When field notes colleague Christian Blumberg came across an album based on field recordings that were collected by the artist during his work shifts for a food delivery marketplace, he promptly forwarded it to me. Christian was of course right about his assumption that I would be very interested in Gavin Vanaelst’s »Takeaway Loops« on Edições CN—I have always been drawn to music and sound art that uses supposedly banal source material, especially the kind that works with field recordings from every-day life.
Sometimes these albums help me travel while I’m sitting at my desk, such as Chris Watson’s »El Tren Fantasma,« which regularly takes me on a train ride throughout Mexico, or they even make it possible for me to regulate my environment. Stefan Roigk and Daniela Fromberg’s »Unfamiliar Home,« an album based on recordings of their house being renovated, somewhat ironically helped me drown out the construction noise when they were building a new house right outside my window. I obsessively collect such records that offer escapism, or at least an escape from my reality.
Vanaelst’s album, on the other hand, confronted me with a reality that barely intersects with my own. Even though I rarely order food, I of course know about the working conditions of uncontracted labourers in the platform economy, but very little about the so-called riders’ lives outside of the fleeting moments in which I encounter them on the streets. By juxtaposing seemingly unedited recordings from his daily life with a musical accompaniment that more often than not picks up on the painfully smooth aesthetics of music made for commercials, Vanaelst allows me to engage with their reality.
Of course the conceptual premise on which »Takeaway Loops« hinges is doubly ironic: it centres on an industry that is built upon people’s unwillingness to leave the house while providing its audience with snippets of an experience that were arranged so that they can be consumed at home. While this seems cynical, it also creates space for empathy with disenfranchised labourers. Rose Actor-Engel’s latest album under the apologist moniker also combines a reflection of complex processes with a sympathetic approach: »Philadelphia« draws on field recordings made in places where she used to live, and is as personal as it expresses political changes.
Following a literally aleatoric treatment process, the No Rent co-founder added lush synthesizer and even string sounds to traffic noise, kids playing, birdsong, and other expressions of urban life at random. The result is a dense, multi-layered symphony of a metropolis like none other. »Philadelphia« is a kindred spirit of Flin van Hemmen’s self-released »Luxury of Mind,« an album apparently made after a personal crisis that finds solace in the every-day life while juxtaposing it with sparse yet nuanced musical interventions that even include ghostly choir passages. Both albums tear down the boundaries between inner and outer worlds.
The same can be said about Katharina Schmidt’s two latest solo efforts, released almost simultaneously with the percussionist’s live collaboration with Adrian Baker and Han-earl Park, »Thoughts of Trio.« »One Day« for Midira and »If & When« on Elm Records both have a personal undertone. While the former, written and recorded in 2021, works with drones and noise to explore »patterns and pathways in chaos and randomness,« as the Berlin-based sound artist puts it, the latter is presented as a »meditation on musical and psychological time« that combines lush synthetic drones with field recordings that are framed as mnemonic devices by the title of the two pieces, »December 1999« and »August 2000.« This makes these soothing pieces highly evocative: does this music allow us to traverse space and time?
The temporal and thus historical dimension of many field recordings is also of great importance to Tahlia Palmer, who releases music under the—seemingly tongue-in-cheek—moniker Amby Downs. »kinjarling studies: soundtracks (five years on)« for Lawrence English’s Room40 is based on recordings made for video art that has been first presented in Vancouver. Kinjarling translates to »a place of plenty« and refers to the lands inhabited by the Mineng in the South-West of what is today commonly referred to as Australia. The artist takes inspiration from a dual or even triple heritage as a descendent of these people and Dutch World War II survivors as well as having, as one track title informs us, »a lot of scottish ancestry too.«
Palmer’s work with field recordings is informed by what she refers to as an interest in the »underheard.« The 16 pieces make an impression as if the artist has removed most of the actual sounds in order to zoom in on the droning and hissing background rumble inherent to the recording sites. They seem void of life, which almost necessitates a critical reading. Are these the sonic remnants of another, pre-colonial time? Ghostly wailing sounds of places that were once the site of an organic coexistence between humans and nature, and are now subjected under unnatural political and commercial orders? None of these questions are raised explicitly, which makes »kinjarling studies: soundtracks (five years on)« all the more stimulating.
Both the aesthetic focus on the barely audible undercurrents of a landscape and the (potential) political dimension of Palmer’s magnificent album are reminiscent of Berlin-based sound artist KMRU’s work. The second instalment of his »Temporary Stored,« inaugurated with an eponymous album in 2022, further elaborates Joseph Kamaru’s artistic critique of the »extraction [...] of artifacts, humans, tools, sounds, instruments« from the African continent by European institutions as a continuation of colonial power: his source material was culled from the archives of the Royal Museum of Central Africa in … Well, not Central Africa but instead in some small city in Belgium.
»Temporary Stored II« combines seven pieces by Kamaru with contributions by Lamin Fofana, Jessica Ekomane, Nyokabi Kariũki, and Aho Ssan. The ways in which these artists work with different ethnographic recordings, re-arranging, manipulating, and abstracting them, are also striking because they distil new musical idioms from the voices of the past. This is most obvious in Ekomane’s piece which possibly may be based on drum or mbira sounds but transforms its source material into metallic, joyfully bouncing synthesizer melodies. It most directly expresses a potential that often remains untapped in the realm of field recording-based music: rather than reflect certain realities, it can be used to create new ones.
This is literally what happens in the case of »Jenseits der Wand,« an album documenting two walk-in—or rather, sit-in—installations by Daniela Fromberg and Stefan Roigk. The same artists who turned the sound of gentrification into a rumbling soundscape for home-consumption erected their own new little homes into Prenzlauer Berg’s ausland venue, inviting visitors to enter and listen closely to the artists’ interpretation of sounds that urbanites hear daily coming from the neighbours’ apartments. The three pieces are infinitely fascinating precisely because they focus on the prosaic sonics of every-day life, magnifying one reality in another setting to provide their audience with a new set of ears once they go back to their own.
This is at its core what all of these albums from the fields offer to attentive listeners: the possibility to re-evaluate their own surroundings through the exposition of unfamiliar sound worlds—whether it’s the lingering effects and continuities of colonialism, the spaces, cities, and houses we inhabit, or even the lived experience of »brand ambassadors« of platform capitalist companies such as Takeaway. If you come across something similar, please forward it to me immediately.