behind a paywall by a project that seeks to develop ethnographic and ethno-musicological material. And organised like this, it It looks like everything is beautifully cared for and cultivated, but actually when you look at the files on my desktop and in my external drives, they're in a very different state. And I don't know whether you can read this, but these file names become for me really interesting ways of thinking about recording an excess of what is on the audio part of the recording.
So these file names are drips again, breathing on mic with drips, drips from many stalactites, helicopter from escape tunnel, lots of clothes rustle in command bunker, more drips near bouquet, PA gives commentary to faint. PA in Korean, in Chinese music. Rubbish, dripping sounds, tunnel one. Two quiet drips, shuffling visitors. Tunnel two, near commander's bunker. So these for me become part of the note-taking activities involved in this fieldwork. The naming of files becomes another way of understanding how field notes work.
So this project, Zawawa, is a project with Rupert Cox and Kozo Hiramatsu that we've been working on since 2011. And we've also been working with Junko Konishi on the left and Atsushi Nishimura on the right. And the project's had a number of different outcomes. One of those outcomes as a film, which has had quite wide distribution, and another outcome is an ever-delayed book featuring a series of these field notes here in Japanese and in English. So one of the ways that the field note can work its way through in my practice is, and this is, I'm afraid you're going to have to hold your hands over your ears in
This is why I've noted this section of the talk as the horror. So by mistake, I sometimes thought that the way to deal with field notes is to vocalise them, kind of like I'm doing for you this afternoon, which I hope is manageable. But in this project from 2008 and in this project from 2020, I took things too far and I started to read my notes into the recordings I've made in the places where those notes catalyzed or were inspired. So this project is a project which was in advance of the redevelopment of Stratford for the London 2012 Olympics. I'm just going to read
you a section of this and I think you might hear why it's okay to have this in the live presence of the online, offline space, but maybe to have this as something that's coming out of speakers in a gallery space or is on a CD didn't quite work. Anyway, the 14th of January. Magpies are hopping between the pylons and New Earth. They're chattering, clattering calls like so many dice being thrown. A coot drifts in circles down the canal. its mate stalks through the rushes at the water's edge. The pair's movements are marked by little acoustic explosions, tings, futts and pits.
Herring gulls wheel and whine, fussing their bright white feathers through the damp and darkening air. A company of crows roll their pelvises up and down, a high bank of earth, Casting sideways glances as if for admiration. There are gruff cores, but I never see the beaks move. So the horror of the voice is something that we're going to hear an example of in a work that's one of those local projects, like the Shoreham project that I'm doing with Simon James. And so these are three books that were published that involve very local explorations. And you can see the diagram in this Knight Blooms book as a diagram.
Maybe you can recognise that it comes from the traces left by my running from a GPS recording. I'm not going to read that because I'm conscious of time, but I am going to show you this. And I do apologise for those of you of nervous disposition, but this is me trying to find a way to read my field notes into a voice that lives on in the recording. is paired with a second that I don't like, that spoils the photogenic symmetry, and is
kept out of the frame and out of mind. The second one, the unmirrored one, offers shelter for sheep, a perch for birds, bark for cattle's hides, and branches to clip two microphones to, leaves to press another microphone through, and later, behind the gorse bushes, a third microphone won't contact with a drumming, hence wider. But intended to end this with wistfulness, in a rueful recognition that the three microphones
could not catch what my ears had heard. My notes had hawthorn and gee-bond set to quiver by the same gusts that trembled the grasses, that srommed the fence, that threw the birds through the sky and took the song from their beaks, that bent walkers heads, turned the brim of a child's hat and forced the runner's legs to match his mother's watch. Five miles from the pond and the tree, the audio speakers on this kitchen table turn still stranger my already strange soundtrack for kindly looking people and have me in june 2020 mistaking waves of wind-blown leaves for marine energies
So I'm not sure quite what happened when, so horrified by the sound of my voice in the event gallery in London in 2008, I must have forgotten it somehow in the intervening 12 years because there I was again without a pop shield recording my field notes into the work that I was making. So another place that the voice and field notes come together is of course within a kind of anthropological idea of research methods and this is something that working with Rupert
Cox for over these many years who is an anthropologist and director of the Granada Center at Manchester University has been a very powerful introduction to it. And this is in the Whale Gallery here at LCC. We created an installation as part of a show called Staging Disorder. And as you can see maybe on the left hand slide that this installation is called The Cave Mouth and the Giant Voice. I'm just going to show you an example of how this piece worked from 2015 and it was a way of us thinking about how the voice functions anthropologically. I just want to start this by reading my field note from the same experience and then showing you what happens to the work itself.
The speaker's output of nasal breathing, of swishing lower body motor actions, and their slithering results of mutterings and of faint voices, all matched a similar presence to what we had heard. Once the listener is metaphorically drawn into the cave, that clarity dissipates, and apart from the perceptible familiarity of dripping liquids on solid surfaces, what is heard takes on a sonority of low shudders and drones, frayed higher frequencies and fragments of voices that might at one point exude the colour of conversational transmissions, yet later seem to take on the character of something broadcast through a loudspeaker.
So this is one of the many pieces that connects very closely to the traumatic and the painful and the description of not of the recording but of listening back in the installation space that we saw in the previous slide is related to this work that we're about to see, which we're very lucky to be working with Yogi-san, who was a very young boy during the Battle of Okinawa and lived through the horrors of what the islanders call the Typhoon of Steel, which was the American bombardment of the island. So I've taken a section of
this film that was what we saw in that space in the whale gallery at LCC but I've hopefully managed to avoid anything that reads too closely of that trauma that we heard from Yogi's testimony and this testimony is a testimony of voice but we don't hear Yogi speaking except in way that was described in those field notes. The yogi has just left me. I'm sitting there with these dripping sounds in this cave that he hid in during the Battle of Okinawa. He's walked up some steel steps and he's having a conversation with Rupert Cox and Kozo Hiramatsu in an upper section of the cave that we can just about hear.
