Found Sounds #1

A few months ago, my partner went to New York City and asked me if there was anything that she could bring me from there. All that I could think of was the latest copy of a music magazine with a focus on different forms of extreme metal. She checked every record and book store in her area, but to no avail. Instead she brought me the second-best thing she could find: A cassette tape with the words »Generic Shit« written on them. I have since learnt that this was one of the many projects of the late artist Philip Tarr and that his only, self-titled solo release was, at least to a certain extent, indeed generic: These are seven pieces of harsh noise with some rhythmic elements and vocals—definitely unique in its presentation, but overall not exactly innovative.

I liked it, even though the music didn’t quite stimulate my brain as much as its title. Was it a gesture of self-deprecation or irony? Did Tarr try to warn potential buyers, or at least communicate to them what to expect? After all, my partner picked out this tape amongst others based solely on the words written on its front cover, just because she had a hunch that I would possibly not think that it’s shit—if only because it was wearing its heart on its sleeve, or if only because I enjoy generic music. I am, after all, a person who can only think of a copy of a music magazine dedicated to a specific genre when someone asks me what they could bring me from one of the most vibrant metropolises on this Earth.

There’s countless people who dedicate themselves to one genre or the other, whether as fans or as musicians. They integrate subcultural codes into their lives; they make music that follows certain formulas because they identify, for whatever reason, with what that genre represents. However, there are also plenty of people who disregard anything that they consider generic, a term that for many is synonymous with narrow-mindedness and cultural stagnation. This is especially true in the case of what we refer to as »contemporary music« in the context of a magazine such as field notes—a delicious chaotic entanglement of very different aesthetic approaches, artistic practices, and outcomes.

And yet we still use umbrella terms such as »contemporary music« to describe similarities and affiliations between them and thus categorise them wholesale. This is generally somewhat accepted even among those who’d like nothing to do with genres. But don’t those also construct genres? And why should that even be a bad thing?

Notes on the Field

Take »field recordings,« for example, a term that can either refer to a specific type of recording (done in the, well, field) or a certain practice (that of, uh, making recordings in the field), but is also—perhaps confusingly—used to describe the results of working with such field recordings. The Berlin label forms of minutiae serves as a platform for the latter, sometimes also referred to as »sonic ecologies« or »soundscape compositions.«

Following up on releases such as Alëna Korolëva’s wonderful »Premonitions« as well as label co-founder Pablo Diserens’ »turning porous,« the recently released compilation »harkening critters« is easily the imprint’s most ambitious release to date. Over an impressive 33 tracks, this four-hour-long charity compilation—all proceeds from sales will go to Friends of the Earth—can easily be understood as a meta-discussion of field recordings as a genre. While probably all of these different pieces represent the basic sonic material in some edited way or another, there are stark differences in what the individual materials consist of, how they were recorded, and what was done with them afterwards.

A lot of the pieces give off the impression that they—pun intended—naturalistically represent a certain soundscape in a specific region at a fixed time, but every once in a while, several artists make use of verfremdungseffekte which remind the audience of the artificiality of it all. »harkening critters« is a stimulating compilation in more than one way: It offers 33 windows into very different sound worlds while also laying the groundwork for an in-depth discussion about how we perceive, mediate, and interpret places, moments, and the non-human inhabitants of this world—which in effect makes it a compilation of field recordings about field recordings.

Such reflections also inform Aditya Ryan Bhat’s »fixed​/​fleeting« for Cedrik Fermont’s label Syrphe: »I hesitate to claim authorship for this music,« writes Bhat in the accompanying notes, emphasising that the different rivers represented on the 28-minute-long piece in the form of manipulated records and enriched with the sounds of Bhat’s percussion and additional saxophone by Justinn Lu, are »mostly responsible for what you hear.« It is interesting that Bhat would so confidently refer to what can be heard on »fixed/fleeting« as »music« nonetheless; implying that the human intention of rearranging and adding sounds makes all that difference between mere field recordings and music.

crys cole’s »Making Conversation« introduces an even stricter delimitation between a certain soundscape (or the individual, anthropocentric experience thereof) and its interpretation from the perspective of a single artist: This collection of three commissioned works opens with the titular piece, which was created for an eight-channel sound installation with which the Berlin-based sound artist tried »to evoke the soundscapes cole encountered during nocturnal listening session in Bali, Indonesia in 2018 and 2019« without using any field recordings made during those nights and instead supplanting them with different acoustic and electronic sounds from various sources.

As a work of simulation, »Making Conversation« thus becomes a meditation on not only on the actual soundscape cole encountered, but also serves as a mediation of her perception as someone who later went on to try to recreate her experience in order to communicate something to people with no first-hand experience of it. So isn’t this piece of what could be called fictional field recordings indeed making conversation with the genre of field recordings, i.e. the act of aesthetically engaging with the world?

Dialogues between In-Betweeners

Field recordings provide us with an opportunity for armchair travelling: Bhat takes us along Australian rivers, cole to Bali and »harkening critters« on likely the least costly—both financially and ecologically—world trip possible. The same applies to many of the strictly human-made music that is nowadays fairly often and always awkwardly referred to as »transtraditional« and alternatively »transcultural« or »outernational« after terms such as »world music« and »fourth-world music« have been extensively and rightfully criticised. It’s interesting that these are adjectives; that they refer to specific predicates of something, meaning they theoretically only add nuance to something.

