Oats as the vessel for change. Oats + core imagines what oats can give to the memetic complex of internet and rave cultures. Oats are wholesome. People are ashamed of the wholesome. They rightly criticize it. But are they also afraid of bodily functions?
Currently I am finding MIDI of old Irish melodies, and producing them above industrial bass, with deconstructed reggaeton and club rhythms.
Notes on a lecture from David Toop and Lawrence English on acoustic approaches to ecology.
Toop and English discuss technology as a fascillitator for measuring and understanding the world. Certain technology can “expand the bandwidth we are in contact with.” We can tune in to frequencies that are previously inaudible as a way to reveal something about the world. These tools are tools for navigation on a micro or macro-perspecitve. As an approch to ecology, Toop and English beleive that by revealing previously inaudible information we can change the way people relate to the world.
Our capacities for field recording and acoustic ecology is shaped by the technologies we have available. During the discussion, capacity is discussed in regards to listening. When the capacity has widened, we tend to listen to the flaws of previous work. The flaw becomes more audible as the capacity has changed. For example, many old recorders had to cut out low frequencies due to machine noise. Only certain voices succeeded in hitting the right notes to be audible through the machine. The capacities of technology affect the personality of the media. Toop says that “with every stage of technology we become adjusted to the new normal. It becomes neutral. Then 10-15 years later we see it’s personality.” It is interesting to examine how these personalities are fetishized are marketed by the fashion and music industries. Contemporary artists seem more forward focused.
English discusses his field recording practices. Field recording can be a technical craft, but also artistic. English admires the personal touch that is audible in the recorded. These are imperfections that are audible to the listener, that perhaps create intimacy. “Field recording is about sharing a moment… the listener’s listening… coming to the world through someone else’s ears. “
In field recording we become concious of those events often missed. Technology can expand our experience of the world. Recording is to take a space with you. It can examine our potential of what it means to be human.
There was no time for me to ask my question: How do you feel about the sourcing of materials for field recording equipment and can that contradict the ambitions of acoustic ecology?
Toop and English are passionate about the non-human lifeworlds we interact with. Much of their work could be reduced to ‘climate activism’, but it is more complex that that. I appreciate their ethics and I am curious about how they approach these contradictions of acoustic ecology and the sourcing of materials for field recording. Technology can help us; technology can hinder and destroy us. Perhaps by remembering it as a tool we can use technologies without getting lost in their seduction.
“There is a need for a more activated way of listening to our environment, which can lead to greater awareness of what’s around us. Artists can help with this. Works that help us to experience sound deeply, making us aware of our ears and bodies which listen all the time, are more necessary than ever.” Kamaru.
Joesph Kamaru is a Berlin based sound artist. He is an active field recordist and discusses noise and listening through his work. He is interested in stimulating awareness of the environment through creative composition.
“Within the complex sound specter of our environments and surroundings, sounds are always immersive, proximal, and constantly pushing through our bodies. There is a temporal flux with the sounds of our habitus and daily lives, which most often goes unnoticed and ignored.” Kamaru
His work tends to be surrounded by intellectual narratives. The sound is a medium to carry ideas. For example, he uses subtle variations over time in synthesizers to explore duration, time warp and accelerration. The slower movement of this music can be read as a critique of the hyper-accelerated states of our time. How do we live today, and how can we contrast that pace using sound and music? There is the intellectual narrative of the sound as text, but the complexity of feeling and being is beyond the compartmentalization of language. I feel a sense of peace and clarity as I listen. It is a new intricate peace, rested in the beauty we reach through discomfort. A contemporary peace that remains critical and present, and can never be a full peace. It is an evolution of the new age peace that failed to be critical.
Kamaru has to explain his work to the world with a formula of text to access people, institutions and ways of earning a living. He commented he never directed his music. He would sit in his studio and create, to then analyse after. As my process of composition is quite similiar, I wonder are we objective as creators to translate our music into text? Perhaps it is always an estimation. Perhaps the quality of the music is not ours to claim. I have noticed, when I add exciting words to my work people seem more interested and engaged.
Recently I’m imagining the cultural exchanges of ancient music. How, by studying them, can we grow solidarity between fabricated borders? How do we respect the identities of national populations and their cultures, while exploring it’s place in a wider sea of exchange?
How can we hold onto the past and our ancient knowledge, without perpetuating their systems of oppression?
I’m imagining a folk revial through industrial sound. Can we find imagine a folk music before feudalism, before our tongues were tied and imaginations dimmed?
Perhaps the answer is fantasy, to an imagined past , for construcive futures. I aim to plant the aesthetics of oats into hardcore queer musics.
The key to access the psychotropic forms of being is to reduce that noise we have agency over. By reducing noise, the desaturated environment starts to brighten and we become fascinated by a colourful sentient reality. I’ve found that reducing listening time to recorded music is a way to amplify the music of everyday soundscapes.