But actually what we hear much more is the US military presence on the island. And so those low drones and shudderings that you might be about to hear are ones that are coming from US Air Force Base, Kedena, which is just near this cave that Yogi and his friends and family shelter from the Typhoon of Steel. I'm going to go ahead and get some more of the stuff I've been doing.
Okay, that's enough. So Yogi, the textual component of this work is Yogi's testimony of what happened in the cave when he was sheltering from this bombardment. And the complexity of Yogi's testimony, which we tried to secure by representing it in this particular way, is one where the Japanese soldiers are themselves identified
as potential hostiles to the Okinawan islanders, of which Yogi was one. And this idea of us using someone's voice as a template for an acoustic work like Cavemouth or like Zawawa became something that was complexified when we presented the film Zawawa at the Jean Rouge Festival. and the fact that none of our work together, whether it's the cave mouth, Zawawa, or our previous work, Air Pressure, ever sees a mouth moving and releasing sounds into the air was something that caused great consternation with one anthropologist in particular who's in the audience for the screening of our work
and who came up to us immediately afterwards and challenged us in a way that I've tried to describe in this field note. past the hawkers launching descendants of the wind-up birds that I've pleaded for some forty years before, past the rollerbladers adding more diagrams to the marble inlays, past the wedding photographers making the city a backdrop, past the security guards and up the steps. Always a mixed blessing to re-watch our film, to realise again what is right, Rupert, and what is wrong, me. Any sourness from the argument that spilled into the foyer. Unless you show someone speaking, then you are not making anthropological film,
evaporated with the trip behind the scenes past what had been Chris Marker's office. So this voice as Fieldnote, the voice connected to Fieldnote, comes both with the horror of me trying to read my voice into material and to represent it, but it also has a value as an anthropological method of engaging people's voices as witness and testimony. Sometimes that witness and testimony, like our interlocutor at the Jean Rouge Festival identified, needs to see the mandibles operating, the breath leaving the mouth, the teeth bared by lips. Sometimes, as in the work that Rupert and I do, we feel
the voice can have a more abstract relationship and can become textual in the way that I showed you in the cave mouth. There's also opportunities for my field notes themselves to become an on-screen component. And this is a long-standing project that's never really gone anywhere. involved work in 1998, 2002, 2007, 2014 and 2021 and it relates to this building here which is the Villa Savoy designed by Corbusier in 1928 and the image on the left isn't real it's a photoshopped graphing of the Villa Savoy but the image on the right does show how this landmark
villa of modernism had declined. So I'm going to read you a section here. October 7, 2002 Les Manifestations.aif 00000-03734 Rest in peace, Jim McGrain We came to work, but the corridors were barricaded by metal-tubed chairs with pale veneer seats and backs, upended tables, blocked doorways.
Leaving the classrooms, we headed towards the sounds of chanting, bodies close enough for warmth, you with a scarf and a smile, making new friends and sharing old memories of other times on the streets with flags and whistles and the songs of several generations. The crowds parted around two men in boiler suits, striking flares against the tarmac, burning streaks of black, reeking carbon, and sudden red lights vivid aloft, billowing, crackling. Okay, so rather like that outposted film, you need to take a bit of a breath when you see this film, which is a reworking of several generations of field notes with some 1998 footage
of me walking around the Villa Savoy with my dad's Hi8 camera. So preparation is required, I think. So the piece is called It's Still Raining in My Bathroom and it's just another example how these field notes can migrate and become legible in different ways. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry,
have emerged in projects is by being published alongside the project and this is another work that has a kind of long-standing relationship so it's been something that works with Chiara Caterina in 2012, 2014 and 2015 and it exists as a number of different iterations. I just wanted to quickly show you the website component to this and then show you a fragment of the last film that we'll be seeing this afternoon before I move into the next section and final section of what we're discussing.
So this is a recording of a website and it's part of the project in the shadow of the silent mountain. You can see that the field notes become the way that you navigate the other material, whether it's these photographs that Chiara Catarina took of me raising this flag on Monte or whether it's the way that you can access the material that's the audio album or whether it's the way you bring in the color to the photograph
And the final section that I wanted to play was the start of film with Chiara-Catharina where the field nodes become again an on-screen element of the meaning. Okay.
