Sounds From Dangerous Places:
An Interview With Peter Cusack
By Angus Carlyle
Peter Cusack is a sound artist/recordist and musician with
special interests in environmental sound and acoustic ecology. He
is particularly interested in global patterns of sonic change created
by migrations of people who make and create them and by new
technologies. In 1998 he initiated the on-going ‘Your Favourite London Sound’ project, which aims to find out what Londoners find
positive in their city’s soundscape.
The first question I’d like to ask about the Sound From
Dangerous Places project is what, for you, constitutes a dangerous place?
My original idea was that these were places of major environmental
damage—not necessarily a place that is dangerous to one personally
(although it may be that too). Essentially the project came out of
specific journeys that I’d undertaken, particularly one to Azerbaijan.
There I went to the oil fields that are just outside Baku, the capital
city; these are the oldest oil fields in the world and are consequently
one of the most polluted spots on earth. The area, called Bibi Heybat,
is beside the sea, so both the sea and the land are saturated with oil.
It is also near relatively large towns and villages. Refugees, who are
denied land elsewhere, are forced to live and graze animals in the oil
fields. Its impact on local people is extremely marked.
What motivated you to explore these places?
Again, it came out of that experience. Despite what I’ve just said
about the pollution and related problems, it is also one of the most
photogenic and sonogenic places that I’ve ever been to. From an
aesthetic or artistic point of view it looks and sounds fantastic. The
sound comes from the fact that it is still a working oil field, with
hundreds of nodding-donkey pumps going continually, each of
which hums and squeaks in its own little way. They are often quite
close together. So the atmosphere is of working machines humming
and squeaking repetitively for as long as they can stand up, and some
have been running for decades. So to walk around there is a sonic
experience. It is not that far off sounding like a genuine piece of
electro-acoustic music in its own right; in fact my recordings of the
oil fields have been mistaken for compositions. So it sounds great.
It looks great, too, many of the structures have been there for such a
long time that they have decayed and fallen into spectacular heaps of
metal, either rusty or blackened with oil. The light, too, is special: the
sky is blue, the sea is blue and the soil is yellow where it’s not black
and the various structures are reflected in pools of oil waste. So it is a
very beautiful site if you ignore all the social, political and economic
things that can be said.
What were the other locations that you have chosen to investigate under the broad theme of Sound in Dangerous Places?
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The main issue for me after experiencing the oil-fields was the
extreme dichotomy between my aesthetic pleasure at seeing and
hearing this place and the knowledge that it was extremely polluted,
created health problems for the local people, had a major impact on
Azerbaijan’s social and political system, the structure of its economy
and exerted a wider, global, effect in terms of oil supply. I wanted to
see if other dangerous places possessed this dichotomy so immediately I thought of Chernobyl. Another place is the region of Eastern
Turkey where the source rivers of the Tigris and Euphrates rise in
the mountains. Nineteen dams are to be constructed here. Dams
have a devastating impact on local microclimates; in other words,
they destroy vegetation and change rain or snowfall patterns making
it a dangerous place from an environmental and ecological perspective. It is also a dangerous place from the point of view of there being
a low-level war between Kurdish guerrillas and the Turkish Army.
In the UK, as well, there are ‘dangerous places’. For example,
in North Wales, where fallout from Chernobyl fell, there are still
restrictions imposed on farmers in order that they can rid their sheep
of radioactive caesium. This is twenty years later and the restrictions
will still probably be in place in another 20 years from now. Other
aspects of dangerousness in the UK can be located in the vicinity
of major military installations, like the American air bases of East
Anglia. The interesting thing is that military bases are also people
exclusion zones, which means that they effectively become wildlife
reserves. So even though the place may be littered with unexploded
ordinance, nonetheless, they are havens for wildlife, which is reflected in the soundscape. Another ‘dangerous place’ I recorded in the
UK is the borough of Uttlesford, where Stansted airport is located. It
is the borough that produces the most domestic carbon dioxide per
UK household. And yet, when you go there, you hear church bells
and the usual affluent stockbroker belt cum rural soundscape.
If all dangerous places were characterised by an absence of
sound then you could say that dangerous places are associated
with a particular, eerily silent soundscape. From what you are
saying, it is not as simple as that; dangerous places have very
diverse soundscapes.
Yes, that’s right. In Turkey, for example, there is an absence of sound.
With the de-forestation connected to the dams, the wildlife disappears, the land is flooded so there is no low-level farming activity,
the bee keeping has to go elsewhere and the villages are inundated so
the people and their sounds depart, too. Instead of the roaring of the
river you get a gentle lapping of the lake. In Chernobyl, the opposite
has happened to the soundscape, the wildlife has come in to replace
the evacuated people. Nature seems to have recovered far beyond
anyone’s expectations and animals that haven’t been seen there for a
hundred years are now back.
Does the diversity of soundscapes associated with dangerous
places pose particular problems for you when you come to present this material?
Very much so, because getting the idea across requires explanation
in addition to the recorded sounds themselves. That explanation can
be visual or spoken or written. This project has presented me with
the challenge of using media that I previously haven’t employed; this
is as yet an unsolved problem.