We live in a sea. We are soaked in media and images, overlapping symbols and language. We are distracted and cannot focus. Lots of people remain in the sea. Music is often here, an anaesthetic to calm oneself and take oneself inside when the world is a scary place. Living in London requires a gentle anaesthetic to cope with the stimuli. I cannot embrace my fellow neighbours as we march through the tunnels underneath. The city goes deep and blocks the sky with it’s pollution.
How do we reduce noise? Is some noise harmful in it’s materiality? Or is it in the way we approach noise that we harm ourselves? Stoics would say we have free will in how we relate to the world. Perhaps if you bury yourself somewhere deep in the intellect. Some frequencies of sound make the body stressed. Some sounds are too loud. Reducing external noise requires massive changes in the way we live and organise.
The inner world reflects the outer world. The binary of inner/outer is only useful for certain theory and communication. Inner noise often comes from those bodies in pain. Bodies distract themselves from traumas too painful to sit with. We think in words about other places. Is everyone in pain? It seems like pain is unfairly distributed across our species. Some demographics of people experience more harm and danger in the world than others. Some carry more trauma that has been passed over generations. How do we claim presence as a solution, when it’s access is inequal?
Healing occurs in safe spaces. Everyone deserves to heal. Everybody needs someone and deserves protection. Sometimes the safety occurs in a gated community, or absorbed in virtual symbols and images.
I believe healing also occurs outside, and in the reduction of noise we have agency over we begin to learn to be present and comfortable with the environment. The colours begin to lift and in their brightness they heal too. They pull the fascinated body further along a path of recovery.
How do we participate in the collective path of healing? I try to take responsibility of my own pain and to stay present with the world. I reduce those behaviours that numb me when I am able to. Then give attention outwards, and try to accept and support whatever position a friend might be at. To access beauty we must go through pain.
Ugly healing world.
I am interested in Hannah Kemp-Welch’s project “The Right To Record.”
When applying for the disability benefit ‘PIP’ (personal independence payment), disabled people and those with long term health conditions are forced to go to a private company for assessment and validation of their own disability. They are forced to perform their disability in the presence of an assessor. A disability news network reported that that the assessors ‘lied, ignored written evidence and dishonestly reported the results of physical examinations’.
It is presumed that the assessors want to limit the access to PIP. Is this a prescription from higher forces; a government who performs social welfare for aesthetic purposes, but does not actually care about the wellbeing of citizens? And ideology. Within our systems there exists the stigma on disabled people who are deemed as a burden. It is a common inversion of responsibility; if anyone cares to witness a disabled person and their struggle, they might learn that the disability often arises from external limitations; a society, architecture and bureaucracy constructed for “able”-bodied, “legal” citizens.
My mother has MS and now mostly uses a mobility scooter to navigate Tramore, the small town in Ireland where she lives. The scooter has small wheels and it struggles to cross the many potholes and degraded sidewalks. When she first had the scooter, I was able to finally see the apathy and ableism present in the streets I had walked on for years previously. Her struggle is silent unless she can speak. Disabled people must be listened to.
Hannah started this project to give a voice to those silenced people. This is artist as community worker. How does one facilitate, and work with a community they are also estranged from by education, language and aesthetics? Hannah discusses the tensions of aesthetics between a white educated arts student and a working class community. She said that the art was not the final product, a 30 minute audio file, but instead it was the connection with the group.
Community work is a fascinating alternative to individual art projects; ethically they seem juxtapositioned. One can do both.
The Knife were a Swedish electronic music duo prolific from 2001 to 2013. Their music is thouroughly political; for example, the name of their last show “Post-Colonial Gender Politics Come First, Music Comes Second”. I listened to some of their music and I am glad politics comes first.
In 2013 they released their most recent album, “Shaking The Habitual” along with a flaming hot manifesto. It blurs between hard fact and surrealist poetics.
“Everybody is always desiring already imagined things.”
“Electronics is just one place in the body.”
“We have made some decisions.”
“We choose process over everything else.”
bODY, Unknown. Music as a medium for politics. Imagining possible futures, new ways of thinking, being. Also hard politics with insensitivity to subtlety, as a recipe for jarring music?
Thinking about the subjectivity of listening and the different modes of conciousness.
Causal listening: listening for the source of the sound,
source.
Semantic listening: listening to what is being said by the sound, meaning.
Reduced listening: listening to the traits of the sound itself,
content.
In reduced listening one cannot explore the depths of a sound in a single listen. The sound must be encountered multiple times to hear it’s “descriptive inventory.” – Michel Chion. Chion states that the sound must also be recorded to carry the exact same pitch, tone, and timbre.
Acousmatic sound is a sound that has no visually identifiable cause. To experience this we can close our eyes to listen.
Beyond the sound in itself, there is the human percieving the sound. Perception is personal so humans listen differently.