So that's the last film we're going to... Oh no, sorry. There's one more. But I realise I haven't written down the timeline for that film. Anyway, so these are all examples of field notes that incorporate themselves into the work. The horror of the voice, the refraction of another's voice, the appearance on screen as subtitle, those painted texts, those hand-painted texts from the raining video. But the bit that I'm really interested in about these field notes working with field recordings as we move to the last part of this afternoon and we come up to the first hour of my talking is that field notes
working in and of themselves and what them operating like that might mean for how we understand field recording and indeed how we understand sounding and listening. So I don't I don't know whether you noticed, but the section that we saw of the field notes as part of the video Il Vertice that Chiara, Katerina and I made together. also that same section of material then was used for another project where I used the audio recorded climbing up that mountain and forced the audio into MIDI and then used the MIDI in Sibelius to create this unplayable score but then used the field note to animate the score as a kind of
lyric or voice where the words of the field note that we saw on screen then become allocated by the Sibelia software where it thinks the musical accent is. And I really like the way of working like this where the field note becomes a modular system just as the field recording does too so that when we saw the reigning film, part of the reigning film was made in 1998, part of it was made in 2002 with a micro track recorder as I was on a demonstration in tour with my friend Jim McGrain. Part of it came from a scam, an academic scam that I got involved with where someone who invented a persona for themselves as an academic,
an architectural academic, invited myself and Julian Weaver to write a text for a journal about our work on the Villa Savoy, which we did. We sent off the text, and only later did we discover, when we wondered what happened to it, that the journal didn't exist, and nor did this person who'd invited our text. But to me, that felt like yet more field note material that I could modularise and manipulate into these different forms. And the idea of the field note as note, not as raw material for some other cultivation or some other kind of manufacturing but rather the field note as a record in and of itself is something that I've been working with in a number of different ways and the
amazing Bridget Crone and Sam Nightingale and Polly Stanton produced this book Fieldwork for Future Ecologies that came out at the start of January of this year before Bridget Crone, the amazing academic and artist sadly passed away, is an example of where the texts as field notes, not as anything else, not as preparation for something else, not as raw material for something else, exist in and of themselves. And I think there's going to be a lot of celebrations of this book happening over the year, which which will also simultaneously be celebrations of Richard Crohn's life. So, having gone through all of these field notes as the hour elapses,
and I'm moving on to the last few minutes of the discussion before we open up for questions, for me, these field notes work against what I'm calling sonic exceptionalism. What does sonic exceptionalism mean? I will use one more video example and then I'll tell you how it works itself out. So one more reading, one more example of a rough video note. In a day's numbness, I followed the group's impetus into the sea, trying to keep up with Philip and Jane
trying to breathe slow and deep when everything screamed sharp and shallow displaced still operating in an out of body thug the water had reached my neck before the cold properly hit with the shock of a frozen jacket thrown suddenly over shoulders I only returned to the kind of presence when fingers fumbled buttons and zips, the envelope of my epidermis still feeling inches out of alignment, a chiming of the bell of my body that is still ringing reverberations now.
So this last film that we're seeing is part of a long-term project in Tromsø, Romsø, in North Norway, in Sápmi. And it's a project that seeks to hear these testimonies, these oral testimonies of a number of different people who inhabit the Arctic region, whether those testimonies come from locals, migrants or indigenous peoples. And we're using sound walking and other strategies to bring up these voices to hear what they're saying. And that
becomes a problem for me and my practice of making the field notes legible on screen because as we saw with the Cavemouth project and Zawawa, if we make other people's voices legible like this. Is there some problematic and maybe a hypocritical element around my doing the same thing? Am I in some way connecting my voice with theirs? And what are the dangers of doing that? So this is part of a side hustle on this Arctic Auditories project where what I'm doing is I'm recording instances of the electromagnetic in the high north. And this shed that we see in front of us is in Telegraph Bukta, Telegraph Bay in Tromsø, Romsø, where
this is the point at which the telegraph came from the mainland to Tromsø Island. And this is the point where that swimming experience I've just described took place and also where this very rough video was recorded. I'm sorry.
So the name of the project that I worked on with Rupert Cox, Kozo Hiramatsu, Junko Konishi, Anatsushi Nishimura is called Zawawa. And Nohiko Tereshima, on the left-hand side, coined this phrase, Zawawa, as an onomatopoeic neologism to capture the sound of sugarcane in the wind. And there's a famous song on Okinawa called Satakibi, or sugarcane, batake, sugarcane fields.
And in that song, the phrase Zawawa is repeated 66 times, and that becomes a really important part of how we construct our film, how I made my field notes, and how we're working together to create meaning about life under the military flight paths on the island of Okinawa. So although Naohika Tereshima coins this phrase Zawawa, it's taken on a life on the island where it means lots of different things. And this idea of one sound meaning lots of different things feels very important to me and connects to this idea of field recording as field notes, field notes as field recordings. Because if we can move from one sound meaning lots of different things,
maybe then we can resist the temptation of sonic exceptionalism, of making sound the exception, the thing around which all other things need to be recalibrated and reoriented. So I'm thinking about field notes that are recorded in the shadow of Mark Peter Wright's work, in the shadow too of Annie Goh's work and Gabriel Vecetta and Eimer Kangeiser, their work problematising sonic naturalism in different forms. So field notes as text and as sound become, and you've heard many examples of this this afternoon, they become the uncinematic and they become the unmusical. They hold on to their own unprocessed qualities. The field
notes become awkward, partial, mistaken and oblique. They're there as a remainder or a reminder of what I call cortisol listening. So this is the listening that explains why it is when you're in a cave next to that beautiful cove where we heard the first recording this afternoon, which is actually the place where the US military first landed in March and first set foot on Japanese soil. And is also the place very close to a horrendous atrocity that was provoked by the Japanese infantry on the island. So that place that looks so beautiful, that sounds
so relaxing, is a place with many different qualities. And as I was listening to it, inside a cave, just out of shot, I was listening with my hand miming a chef's kiss gesture, because I was experiencing what I call cortisol listening. And this is, I think, what happens when you become adrenalised, you've got cortisol flooding your system and your hearing changes. You start to hear differently. You think this is the best field recording ever. And your field notes can work to capture that monstrous egotism that you felt when you had those headphones on and you were believing that you had in some way made a field recording that was so
perfect that it would justify the whole discourse around sonic naturalism and sonic exceptionalism. But no, cortisol listening should be thought of as something that actively reorients your hearing and you should always be carefully engaged with as a reminder in your field notes. So these field notes become, with the constraints perhaps, a kind of no input field recording. So they become a way of thinking about field recording outside of a huge apparatus of technical machinery with great costs to the environment. They also become a way of engaging with field notes outside the field as it's conventionally
understood and a way of bringing the sounds of sugar and the sounds of surf in the four examples we heard this afternoon in Tokashiki, in Shoren, in Norway as examples of sound where one thing doesn't just mean one thing but it means multiple things. And that's I think a way of thinking about field notes as field recording and field recording as Okay, thank you very much. Thank you so much Angus.