However, if that something is simply »music,« even such adjectives take on a life of their own. The German label Glitterbeat and its tak:til imprint reserved for instrumental music is generally associated with such descriptors though apparently preferring »Vibrant Global Sounds« according to its self-description. You can expect pretty much any record on the label(s) to be some kind of musical melting pot. Take Gordan’s self-titled sophomore album on Glitterbeat, a riveting record that primarily draws on folk songs reinterpreted by vocal artist Svetlana Spajić together with noisenik Guido Möbius and percussionist Andi Stecher.

While »Gordan« is indeed working with material from one kind of tradition—broadly speaking, musical folklore from the Balkans—and does perform a kind of transfer, the music that the Berlin-based trio comes up with integrates this core element in similar ways in which it works with a few trace elements of noise and krautrock, occasionally even jazz along the way: They do not situate these traditions or genre in a different setting, but use their elements in order to create something new. As a whole then, this album does not so much take one tradition somewhere else but rather recontextualises it in a different time. The borders that Gordan cross during their journey are temporal and not so much geographical or cultural.

In a way, it's the other way around with »Coexistence« by the South Korean duo Da:Lum, released through tak:til. Ha Suyean and Hwang Hyeyoung use quote-unquote traditional instruments—namely, the gayageum and the geomungo—to make music that has almost no connections to the court music with which those instruments are typically being associated. This doesn’t deter the press and even the duo’s label to compare their approach and music to that of label mate Park Jiha or other South Korean groups that also use instruments with long histories in Korea and who make music that does neither replicate nor respond to certain traditions—with very different end results.

These are certainly examples of cases in which categorisation or the creation of genres—however loose they are, however implicit they are being constructed through the use of adjectives that pop up around the actual music—seem to have a reterritorialising effect on music that is boundaryless in every sense of that word. But just as with the (meta-)genre of field recordings, such attribution can have productive effects. Albums such as »Gordan« and »Coexistence« make it possible to reflect upon questions of tradition and modernity, acts of appropriation and cultural transfers while also emphasising that the exploration of traditional musical forms or instrumentation as well as regional specificities can lead to innovation.

No other label operating today has understood this as well as Post Orientalism Music, an offshoot of the Tehran-founded and now Berlin-based Noise à Noise. Led by Ehsan Saboohi, it has quickly become a significant platform for the theorist’s and composer’s own work as well as that of several like-minded colleagues. The group strives to go beyond one form of categorisation by embracing another that best describes their approach. The Post Orientalism composers work with recordings of Persian radifs, melodic figures passed down from one generation to another, and let them mutate in various ways—in some cases going so far to bury Niloufar Shahbazi’s kamancheh playing under a harsh noise wall, completely deconstructing Pegah Zohdi’s santur recordings and much, much more.

In Defence of Genre

While the Post Orientalism project is a clear example of a group of composers and musicians intentionally creating a genre, you could argue that none of the people who make music that is described by the press, distributors, or even their labels as »transtraditional,« »transcultural« or »outernational« asked for that. However, much like Saboohi and his colleagues, with their widely different means they nonetheless consciously engage in creating the kind of interplay of sounds, signifiers, forms, and formulas that is at the heart of every genre. Of course, looking at the vastly different results of their practice as just an expression of genre would both be unfair and unproductive when trying to critically engage with them.

However, positioning them in a wider context, comparing their music to that of others also makes it possible to work out the nuances they bring to the table and thus problematising how we relate to culture as a whole. In fact, the reason why very few people would refer to the music of Gordan, Da:Lum or the Post Orientalism crew as »world music« anymore is because that term, when it was used to posit and hence create a genre, facilitated a discussion around the eurocentric bias embedded in it—and eurocentrism itself. Similarly, a word like »outernational« marks the limitations of how we continue to think about culture as both a product and representation of the national state—

On a semantic level, the word acknowledges that and implies that this music goes beyond this, much like terms such as »transtraditional« and »transcultural« promise us that music can bridge gaps that were previously thought of as irreconcilable. In their own distinct ways, the aforementioned projects and many others that are clumsily referred to with those adjectives make these contradictions audible while following their very own path. Acknowledging this is helpful. Of course, genre still is just one of many lenses through which you can view a piece of music, a whole album, or the activities of a group of people. But it can also be used very productively to think about a world with whom this music and those people engage.

There are, of course, many people whose music is said to »defy categorisation« or who reject any attributions and who do not wish to be associated with specific genres or the notion of a genre more generally, and I can personally relate to anyone who does not wish to be pigeonholed. However, I also remain suspicious of anything and anyone claiming to be truly sui generis. For once, that reeks of a cult of the genius that has been rightfully scrutinised in art for the past hundred-and-something years. It also implies that dissociation from other forms of music and the people who make it is not only possible (it is not, I hope) but also desirable (it is not, I believe). This brings me back to the tape that started it all.

I have no clue what Philip Tarr intended to communicate when he named one of his projects Generic Shit and put out a cassette with those words written across its front cover. What I do know is that my partner saw it, thought of me, and flew halfway around the world with it because she suspected that I might enjoy what’s on it. Therein, I think, lies the true beauty of genre: It both creates and expresses the connections between people that only music can facilitate. And that’s why generic shit is my shit.