the field
While making a field recording of water lapping up under a sink discarded in the ship canal I heard a snort coming through the headphones. Without shifting the mic I started to look for for the source of the noise. I was helped by a kind of groaning croak which came from one of a pair of swans who had swum under the deck I was recording from. They dabbled in the water, then brought their heads up and snorted as if clearing water. From time to time they would croak at one another. Once they realised I wasn't throwing bread or other food in the water they seemed to lose interest.
I enjoy these accidental discoveries which often turn out to be more interesting than whatever it was you intended to record. The weekend before last I intended again to record water sounds but ended up recording the sound of the seed cases of Indian Balsam exploding. In this case the sound was something heard without headphones while walking along the riverbank. Unlike a lot of sounds that catch your attention this one proved surprisingly easy to isolate from any other noise happening.
There is a relationship here to my text poetry recently, particularly to the scraps in my twitter feed. Although there is obviously a selection process, the idea when work is presented or incorporated into larger pieces however transformed is to present something that forms a kind of environment or field in which the reader or listener structures a meaning of their own, not to provide a narrative/sequential exposition of a defined set of events and ideas. By which I mean I have no interest in providing something formally structured and framed. I want the reader or the listener to have an experience closer to mine in creating the work than to the more conventional role of attempting to decode what I've put there. Which is not to say that I take no role in my own work, or that it's incomplete. Rather that so far as possible I try to allow the material to dictate the shape of the work instead of trying to fit material to pre-existing moulds.
This is why I use the analogy of an environment or, as I'm coming to to prefer, the field. It emphasises that we are not talking about something unformed and incomplete, but about something which has been selected, where some characteristics have been emphasised and others surpressed. By this analogy a sonnet, a three-act drama, a pop song are perhaps houses, intentionally built structures with a clear form. My interest then is not in building houses, useful as they are, but in developing fields to bring out some property or properties of the materials chosen.
There is no intention to make a judgement here, to say that either approach is superior to the other. The approaches are different. I find that attempting to pursue an argument and fit the material to a recognisible form does violence to the qualities that interest me in whatever it is I write about (or explore through sound etc.)
A few weeks earlier in the same spot while recording the sound of a diesel generator I picked up another noise. Inaudible without the recording equipment, under the sound of the engine I heard the faint regular rattling bang of a pump.
I enjoy these accidental discoveries which often turn out to be more interesting than whatever it was you intended to record. The weekend before last I intended again to record water sounds but ended up recording the sound of the seed cases of Indian Balsam exploding. In this case the sound was something heard without headphones while walking along the riverbank. Unlike a lot of sounds that catch your attention this one proved surprisingly easy to isolate from any other noise happening.
There is a relationship here to my text poetry recently, particularly to the scraps in my twitter feed. Although there is obviously a selection process, the idea when work is presented or incorporated into larger pieces however transformed is to present something that forms a kind of environment or field in which the reader or listener structures a meaning of their own, not to provide a narrative/sequential exposition of a defined set of events and ideas. By which I mean I have no interest in providing something formally structured and framed. I want the reader or the listener to have an experience closer to mine in creating the work than to the more conventional role of attempting to decode what I've put there. Which is not to say that I take no role in my own work, or that it's incomplete. Rather that so far as possible I try to allow the material to dictate the shape of the work instead of trying to fit material to pre-existing moulds.
This is why I use the analogy of an environment or, as I'm coming to to prefer, the field. It emphasises that we are not talking about something unformed and incomplete, but about something which has been selected, where some characteristics have been emphasised and others surpressed. By this analogy a sonnet, a three-act drama, a pop song are perhaps houses, intentionally built structures with a clear form. My interest then is not in building houses, useful as they are, but in developing fields to bring out some property or properties of the materials chosen.
There is no intention to make a judgement here, to say that either approach is superior to the other. The approaches are different. I find that attempting to pursue an argument and fit the material to a recognisible form does violence to the qualities that interest me in whatever it is I write about (or explore through sound etc.)
A few weeks earlier in the same spot while recording the sound of a diesel generator I picked up another noise. Inaudible without the recording equipment, under the sound of the engine I heard the faint regular rattling bang of a pump.
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