One of the other consequences of going to Azerbaijan was meeting Ursula Biemann there. She is a Swiss video artist, more particularly, a geo-political artist, whose interests have been in borders:
in the mechanisms involved in the legal and illegal transport of
resources and people, in the differences in economic development
either side of borderlines and in the philosophical, sociological and
cultural issues that underpin those processes. We collaborated on
two projects, one on the architecture of Baku as a city and another,
The Black Sea Files, an exploration of the Baku/Tbilisi/Ceyhan oil
pipeline that has been constructed to bring Caspian oil to the west.
This is very much her piece—my role was in finalising the video
sound—but working with her was extremely valuable in introducing
me to areas of geo-political art that I wasn’t aware of before.
Looking at such work didn’t change the way I hear the soundscape
but they did persuade me to make a wider range of recordings,
particularly interviews with people. The whole thing has turned me
into more of a journalist than I’d ever imagined I’d be! Moreover,
these experiences inspired me to conduct much more detailed
research into the contexts of the places I was exploring, producing even
more material to deal with. So it has been a blessing and a curse, but
ultimately a good thing.
How would you relate your Dangerous Places project to your
previous work?
Almost all of my soundscape work has been focused on place and
the way we respond to place through sound. One of my previous
projects, The Favourite Sounds of London was quite a detailed attempt to get at what Londoners found positive about the London
soundscape. Sounds from Dangerous Places is kind of a logical extension from there. It is not quite the same since it is more overtly
political and deals with more global structures, yet, because it is me,
it still has the sonic bias.
What will happen to the focus on positive sounds that was
represented in some of your previous work?
The Favourite Sounds of London was started in 1998 and is now
almost nine years old. In 2005, I had the opportunity to do the
same project in Beijing. There is also a group originally based in
the School of the Art Institute of Chicago who are extending the
Favourite Sounds idea to Chicago (http://favoritechicagosounds.
com). So similar projects are being pursued in different cities. Because
the same questions are being asked, the material is comparable and
that has generated a lot of interesting, often unexpected, results. For
example, the way that people spoke of sound in Beijing seemed noticeably different from the way that Londoners described their relationship with sound. In China, they were more poetic or metaphorical in their appreciation of what sounds of the city meant to them.
This alerted me to the cultural differences that there must be in the
way we think and feel about our sound environment. In one sense,
of course, those differences should have been entirely expected, but
it has taken me fifty years to appreciate the point!
One of the things we are told, from a variety of sources is that as
the world globalises, it becomes more homogenous. That may be
true of the visual field, if we think about signage, for example, but
what about the field of sound?
I would say that the more I travel the more homogenous sounds do
seem, although that process is by no means complete and there are
vast and interesting local differences which one can only hope are
maintained. The most ubiquitous sound now is traffic noise and that
sounds pretty much the same wherever you are—although there are
local variations even in that. As traffic noise increases and becomes
dominant, generally, homogeneity increases and there is a parallel
with new communications technologies. There are mobile phones
and electronic bleeps of all kinds that you hear all over the world.
Traffic also masks out many of the smaller sounds that give places
their character.
Music is seemingly becoming more homogenous. Drum
machines, for example, have conquered the world and while these
may be producing different rhythms, the individual sounds themselves are unfortunately similar. The same can be said of synthesisers.
Do you have a new place in mind that you are looking forward
to exploring?
I’ve decided to stop travelling for a while in order to use the material
I’ve already accumulated. The next task is to create new work from
this material.
That said, I’d like to travel the length of the Tigris or Euphrates River.
One of the reasons is that these waterways are historic in terms of
their relationship with the origins of organised human habitation.
Everyone knows of the terrible political situation in the Middle
East; yet less known is the issue of water, which in a hot, dry area, is
possibly more of a significant resource to the local populations than
oil. At the other end of those rivers are the deltas that flow into the
Persian Gulf and the Shat Al-Arab; these areas are home to the Marsh
Arab peoples, terribly persecuted under Saddam Hussein. The United Nations Environmental Programme has attempted to restore
the marshes that, under Hussein’s instructions had been drained to
twenty per cent of their former size. They have succeeded up to a
point. However what impedes more progress in the restoration is
now not anything to do with Iraq, but rather with how much water
Turkey and Syria allow to flow down the waterways. What interests me is that the watersheds present very clear-cut ecological and
environmental systems from source to mouth, which have political,
cultural, sociological effects all the way down the line. As a complete,
self-contained system it has many interlocking elements that allow
one to make general points about the relationship between ecology
and human society. These, I think, are the issues of this time; and
while these issues can be explored from a variety of perspectives, for
me, it is sound that is the way in.
This interview also appeared in Autumn Leaves: Sound and the
Environment in Artistic Practice, a book edited by Angus Carlyle,
published in 2007 by Double Entendre and Creative Research into
Sound Arts Practice (http://crisap.org). See review on page 48.
Angus Carlyle is a writer, academic, and artist who explores
the interfaces between technology, culture and creativity. He is
Co-Director of CRiSAP.
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