Over the last few years I’ve made field recording a hobby. Not a bleating calf, roaring motor nor creaking chair is safe from my microphone and recorder when the disc starts whirling. But when it comes to setting them down into any kind of use, I’m completely at a loss as to what to do. The idea of just presenting the sound of a busy street or the wind blowing through trees as an album seems likely to be a boring experience for a listener (at least the way that I would present it) For me the pleasure is the same as when I smoked cigarettes. When you smoke, perversely you make time for breathing, or as I read in an interview with great chain-smoking art critic John Berger, the time it takes to smoke a cigarette is a parenthesis. Though a less deadly pastime, field recording is similar to smoking in that it uses a technology to mediate, make time for and enhance a bodily process and its psychological effects; one breathing, the other hearing. There is a unique, if not embarrassed, introspect satisfaction that comes with putting on headphones and hanging around somewhere recording, a feeling which doesn’t come when I simply go and stand on a street corner. This process gives the sensation of having my hearing cleaned out or tuned up. But listening back over what I’ve recorded only ever reinforces the pleasure in the act of listening for me, rather than creating an interest in me for the recorded sound. I long ago gave up on attempting to edit my recorded sounds into something interesting, but can find a vicarious joy listening to the field recordings of others. Recently I've become interested in the figure of the field recordist as artist, starting to imagine them taking on a number of different stereotypical roles of the 'artist': the rock star, the tortured composer, etc. This imaginative drift and projection onto the recordist is probably because I have no idea who I'm listening to; the field recordist always seems so purposefully hidden from sight, so reluctant to emerge from behind his microphone. This apparently passive silhouette of the artist is intriguing in that it presents them and their work to be listened to with a particular audition that is at heart, I believe, deeply related to a Romantic notion of Man and Nature.
Field recording's artistic status is alike to being a train-spotter of ‘experimental’ music, operating in a zone between radio-play soundtrack and eco-acoustic archiving, spending the last 40-odd years nervously rubbing music and the sounds of nature together. We could trace its origins to the reduced listening of musique concréte, but this wouldn’t begin to describe the breadth of influences and traditions that it’s emerged from. Beyond its myriad of origins, field recording has only started to become an artistic genre in its own right over the last few decades, having usually possessed somewhat of a side-project status within the arts (e.g. sound designer for television, cinema and theatre). It’s an occupation that is practiced at shifting about - playing the role of hapless and bullied soundman in a fuzz of multidisciplinarity - but now has something of a history to react to.
More than any other environment, the field recordist focuses upon that of the natural world, one that’s far removed from the lo-fi aural environment of the city. The pastoral subjects of birdsong, insects, wind, cracking ice, thunderstorms and rain are popular, the recordist generally being interested in soundscapes from parts of the world that are still ‘wild’ and untouched by the sounds of urbanism and industry. So travelling to remote and/or exotic places for new sounds is also quite important to the field recordist. The World Soundscape Project, it’s theorist R. Murray Schafer and ideas stemming from acoustic ecology are important touchstones also, but in general field recordists have taken an artistic route that deviates from the latter’s academic aspirations and didactic environmentalism. Instead, many recordists choose to highlight a musical sensibility within their ‘phonography’, instrumentalising the sounds of the world as compositional source material, creating narrative journeys, rather than as a tool for planning the tuning of nature and culture.
Due to an increase in affordable technology and the resultant enthusiasm of hobbyists and prosumer-age composers, field recording has grown busier in recent years. Apart from online file sharing, there’s also a good amount of commercially released recordings from independent record labels and projects, such as European labels Touch and Gruenrekorder, along with a slew of one-off releases and performances. Though popular, it’s hard to imagine that it’s a profitable venture releasing an album of field recordings. The end product of the field recordist doesn’t emote an ecstatic wave of Wagnerian transcendence or invite the listener into a carnival of hedonistic sociability: two important commercial considerations. Rather, it’s an art practice that keeps itself detached and mute, intent on avoiding any noise of the self in order to maintain a neutral and unpolluted listening.
