Book Review IN THE FIELD: THE ART OF FIELD RECORDING, Cathy Lane & Angus Carlyle

Book Review by Marcel Cobussen

 "For several reasons I have a rather ambivalent relation towards field recordings. This ambivalence is not necessarily annoying, disturbing, or irritating; it is simply that I am often puzzled, confused, and full of questions after having listened to field recordings. One of these questions that regularly arises is: To what have I actually listened? Let’s say that on one side of the spectrum I could consider those recordings as something like sonic documentaries, introducing me to unknown, lost, or past soundscapes; on the other side, I do not attempt to situate or identify the sounds, but perceive the recordings with a more or less purely aesthetic attitude. Or, to reformulate this, the former raises questions about the representational value, including ideas about “sonic journalism” or “docu-music” as Peter Cusack calls it, whereas the latter is inviting me, first of all, to attentive listening, to perceiving, without too much reflecting, the richness of the sounds, their individual layers as well as the complexity of their potential relations and combinations, close to Pierre Schaeffer’s acousmatic listening. Choosing between, let’s put it boldly, the rational and the aesthetic or between “truth” and “beauty,” is often codetermined by the additional information accompanying the recordings: [...]
abstract or no titles usually seem to demand a listener who is primarily interested in “the sounds themselves”; Conversely, lots of information on the exact time and space of the recorded sounds gives me the idea that the “composer” (also) wants to share knowledge and give a concrete impression of a particular sonic environment.
Struggling with this provisionally binary opposition, I was quite happy when Cathy and Angus sent me their book In the Field: The Art of Field Recording (Axminster: Uniformbooks, 2013). The book consists of eighteen interviews with well-known as well as less well-known contemporary sound artists who use field recordings in their work: Andrea Polli, Annea Lockwood, Antye Greie, Budhaditya Chattopadhyay, Christina Kubisch, Davide Tidoni, Felicity Ford, Francisco Lopez, Hildegard Westerkamp, Hiroki Sasajima, Ian Rawes, Jana Winderen, Jez Riley French, Lasse-Marc Riek, Manuela Barile, Peter Cusack, Steve Feld and Viv Corringham. The format and structure of the book is relatively simple: Cathy and Angus each conversed with nine sound artists through a fixed questionnaire, which makes it both easy and interesting to discover points of convergence and points of departure between all interviewees. As for me, questions about their entrance to field recording, their sources of inspiration, or their own favorite recordings served primarily as a sort of background information. More interesting with regard to my indecisive relation to field recordings described above were questions such as: What do you look for in a recording? What about the audible presence of the recordist? Why field recording? Do you call what you do music or art? Is it important for you that people listening to your work know what they are listening to? These questions dealt more specifically and explicitly with the status of the auditory investigations of sites, with their emphasis on the indexical or the expressive, with their inclination to the testimonial or the artistic. [...]"
http://journal.sonicstudies.org/vol06/nr01/a09