I have long held the view that the impact of recording technology is far from adequately appreciated in the critical discourse on music. Every new book or paper that brings a fresh perspective on the revolutionary change in the art form is worth celebrating. I was very pleased, then, to read the opening lines of the introduction to the Bloomsbury Handbook of Sound Art, the opening gambit of the whole volume:
The voice I hear is strange. It is too intimate, too close, too alluring – and still it keeps an almost professional distance. I hear waves rushing in and fading away under sounds of various, unclear origin. I like to listen to this voice. Many people are listening these days to rather intimate or more vivid and invigorated voices on a daily basis. Voices from a lively conversation podcast…
That podcasts, or sonically mediated ‘para-social relationships’, are the first example sets the terms of the discussion very clearly. Are we talking about music? Are we talking about discourse? Do we need to worry about the distinction? I believe the answer is no; some claims are made about the topic, sound art: it is young and new and tech-savvy;, it includes podcasts and art installations, and field recordings and much more.
The term ‘handbook’ immediately paints a picture: convenient, practical, likely fits in a back pocket, but most importantly is decently comprehensive. None save the last can be said of this volume, recently published by Bloomsbury along with the companion Handbook of Sonic Methodologies. Quite an impressive amount of knowledge production is contained in these 24 chapters: it is a dense, broad, substantial and thorough book. A group of musicians, commentators, musicologists and activists have been collected in order to provide a snapshot of the ‘state of the art’ in the year 2022 – or, to be more precise, a snapshot of the state of theorisation of the art form.
Each author and their chapter bring a different understanding of the term ‘sonic art’ to the fore. The protean nature of sound art underlies its vitality and makes it so fascinating. Some basic observations begin to narrow the aperture and bring the topic into focus: sound art typically does not operate with a distinction between composer and performer mediated with notation. Rather, it typically mediates between artist and performance via technology – a microphone, an audio interface, one or several speakers. The advent of relatively inexpensive consumer-grade technology and electronics is a precondition for the majority of this work to exist. Sound art utilises field recordings in all manner of ways from simplistic to sophisticated: a fraught geopolitical event (Chapter three pertains to Sao Paulo, Brazil, in 2016, during radical student protests and the following reactionary protests) or a specific symbolically charged place (Chapter one describes glaciers melting at the moment of a recording, still melting at the moment of presentation, even now at this very moment). My impression from this book is that sound artists have a very strong sense of social and political justice and tend to express it explicitly rather than symbolically in their work. Sound art has a major hub in Berlin. Cultural programmes such as DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst) Artists-in Berlin, funded by the German government, have a particularly powerful influence, and the history of the city and of Germany – fascism, partition, neoliberalism – exert a clear influence as well. Sound art is typically not particularly concerned with aesthetic considerations – beauty or ugliness. Or, if it is, it is by way of a dispassionate and naturalistic process of capturing ‘what is there’ through field recording or otherwise. Sound art is, in the most general sense, suspicious or even hostile to established institutions of artistic influence, support and patronage. All these characteristics remind me of the punk scenes that I have spent time with, in Chicago and Buffalo. But a question tugs: does this book critique an established musical world or is it justifying itself to that very institutional establishment using the language of the latter?
Six divisions structure the volume. The first two of these (‘After the Apocalypse. The Desert of the Real as Sound Art’ and ‘Journeys across the Grid. Postcolonial Transformations as Sound Art’) and the fourth (‘De-Institutionalize! Institutional Critique as Sound Art’) are in significant dialogue with each other. The general contours are probably familiar to most: the politics of representation and the importance of supporting and uplifting diverse voices, the manifestations of climate change and the obviously unequal distribution of its effects throughout the world, and the vitality to be found in grassroots music-making. While there are many interesting chapters here (the interviews with Elke Moltrecht, co-director of Ensemble Extrakte and Julia Gerlach, former head of the music section of DAAD are particularly good), I find that these topics often require fluid conversations better served in a dialogical format with subjective framing rather than the univocal format of the positivistic academic paper.
The remaining half of the volume, the third section (‘Come Closer… Intimate Encounters as Sound Art’), fifth (‘The Sonic Imagination. Sonic Thinking as Sound Art’) and sixth (‘Making Sound. Building Media Instruments as Sound Art’), is, as far as my personal interests go, the more interesting. Particular highlights include the three interviews concluding the volume, with Marianthi Papalexandri-Alexandri, Yuri Landman and Morten Riis, and Holger Schulze's ‘Intruders Touching You. Intimate Encounters in Audio’.
This is not a book to sit and read cover to cover – it is a collection of academic papers that cover an incredibly wide swathe of research interests. Should the topic of a given chapter be in fruitful dialogue with a reader's pre-existing research interests, it will be riveting. However, if that is not the case, that chapter might be, frankly, rather tedious. With the exception of the introduction, each contribution follows the same style guide: academic, positivistic, scientistic, dry. That there is such diversity in the identities of the contributors, mode of artistic expression being discussed, motivating thematic nexuses and more is laudable. That every author utilises the same style of prose simply feels wrong. Was no one tempted to write an artistic diary? No one wanted to write a symbolically weighted fictional history of their craft? Did the editors proactively avoid contributors who would have taken such an unorthodox approach? Doesn't such an editorial stance contradict the ethos of diversity so thoroughly incorporated into the fabric of the volume?
