Angus Carlyle

The local Angus Carlyle wing is compact but spans two distinct periods: the CCRU-adjacent essay “Amortal Kombat” and later research on environmental sound, field notes, and situated listening. Its interview with Peter Cusack concerns acoustic ecology and “dangerous places”: damaged landscapes whose machines can be sonically compelling even as pollution harms the people living among them (Angus Carlyle/Texts/Sounds From Dangerous Places An Interview With Peter Cusack.pdf, p. 1). The oil fields outside Baku make this contradiction explicit, coupling electro-acoustic intensity to petroleum infrastructure, displacement, and illness.

Carlyle is the interviewer and Cusack the respondent, so the project's examples and first-person judgments should not be reassigned to Carlyle. Carlyle's questions make a different contribution: they press on what constitutes danger, whether diverse soundscapes can carry that category, how sound alone fails to convey context, and what globalization does to local sonic difference. Cusack's replies then expand soundscape recording into geopolitical research on borders, oil pipelines, uneven development, and the movement of resources and people (Angus Carlyle/Texts/Sounds From Dangerous Places An Interview With Peter Cusack.pdf, pp. 1–2).

“Amortal Kombat”: disciplined bodies and arcade becomings

“Amortal Kombat” stages a match between the Western Bodily Organisation (WBO) and the body without organs (BwO). Boxing's training, weight classes, musculature, and governing organization become one machine for producing a bounded male organism: a body isolated in its “lonely Being,” armored against intensities that might shift it toward becoming (Angus Carlyle/Texts/Essays/Amortal Kombat.pdf, p. 1). The essay's punning typography and boxing rounds do not decorate a prior argument; they make conceptual conflict proceed as an illustrated fight card.

Bruce Lee initially appears as a route out through formlessness, openness to multiple styles, and movement compared to water. Yet Carlyle's second round shows that threat being recaptured when martial practice becomes an internal discipline of mind over body and when animal movement is reduced to imitation (Angus Carlyle/Texts/Essays/Amortal Kombat.pdf, p. 2). The opposition is therefore not Western boxing versus an intrinsically liberating Eastern martial art; either can harden into organization, mastery, and form.

The third round moves from the trained fighter to the arcade avatar. Mortal Kombat's selectable bodies and elemental effects let the virtual fighter materialize “in the middle” rather than at the origin of a stable effort, while drum and bass supplies a continuous-immanence analogue for dismantling the organism's strata (Angus Carlyle/Texts/Essays/Amortal Kombat.pdf, p. 3). Carlyle names the resulting practice “detrimentalism” or “grooveriding”: motion, desubjectification, and rhythm used to diagonalize between mind's command over meat and the organism's defensive armoring (Angus Carlyle/Texts/Essays/Amortal Kombat.pdf, p. 3). This places the early Carlyle beside cyberpositive bodily experimentation without collapsing it into his later environmental-sound research.

Sound, Place and Memory

The Sound, Place and Memory project connected the sound portal to 2001: A Space Odyssey, its HAL-inspired design and LCC's Stanley Kubrick Archive. Its workshops treated listening as material inquiry: students built microphones to register vibration through metal, concrete and liquids, then combined those recordings with voice, processing and material from the archive (Angus Carlyle/Audio/Angus Carlyle & Iris Garrelfs about the Sound, Place, Memory project.mp3, 00:55–02:32) speaker unattributed.

The interview presents sound as a medium open to divergent disciplinary trajectories, including a visual-art practice that handles it as material. Those approaches can “make sound meaningful for yourself and to others”; the point is not a single hierarchy of expertise but an accessible field in which lived experience counts (Angus Carlyle/Audio/Angus Carlyle & Iris Garrelfs about the Sound, Place, Memory project.mp3, 03:47–05:14) speaker unattributed.

Field notes against sonic exceptionalism

The recorded lecture proposes that written field notes can function as field recordings and that recordings can in turn become notes. This reciprocity expands sonic research beyond captured audio toward notebooks, voices, constraints and other forms of situated notation (Angus Carlyle/Audio/Seminars/Visiting Lecture Angus Carlyle 09 03 2023.mp3, 05:41–07:19). It also resists “sonic exceptionalism”: a sound can carry several histories and meanings without becoming the privileged measure to which every other medium must be reduced (Angus Carlyle/Audio/Seminars/Visiting Lecture Angus Carlyle 09 03 2023.mp3, 66:42–67:19).

The lecture calls this “cortisol listening”: the bodily distortion that occurs when an adrenalized recordist hears a site as an exceptionally perfect recording while its violence, history and other qualities recede. Field notes preserve that compromised state so it can be examined instead of naturalized as transparent listening (Angus Carlyle/Audio/Seminars/Visiting Lecture Angus Carlyle 09 03 2023.mp3, 68:02–69:42). This extends Carlyle's existing page from environmental sound toward a reflexive account of the recorder's apparatus, body and political position.