What a weave of personal and political poetic practice. practice. I've got lots of questions but I'm going to fire them back to everyone else. And also remembering that we have lots of people online with questions I'm sure banking up, which Eka will help us with. But who would like to begin the questions? I'm sure there's There's lots of you who want to. We've had very good Q&As, so come on, let's just roll into it. I'm doing my Jerry Springer impression. Go in. Thank you. Oh, yeah.
So I think, yeah, I wrote a note because I couldn't actually read it. I write it very well because I couldn't see it, so that's a constraint. but yeah I think yeah I want to ask about do you how much do you take kind of the technology use as as a constraint or a way of kind of like taking these filled notes like because there's the piece with the the hiate that's a very kind of aesthetic kind of choice I mean maybe it's a choice of the time period you're doing it. But yeah, I guess the question is, like, yeah, how much do you, is your,
how much is the choice of what technology you use, basically? Yeah, I think that's a really, thank you, that's a really great question. And it's not one that I'm necessarily going to have a very neat answer to. But I guess one of the things that I'm immediately, thinking about in response to your question is how ultimately for me it would be very exciting if I could reach the point where the technology that I was using was a technology of paper and pen or iPhone and notes. And I call those technologies because they are technologies and they have environmental costs and they have other kinds of constraints,
but certainly aspirationally I like the idea of getting field recording to a kind of no input state if possible. But I also like taking an answer to your question in a different way, advertising the different constraints of technologies and advertising those technologies as a way of stepping back from the cinematic and the musical because one of the things that you can do with a constrained technology, whether it's the, and Rory and I were talking about this earlier on, the recording on the demonstration that goes with that Hi8 footage happened four years later and it was a recording that took place on a small micro track recorder,
which is probably something before anyone here has heard of. But this was a really early digital recorder that came around a similar time to mini discs were being used and it had a very compressed acoustic signature which I really like and you can definitely hear that technology and all of its compression routines working through in that soundtrack but you can also hear another element of the technology which is how you use the technology and at that point as I walk next to Jim McGrane in his demonstration the technology was placed inside my jean jacket pocket and you can hear that too. You can hear that something is moving against something else throughout the recording. So on the one hand I want to get rid of technology, I want to find a kind of no input field recording, but on the other hand I feel that
if I'm going to use the technology I want to hear the technology and its limits. I don't want to process things, I don't want to cinematify them or musicalise them, I want to resist the cinematic and its theatrical presence and resist the musical and its mode of ordering sound in a particular way. So technology is kind of inescapable, but for me it's how irreverent we can be with that technology without ever falling into that terrible prestige of thinking that you can step back from any technology, which I think is a kind of existential impossibility. you're always using technology, it's just what kinds of technology and how I think is important.
And maybe that's particularly, maybe that's something we leave for another thing, but yes, I'll leave it there. I have a question from the live stream chat from Harriet. Do your field notes ever stop you really listening? Well, that's a fantastic question. Yes, they do. And especially the field notes that take place on an iPhone, because that becomes something that's very much an interruption of what I would otherwise be doing. So it's something that's about taking something out and starting to shift into a different kind of register. And I think that is something that happens
and it is something that interrupts. So yeah, there's definitely a question of that happening. But there's also maybe a more political and ethical question, which is about one of the advantages of using technology, especially very visible technologies, is that you're allowing other people to know that you're recording. Whereas if you're using a notebook or an iPhone, it might not be clear that you are committing something in some public way to a kind of presence that persists. Whereas if you have a microphone that's very visible, and I've got a really great rig that I'm using at the moment with red and blue XLR cables with funny big fluffies
and a monopod and a stereo bar. So I like using this system compared to, say, a discrete binaural system because it really advertises what you're doing. Whereas maybe one of the things that keeping a no-input aesthetic in how you do your recording means that your recording becomes not just inaudible but invisible too. And I wonder if there's a kind of ethics about how people react. And one of the things about going to Carrara, which you might have seen in my iPhone notes, was that every time I took out a camera, people reacted in a negative way. and when I had my hotel coat hanger with my microphones on it
and I was trying to record these demonstrations that happened on the May Day festivals, you could see people asking what kind of recordings were these and in fact several people spoke to me about what I was doing, where it would go, and I liked the fact that I hadn't just worn some binaurals and had a completely discrete recording unit that no one would ever ask me a question about. But I also found it very uncomfortable. And so I think whether it's the field notes in the writing form or whether it's the field notes that take a field recording form, both of those things, yes, interrupt a kind of experience. But at the same time, rather like the question about technology,
I think all experiences are mediated anyway and so it's not like there is a pristine reservoir of sacred experience and then technology messes things up I think everything is already mediated in all kinds of different ways and yeah so I'm not saying that there's a because I think that would be a kind of sonic exceptionalist approach that once sound appears it can operate without any of the problems of the visual and yeah so I think that's an excellent question like the question before it on technology and I think my kind of muddied muffled answer would be something like it was with the technology one yes and no yes it interrupts the very thousand I actually have one more question as well
from the live stream chat from Diana Any thoughts about notes over the notes and how to include them in the sound work? In ethnography, for example, there are several stages of notes. When preparing an interview, visit, observation, the notes during the action itself and notes post-action, usually more analytical, in brackets. Thanks, amazing talk. Smiley face. Thank you. That's a really nice question. And I think it's... I don't want to sound as if I can only ring the same tune, but I think it does relate to what the previous two questions asked because I think it's really important to identify those ethnographic stages
