The Wire 300: Will Montgomery On The Changing Uses Of Field Recordings

In February 1998 The Wire published a useful Primer on field recordings (issue 168). The recordings featured in the article, however, had little to do with environmental sound. They captured non-Western musicians recorded ‘in the field’ and were released by labels with an ethnographic bent, such as Ocora and Le Chant du Monde. So much has happened under the ‘field recording’ heading in the intervening period that it seems inconceivable that the tag could be used in this way now. Since the turn of the century, an increasing number of musicians have wanted to look beyond the creaking electronica vocabulary of loops, drones, glitches and sample-mangling, and towards the rich acoustic potential of untreated field recordings. The increasing availability of small, affordable digital recorders since the middle of the decade has accelerated the process.

With such activity, of course, another Cagean prophecy has come true, as the boundaries between musical or artistic uses of sound and environmental sound become ever harder to defend. Field recording is now commonly encountered both as an artistic practice in its own right and as a component of experimental music and sound art. There has been much debate on listserves about the lines, if any, that can be drawn between these activities. In a recent interview on sound artist Jez Riley French’s website, the Australian artist Robert Curgenven remarks somewhat wearily: “[The] old music vs sound chestnut is not so important to me these days, if it makes it easier to get a point across then it’s a useful polemic, but otherwise it’s got so many elements to it that it‘s not easily reducible to a few quick definitions.”

The background to much of this upswell of activity lies in the concept of the soundscape, which originated within acoustic ecology through the pioneering work of the Canadian composer and theorist R Murray Shafer. Influential figures active in this area include David Dunn, Douglas Quin, Hildegard Westerkamp, Annea Lockwood and Bernie Krause, all of whom (as David Toop points out in his book Haunted Weather) have a relationship with experimental music. For many younger musicians, however, two figures have been central to the cross-fertilisation between environmental recording and experimental music: Francisco Lopez and Chris Watson.

The work of Lopez runs from harsh electronic sound to subtle and bewildering environmental recordings. Influenced by the acousmatic theories of musique concrète, his approach has been to focus on the sound itself rather than its source. In his text ‘Profound Listening and Environmental Sound Matter’, the sleevenote for his seminal release La Selva, he criticises the scientific approach of bioacoustics or ‘documentary’ nature recording. “As soon as the call is in the air,” he asserts, “it no longer belongs to the frog that produced it.” He dismisses the tendency of acoustic ecologists to elevate a sacralised natural soundscape (preferably pre-industrial in character) over the fallen world of man-made sound. His suggestion that no recording is ever scientifically ‘objective’ places the emphasis on the shaping, even aesthetic, decisions of the artist or recordist: microphone placement, equipment choice or editing, for example. And, in a similar move, he removes any pretence at locating an objective musicality in environmental sound: “It’s our decision – subjective, intentional, non-universal, not necessarily permanent – that converts nature sounds into music.” It’s easy to see how this could be inspiring and liberating for those who were coming to the end of other musical tethers in experimental music.