Sometimes it seems to be an art practice that has grown used to its undefined ‘experimental’ nature, even thriving in its ephemerality and mystery. In a practice that’s so focused on the hard-to-grasp material of sound, it can be easy to forget about the recordist silently creeping about with held breath. Trying desperately to not interfere with the fidelity of the recording, the recordist avoids any sonic evidence of their bodily presence, keeping deathly silent as even the slightest sniffle or breath would ruin the verisimilitude of the recording. This silent, spectral approach to authorship can be perplexing, as if there’s something I’m not quite hearing in their work, something that I never will hear, as only the recordist could ever hear it. There’s an odd and slightly pubescent quality to it: the recordist is spying in on something, as if performing police or intelligence field work. Playing the part of surveillance expert Harry Caul in The Conversation, the recordist is an invisible and ubiquitous ear, secretly engrossed in all the moans, groans and other rumours, recording them all for some later use (or misuse). But along with this performance, the figure of the silent recordist can be understood as an avoidance, as if the recordist is trying not to be there in order to act as a conduit for the sturm und klange of the world as it is.
Listening to what might now be called ‘classic’ field recordings such as Francisco Lopez’s La Selva or Chris Watson’s Weather Report I can let the composition take me on a rich and sublime journey that traverses exotic soundscapes as well as travelling through insect swarms and then deep into a rain forest. What makes these exemplary works of field recording is both the attention to recording quality and the fine-tuned listening of the author. Armed with a variety of microphones and assorted sound gear, a good recordist is able to use their equipment as musical instrument, coaxing sounds out of the oddest of places or objects. Then there is the process of composition and mastering, both of which demand further expertise and obsessive attention. Technically proficient and aesthetically sensitive, at best the field recordist presents a composition which leads us through their breathless audition of the world compressed and edited into a seamless sequence, an art that obscures the body of its maker. This vagueness always makes me create and project an image into the missing part.
For this reason, throughout listening to a composition, I imagine the figure of the field recordist, boompole & deadcat in hand, intrepid, wind-bitten, clambering up rocky mountains, pointing shotgun mics at eagles circling high above the peaks. A tropical explorer, machete in hand and pack filled with spare batteries, treks through a mosquito infested jungle in search of ‘the sound’. A private eye tails and duly records the babbles and incomprehensible threats of their prey as evidence. It sounds so incongruous for these stereotypical characters to be projected into work that is so pensive and solitary.
With this on my mind, I came across the website of the field recordist Chris Watson, the closest thing that the genre has to a cover star. Formerly a member of the band Cabaret Voltaire, Watson made a switch from tape splicing to field recording via working for the BBC on different wildlife programs as soundman, after a while he recorded and composed several albums for the Touch label, and in his own way is quite famous for what he does. Looking through his website, one can download an album of photographs of Watson (in both low and high resolution) in which his impressive travels about the world are recorded. Watson next to the pyramids, Watson recording Crocodiles (or are they Alligators?) recording the sounds of a volcano, the crashing waves and the windy mountains. It’s all quite exciting, but contrary to the fleeting and humble image of the recordist, and closer to that of the intrepid adventurer. This is the man at work, doing what he does best whilst making a nod towards an artistic impulse that is widespread within field recording. It’s solitary Man in the elements, a Romantic notion of nature. A nature that can speak and be understood as long as one can listen well. It takes only a slight modification from the theories of acoustic ecologists proposing a tuning of the world (the composition of the world by Man) to get to the lone male in an aural commune with nature.
In this case then, the term field recording is a misnomer, or only describes part of the activity. This profound listening to nature takes on a new meaning when these sounds are recorded, edited, composed and presented in the form of a musical document. In his essay The Art-Work Of The Future, Richard Wagner, writing about Nature, Man and Art gives the cognition of Man a specific prehensile purpose, “[…] who only through discriminating between himself and Nature has attained that point where he can apprehend her, by making her his 'object.'”. Making an album of the sounds of nature is an act of architecture that both organises the world according to an individual’s particular audition, and creates a cultured distance between “Man and Nature”, which is not a passive hearing or contemplative sensorial 'meditation' upon the world. Field recording isn’t only someone’s Uncle in rubber boots standing in a field interviewing sheep and cowpat. It is an art with the potential for reiterating deeply ingrained assumptions about the world.
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