of primary note-taking and secondary analysis, and they work really well for all kinds of different contexts. But part of the kind of no-input field recording methodology wants to hold on to the motion of registration that field recording has that I think is one of field recording's benefits, that it timestamps what happens. And I worry a little bit about the stages of ethnographic note-taking being stages that take you away from the temporality of the moment that become things which are, and this is really powerful, the product of reflection of critical analysis of rumination
these are really powerful things and they're important but at the same time I think the field notes that I'm interested in are ones that have a kind of stamp that relates them to the time that they were taken but definitely trying to find a way to create notes on notes sounds amazing opportunity and I'm thinking at the moment I hadn't thought that far ahead I hadn't thought that in that sophisticated a way I'm trying to create this kind of modularized system of notes and recordings that I can use in lots of different combinations what I hadn't thought about which is what Diana Diana's question it now impels me to consider is the idea of notes on notes
and given that memory and remembering is part of what I'm doing then that makes a really great innovation to follow up the idea that you can take a note and in the future make another note on that note and then another note and then another note or maybe, thinking on my feet you can make those notes available for other people to work with in different ways and I think that you might have seen with the Zawawa text which has been published by archive books it's all dual language so this is the text about the work in Okinawa so the reason why it's dual language Japanese English is because if these systems, these technologies mean anything
they have to be kind of accessible to challenge and critique from the people whose lives in extreme environmental stress we're trying to make some kind of sense out of so yeah so just as when we made the film the premiere had to take place in community spaces around the island where the people who we'd interviewed had helped structure how the film operates so too with the book the idea was that we went to Okinawa where I made the recording that we started with today with the beautiful beach scene which was the space where as far as I can tell, the American Sith, the seventh-country first set foot on Japanese soil. Yeah, so I think there's a question about these field notes
and what kind of status they have and how open they are to critique. And the idea of making notes on notes in the way that Diana suggested to me sounds like a really powerful development. Is that me, Robin? That was another powerful development. Just a mere ambience. It's the no input element. Hello. Yeah, I have two questions for you. So firstly, I realized that in your few notes, there's like feelings, sounds, personal anecdotes, colors. So I wonder how you strike like a balance between your intuition and the scientific recording when you are doing your observation.
And that's the first question. Okay, do you want me to answer that first? It's a really, really hard balance to strike, I think, partly because of the reasons that I've just identified, that we want these documents to be available for scrutiny and critique. So while I might pretend that these field notes represent a kind of moment of primary engagement, actually I'm always conscious that other people are going to read them. And so maybe that is the kind of analytical scientific element alongside that. And so things become very complicated with, for example, the Alexander Street archive. So this is a
ethnographic and ethnomusicological archive and it's an archive which has taken on all of our field recordings from the Zawawa project since 2011 and when we were talking to them we had a question it was very similar to yours what counts as a field recording what should it be should we edit it should it just be the raw recordings that come off the field recorder or should we process them in some way should we raise up and normalise their auditory presence. And what do we do about inadvertent bodily activities that happen to occur and be registered on the field recorder?
So one of, another chef's kiss moment for me was when I was recording a huge transporter plane taking off over Kadena air base we'd been spending the evening with some fishermen in the local ino or lagoon and my friends Rupert and Kozo had walked out to the reef with the fishermen and I'd stayed behind near the base and maybe this is too bodily actually as an anecdote um but yes anyway so I had I was making a recording and I was thinking this is this is surely one of the best recordings I've ever made. It's got everything, there's human activity, there's water, I can hear the air, there's the US military base, there's all kinds of sounds and then suddenly out of nowhere
a huge transporter plane started its engines operating and those engines started to raise their energies and become more and more of an acoustic presence and they took off directly over my head and I'm looking at the level indicators and I'm thinking this is so good, it's absolutely happening now and there was no red it was like nice and orange i was just doing everything and then i had to respond to a bodily imperative i just couldn't stop myself i tried but i'd been drinking a lot of tea earlier in the day and i just this recording is now part of this archive with the sound of me urinating on it and i'm just thinking you know should i alert them to this fact I mean what do I do I mean this isn't science when your body kind of leaks and reveals
its own wateriness how do I deal with this so this is on an archive that is behind a paywall thank goodness so none of you can consult this but the more serious part of it was that at the time I was thinking this is a really good instantiation of the American military colonialization of airspace and how late at night as people are conducting these activities of harvesting sea urchins and other crustacea for their dinners the next day, in comes this big transporter plane and creates this huge sonic aftermath that takes ages for things to settle back down. but the next day I discovered that actually that transporter plane was doing something very different
than creating the sounds of freedom that might represent US military might actually what that sound was doing was taking relief supplies to the Philippines to help in the aftermath of a huge earthquake that had taken place so in answer to your question about what's the personal and what's the scientific the scientific demands that you pay more research attention to what it is that you're doing, and to learn that these sounds aren't necessarily as convenient, as legible, as you might think they are. And that's why, with the kind of manifesto commitments on that last slide, I'm really interested in the idea that field notes and field recordings are awkward, partial, mistaken, and oblique.
Like, I made a terrible mistake in terms of what this sound was. I also made a very awkward mistake in terms of urinating during a chef's kiss recording, which I'm really regretting telling you about. It's only one of many horrendous examples that populate my field notes and field recordings. So that was your first question, which is I oscillate between the scientific and the personal. I don't think you can do the scientific without the personal, But I also don't think you can do the personal without thinking that this transporter plane is doing something different than keeping people up at night and showing the Okinawans who's the auditory boss. The second question? The second question is regarding art-based research.