Ingrid said the brain echoes sounds heard from the world. It can be the song in your head when you wake up. Can we create new sounds internally? What is the internal voice that sings? I can actively play the same sounds I hear outside of me in my head, but it is less pixelated. Perhaps it is only an idea of the sound. But the idea is strong enough to move, create emotion. I would like to explore this inner ‘voice’ and how it relates and is affected by the environment. People who don’t like pop music will be seen nodding their heads to chart music, as if they are hypnotised by a force. The secret force of chart music is to accelerate, numb and distract. Can we use music to have the opposite affect, to bring people into the world, into it’s mundane timeless beauty?
The location of a melody in space affects mood and carries meaning. Using reverb and echo, we can simulate different environments that resonate with memory. What melodies and spaces resonate with our ancestral melodies?
I am composing music that exists in a location, mostly in field recordings I have made. Melodies and instruments weave in and around other sound objects to harmonise the space, to guide the listener around and settle the mind. For now it exists in audio format but I would love to learn how to bring these concepts into a more physical form for communal listening experiences.
We finished our first lecture with Ingrid Plum, and one statement from Ingrid fascinated me: “Subscribing to certain categories of conciousness can create culture wars.” This idea refracted with my interests in buddhism and awareness. How do we work with an uncategorised conciousness, one free from the prison of objectivity? The path of awareness is depicted as a transcendantal path, one that transcends category. But in truth there are many ways to explore being in this world, and those ways can contradict eachother, even to the point of harm. This is an interesting point, the individual truths that bring us closer to the unknown can be so different, it makes me wonder about truth itself. Can we propose there is another way, one rooted in subjectivity, that does not perpetuate the supremacy of reason above all else? In academia, that tends to be a eurocentric reason.
I do think there is another way, and it’s edges are sharpened as globalisation continues. Does globalisation unite us in struggle? In this context I am imagining globalisation not as an interdependence but an increasing homogeneity of tools, services and architecture. I don’t struggle in the same way as the peasants who grow my own food, but given the trajectory of our systems our struggles may be coming closer together. We may use the same applications. GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon) unites all. (To clarify, according to the internet 4.39 billion people use the internet, that is 56% of the global population, so not everyone. This hypothesis imagines that number increasing.) In this sense the categories of conciousness become reduced as we upload ourselves into the metaverse. We are united and yet reduced. The will of GAFA is to exploit, isolate, and dismember people of their hearts, to then mine energy from this disturbed dopamine junkie creation. We are extracted. Here is the language for a non-human solidarity; my polluted mind winces at the polluted river. GAFA will reach into the far corners of human settlement for every last one of us. Can we hitch a ride by the back door perhaps? Can we undermine this process by using the same powerful tools of unification to have a global conversation that revive heart? The xenofeminists say “We want neither clean hands nor beautiful souls, neither virtue nor terror. We want superior forms of corruption.” We participate in corrupt systems to undermine them. Interestingly, the xenofeminists use XENO and ALIENATION to make a commonality of struggle similiar to the one I have made. We need to take caution making claims of a global solidarity to not appropriate the struggles of BIPOC. The global conversation is already happening and it is most important to give higher platforms to minority voices. And perhaps we can start to carve a unified heart.
“I record them in their environment then take these recordings to another environment… I make stories. … I don’t include myself, I want the listener to have freedom to think about their own association. I don’t want to tell that this is that and this is that.” – Jana Winderen
I love Jana Winderen! She records sound environments and creatures unknown to most of us. She believes in connecting with microscopic organisms as a way to spread awareness of macroscopic climate disasters and species exctinction. Her work is humble and minimal like the costume of an eco-activist and carries a clear message about the affect of human civilisation on other lifeworlds.
Pragmatism. Endings. Products? Winderen is an art warrior: she wants to make an impact with her work because she believes there is something wrong that is possible to change. In this sense the work can be considered as activist work, in the way that the practice does not only affect the artist but also attempts to change systems of power (resource extraction.) Her approach is pragmatic and due to her wanting material change it is action based. She finds pride in her history as a poor art student who saved their little cash to buy equipment. Ego as a tool for success! Her dedication can be seen in how clearly she draws these fish that she spends hours listening to.
I believe in this action-based approach the philosophy must be limited. Is philosophy a fear of life? Winderen loves Life and she wants to protect those living beings. So at a certain point with her work, she stops reflecting and pondering and starts moving forward, towards a material result (sound object, installation, concept, essay). Must we do the same? Some artists criticize those who are ignorant of something because they didn’t have enough time to think about it. Others criticize those who think too much.
Thinking is a solo project and even the theorists have to write to export the ideas from their inner world.
This is a dichotomy that I am curious about, between thinking and action. However limiting those two categories are they point to a dilemma that has divided people at crucial moments in history. Must we think, must we act, or must we do anything?
Thankfully Winderen is acting, and makes beautiful work that I enjoy listening to.
Her message to us students was to find a way that we would like to work and create that space for ourselves, not to wait for anyone to invite us in. It’s a clear fruitful message we must remember when we have dreams.