How do you think your work contributes to how you envision it to apply to the future of research, especially in the most post-humanism? I don't know really. I don't really think about it in terms of this kind of legacy, but this is a really good question. I'm not sure, I don't, yeah, an honest answer is I don't think about it as a kind of contribution to a legacy or to an unfolding approach to to creating art-based research methodologies that are sustainable or repeatable. I think there's a lot of amazing work happening and these things are not things that everyone
has to sign up to, they're things that I feel that I've got to after working through some of the problematics associated with them. So I'm not suggesting that this kind of approach of a kind of no input field recording is necessarily something that we all adopt. Because I understand that with Kozo Hiramatsu, the Japanese acoustic scientist who I work with on the Zawawa project, what he's interested in in Kadena Air Base is looking at the prevalence of hearing conditions that happen to people who inhabit houses on the border of the base. So he's not really interested in someone talking about how amazing it is wading out into a lagoon with fisher people like I would.
He's talking about how do we conduct epidemiological surveys to understand early onset hearing loss related to overflights. And I think if anything, in terms of the legacy, what I really like and I've been really able to do, and I know that Mark Peter Wright's work does this as well, is to collaborate across disciplines in ways that make those disciplines really leaky, sorry, really permeable. And I think that's where that kind of, for me, the art space part of things, it excites me most where you can make those connections between different disciplines. So this Norwegian project, I'm working with an anthropologist, an ethnomusicologist and a geographer,
and we're all using feminist methodologies. So that's our kind of shared point and the idea of watery bodies. But we're coming at it from very, very different perspectives. So that's why this electromagnetic project is a kind of side hustle. Or it was until we started to talk to people and conduct our ethnographic research where this notion of the electromagnetic as a factor in how people heard the High North started to appear during their sound walks and sound mapping sessions. So people started to volunteer the idea that the electromagnetic was something that was part of the landscape. And yeah, that was really good because it felt to me that I wasn't just doing,
going back to your first question, something that was personal, but I was doing something that had a kind of negotiation with preferences and desires that had been offered by people through kind of ethnographic research. Does that answer a little bit? question. Another one from the Zoom chat from Luke. Hi, Angus. Your talk was a delight. I would like to ask if your field notes are somehow curated or you treat them as a found object when you use them in your work. Maybe there was a change that happened over time?
question mark thank you that's that's a great question so all of the questions have been amazing that and they've all been really attentive to what I'm trying to tune into and I think that yes there has been a change over time and what I'm interested in is trying to if I've used this constraint particularly the 100 words constraint but not only that as a way of trying to stop me writing in a banal way. What I'm now trying to do is what I think Luke's question is getting at, which is to rid myself of the curatorial imposition of my own idea of what kind of unnatural writing as a riff on nature writing might be. So I think that I'm really interested in things
like I pointed to earlier on, like the, how did I, how did I come up with these file names, which was something that I wrote when I left the Navy tunnel and was sitting beneath a PA speaker, just writing down the names of the files so that I wouldn't forget what they were. And does this represent something that's like a field note? And in some of this book that we used as a kind of catalyst for this afternoon, some of the field notes are just lists of file names. And I think that, of course, there's a curatorial ear at work still.
I'm still listening for something in particular. But I'm quite interested in what happened in terms of this time stamp here. So you can see where all of these things were recorded. They have dates, they have times. I'm telling you they have locations. They have a kind of weight in data terms that gives you a sense of what they were, how they were recorded. And I think that if I can get further away from the curatorial and more into the less curatorial, whatever word that might be, then I think Luke's question is a really powerful one in terms of what's changing and what has changed. I mean, I still, yeah, because I've been doing these things since,
you know, for a long time. So the book represents 21 years of making these field notes. So it's a relatively long time to work in this way, which feels to me like quite obvious. conventional, but maybe it isn't. So yes, I think the more I can strike out the curatorial impetus, the better. And the more I can start to pay attention to some of the technologies of recording, like how you name a file, or how you place those files in a folder structure. These are things I'm really interested in, and I wonder how much further you can go and to see these as part of a note-taking recording activity that
doesn't obviously fit into what some of the older conventions of field recording might have asked us to focus on. I like the fifth one on that list. I like the fifth one on that list, the helicopter, then it just said shit at the end. You can't get away from the curatorial. It doesn't say that, does it? Oh, shit! That's fantastic. Yeah, and it's misspelled too. Is it? We actually both have a question, so shall I keep the microphone and pass it over? I'm sorry. Thank you, Angus.
That was such a fantastic presentation. presentation and inadvertently answered a lot of questions that I've been ruminating over for a while and maybe raised quite a few others as well on top of that. But I wanted to ask you specifically about something you mentioned towards the end, this term cortisol listening. It really stood out to me because so often my experience of listening in different modes where I'm either performing or making field recordings I appreciate your self-reflexivity on the ego aspect of it and the chef's kiss but so often
there are artefacts that are not present when re-listening to the material that there's almost like a sense of loss did I imagine hearing all of this stuff in the field that's just no longer present when I'm listening back. And I just wanted to ask you about where you think those artefacts go and whether or not they can be recalled in ways other than, for example, treating the field recording, processing the field recording. Because it sounds more like something that's embodied rather than auditory. Does that make sense?
It does make a lot of sense, yeah. And I think, so I want to do something very quickly to, before I answer Reid's question, and the first thing is that a lot of this kind of working through has not only been having lots of conversations with Mark Vita Wright and Rory and Eka and others here, but has also been very much informed by a long history of working with students who I feel have been really fundamental to what Luke's question was about how have I changed what I'm doing. Well, I've changed what I'm doing by answering questions like this and being inspired by seeing student work, hearing student work, and engaging with it. So that's my first kind of caveat. The second thing is I definitely
think that something is happening at least with me in terms of the moment of recording, and there being a remainder that's not captured in that recording. a kind of excess that must go somewhere and must, can't only be available to make others have access to it through the rather clunky field notes that I've been reading to you this afternoon. And I think that although I commit fully to being against both cinema are music. Nonetheless, although I don't process, I certainly think that people with much more sophisticated technical and listening acumen than me can use processing as a way of capturing
what is missing in the recording. And one of the people who I have been on field recording trips with in Japan is Eseke Yanagasawa. And Eseke Yanagasawa had something that I think is a really important way for me, as alongside all of the students and colleagues who've given me all of this kind of rich inspiration to change the way I do things, Eseke had this idea that actually connects back to that Norwegian photographer Ina Hansen's work that started me on this process of taking field notes into a different direction. And what SK said was his field recordings seek to record the moment before he pressed record.
His field recordings seek to recreate the moment before he pressed record. And I think maybe that's something that can maybe not provide the remainder, maybe it can't recover the excess, but it can give us a sense of how to do it, of how to let go of there being a recording that has a frame that's related to when your little finger pressed on the red button and you saw a light start to flash and a duration start to elapse on a recorder screen. So maybe there's something there about the commitment to the temporal and the frame that has to be relinquished. and yeah so I think in answer to that question I think one of the things that is
is at stake here is that if I was a better field recordist or if I was a better sound designer many of these questions may not be as urgent as they are to me now because I think you could overcome some of these apparent deficiencies by being better with the microphone or being better with the Pro Tools or digital software. But I've decided to work with the unprocessed, and I feel that it's too late now to change. I think you're being a little self-deprecating there about your talents. I just want to respond very briefly, and then I'll pass the microphone over. Firstly, to say that I am, in fact, so old that I have extensive experience of using microtrack recorders.
so you're not the only dinosaur that remembers those awful devices and did I make a note about the other thing I would say? No I didn't I'm going to keep that one to myself maybe that's the artefact of the cortisol question I mean this cortisol listening I have no idea if this is any scientific basis for this at all but it just feels like this must be what's happening because so many people talk about this thing not being present when you play it back. So I've invented this kind of hybrid thing where I try and play things back in the cave that I recorded them. So I'm thinking, maybe that's what it is. What I'm actually hearing is the doubling up, the reinforcing of sound, what's coming in through my headphones and what's coming
in through my headphones. But then that doesn't seem to make any difference. Thank you. And Mark, there's someone with the hand up at the back as well. Hi. I just had a question about, I guess, what kind of considerations or maybe even precautions you keep in mind when documenting or capturing something like the May Day Parade, where the documentation of that could pose a risk to the subjects? That's a really, really good question and it's a question which I think I half-heartedly seek to address by making my recording operations as visible as possible. because it would be quite easy, and some people do,
to use binaural headphones to make it look as if you were listening to something while you were doing it. But I think it is really important to set out your stall and to make the recording part of the recording, so to almost invite people to interact and engage. And it's definitely the case that at those May Day festivals, some of what's happening is through a PA, so it's deliberately designed for an audience and it's something that people have named to the extent that there's a running order of people talking at great speed and volume about urgent political
matters but there's also the extent to which there are others who don't even want to be a kind of ambient presence in a recording and I think that that's something that has to be respected as much as possible. I know that Mark Peter Wright's work is very good about these questions of consent and how deeply they go because they're questions of consent that don't just happen within an intra-human environment, they happen also with the more than more than human within other worlds too. So there are kind of ethics that exceed the festival and there are ethics that attach to recording all kinds of different things.
I find those ethical considerations really difficult. And I know that the university has an ethical research policy that attaches to all kinds of different activities that happen and it has a kind of set of protocols associated with it. And those protocols are really complicated. But I'm not sure that they would allow for the kind of non-consensual recording, as some of my recordings have done in the past. Including ones, let's be clear, where I'm actually naming some of the people whose voices we hear in the recording.
So I think it's an ongoing conversation and I don't really know what else to do. I've got a couple more. I just want to check, are you okay Angus energy wise? I feel like you've been on the spot for a long time. Yes, I'm fading but I'm very happy to have this question. We'll do one or two more. Hi. Hi. Thank you. Thank you. So you've done a lot of things and I'm curious which one felt like it added something powerful to your path like gave you a lot of momentum and that one how you felt in approaching executing it whether any and how you navigated any
type of limiting beliefs or anything like that? Yeah, that's an amazing question. And I'm not going to be able to do it justice with this answer, but I'm going to try. I think it's definitely the case that there are projects that I've been involved with that have particularly touched me in terms of have connected so many simultaneous elements that I'm interested in. And having done that have created a particular space for me to be able to reflect back on them.
But actually, the two projects, two recordings, if we just think about recordings, that were, the ones that I go back to frequently are both recordings that have almost no public presence. I don't think you could Google either of these and find them. And equally, as well as having no public presence, those recordings were ones that were not inadvertent but almost accidental. So they were just things that happened at the time. So one of them I was commissioned by a photographer to make a soundtrack
for an installation in the Vauxhall pumping station. exhibition, and it was a day of multiple chef's kisses when I installed this work, which was not credited at all in any of the exhibition literature. And it was one of those times where I had a day to work with the material in the space. So this space is a huge reverberant hall with a small building adjacent to this where they kept the coal that charged the power station which had as its function powering a hydraulic system that operated things like train turntables and a stage that raised up in the theatres in London. So this was a hydraulic
power plant and I did this soundtrack and I have never done anything that good in my life. It was absolutely amazing, I just couldn't believe it. It became so good that I went back to it several times and was conscious that this wasn't my own work anymore. Even though all of the acoustic elements had been recorded by me, they'd been composed by me, the speaker set up had been organised by me and I'd worked with the technicians to get everything just so, actually at that point it wasn't mine anymore, it was something else's, it was the buildings, it was the photographers, it wasn't mine. So that's a project I'm really fond of and I've never captured that again, This is something that's going back into the 2000s. And then another recording was another recording, funnily enough, that happened with a recorder
just in my pocket. And it was a recorder that was registering my body's movements as I went to a market. And I've got a long-standing interest in markets, but I've never done anything with them. So I've got lots of recordings of being in markets, of people buying and selling. and I've always had this idea of doing something with them, but actually I wonder whether there's an active resistance to making this a work and instead wanting to hold on to it as something special that's outside the process of making, that's just something that I do. And obviously the next question is immediately, so why do you record it then, Angus? But maybe it's to do with this cortisol listening.
It's something about making a recording as a way of focusing on a moment that allows me to be very present and embodied and have all of those experiences. But actually, although that recording is really special to me, and I do listen to it and think about its conditions, I've never used it for anything. But in terms of answering your question with which of the projects that I've worked on, that I've showed you sections of this afternoon that are important, definitely the Zawawa project with Rupert Cox and Kozo Hiramatsu is really important to me for all of its mistakes and faults and regrets
when I see the film again and it's almost unbearable to watch the film again and I'm at the moment I'm in the process of making an album to go with the project which will be another work that's coming out of it. And yeah so that's one of the projects that I have most fondly attached to my kind of my spirit and I think that's a fondness that comes from the people that I, not only the co-researchers, but the people like Yogi-san, the person who he made the biography about in the cave in Tsunabi near Kadena Air Base. So I think people were so generous with allowing us into their worlds that that will be a very
difficult project to beat. Not that it's a competition in terms of that kind of emotional relationship. Does that answer your question? Yes, thank you. Thank you. So, I'm never good at making the question, but I think it's something about, we were this morning in the MA about memory as a form of capture, like memory as a form of recording, or like why different forms of recording are understood differently. So that's kind of
with me as I'm asking this question now but I'm thinking a lot about this excess that doesn't fit in the field note or maybe like lives between the plurality of field notes or it kind of lives with you or you have these experiences of notating as a way of being present and maybe going back to the notes as a way of activating that excess in you and then I was thinking about so thinking of this thing of like notes and the relationship between note making and recording but then I was thinking about the relationship between reading and listening and
and I know that you're always the first reader in a way or the first listener of your own uh notes but I yeah I was just thinking something about singing about like practices of reading or listening that or like like the way Tina Camp talks about like listening to images and listening for all of these registers of of what exceeds the the frame of the form and just uh and i know you've kind of shared that in your whole presentation but i was just thinking about uh the other listeners um and because i was kind of like why is it a horror like you know maybe it's
a horror for you but like is it a horror for anyone else yeah but i don't know so just something about when the listeners multiply. Just allow me to write a couple of things. Thank you, Kenneth. I think definitely there is a space between the field note and the field recording. There's also the space between legibility and audibility and equally the space may be between the recordist and the audience. So there are multiple axes that intersect, I think, around that point. And I think Tina Kemp is definitely a person who can help us be guided into that space,
into the different spaces. Because I think that one thing that maybe goes back to what Diana's question was about that attaches to what your question is about, is that some of the excess is not a poetic excess or even an excess that lies between the visual and the audio or between the record and the memory. But it's an excess of pain and an excess of trauma. And I think that one of the experiences of working on the Zawawa project, which for me, maybe I fluffed it this afternoon, because what I wanted to talk about is just as the sound of the sugar cane, Zawawa, can mean so many different things, to so many different people, so too can the sound of the surf mean multiple things as
well. So that surf that we opened with, the surf of what looks visually like a picture postcard, foliage fringe coast with white sand, is a place of extraordinary trauma. that's not present in that recording, and not present fully in my field notes, but is present I think in the interview material that goes alongside both of those things. And I think that that's maybe another dimension that's not been brought to the surface here because I wanted to focus particularly and egotistically on myself here, but all of these
projects the Norwegian project Arctic Auditoris the Okinawan project Zawawa bring in other listeners and those other listeners have very different perspectives these are the perspectives of myself and I think that our question about the other listener becomes a question for the 14 interviews that begin this archive books publication before we get our voice in and maybe this goes back to what Luke said about curating we're still curating that we're still creating curating their priority in the publication but at least people in English and Japanese script are getting to experiences that are different to ours before they hear what we have to say and I think that's a listening experience that's registered outside of a field note it's registered
in Norway and one of the things that appears in those field notes and it's something that was drawn to my attention by our collaborator Kozo Hiramatsu is when people hear something like the transport plane lifting off of a nocturnal Kaduna airbase and heading out they're not just hearing contemporaneous agitation of molecules but they're also hearing historic agitations of molecules and with Okinawa being an island where some of the most long-lived people in the world inhabit, what people like Yogi are hearing when a plane takes off is not just a Hercules C-130 transport plane but it's also a V-29 military bomber that was contributing to the Typhoon of
Steele on April 1st 1945. So the memory of sound becomes a memory that agitates the presence of sound in the contemporary world. So I definitely think that is an active component of this. I can allude to it like I am now but I think the testimony of others is the testimony where it can live most strongly. The horror of my speech and the horror of the voice, at least my voice, is a horror that I've had for almost, well for as long as I've been able to hear my voice. And it might be like an equivalent of a cortisol listening, it might be a subcategory of cortisol
listening which is hearing yourself without your skull and that might be the the the horror that i hear that voice and it's strange that my job is about speaking in a way but what am i inflicting on people if i can't even listen to my own voice so the horror for me is real though because it's kind of it's that and i'm being flippant but i think there is also a horror in the voice becoming material or resource that's manipulated and used in different settings without clear understanding of the pain that caused that voice to enunciate in the first place. Which is a bit of a downer
to leave things out but I think that's me just about reached the end of my own tether. So thank you so much everyone for coming this whole to do. Thank you Mark for setting this up thank you to echo and Rory and yeah thanks for those amazing questions they're going to live with me for a long time thank you thank you