Default of origin

This piece begins with a single recording: a forest soundscape captured by Louis Sarno in what is now the Central African Republic and the Republic of Congo, with birds, shifting air, and the distant rumble of a storm. The tape is not just a neutral document. It shows how sound can be taken, stored and studied. It is both a memory of a living environment and a product of the colonial era that collected and classified other people’s worlds.

Bernard Stiegler writes about tertiary retention, the way human experience is stored in technical objects such as recordings. These objects extend our ability to remember and listen, but they also change and sometimes remove what they hold. Stiegler calls such technology a pharmakon, something that can be both harmful and helpful. The recording is a trace of a forest displaced, but it is also a way that forest continues to be heard.

This composition works with that tension. It does not sample the sounds or remake them as material for a new track. Instead it tries to “stay with” the recording, to listen beside it rather than take from it again. Stiegler speaks of care, the need to handle inherited technologies in a way that can open new and more ethical futures. This piece tries to practice that kind of care.

Within this frame, the composition builds a new “forest” of sound, a network of layered micro and macro gestures that mirror the density and dispersion of the original recording. Close-mic techniques capture the vibrations of small objects, surfaces and resonant materials so that their textures mimic biotic activity such as insects, air, leaves and distant thunder. These sounds are woven with broader spatial gestures, creating an environment that moves between intimacy and expanse, between the barely perceptible and the encompassing. The resulting texture is not a reproduction of the forest but an echo of its living complexity, reimagined through the act of listening.

The work draws on the Wandelweiser tradition’s radical sparseness and on Discreet Archive’s sensibility for fragility, quiet and slowness. Silence here is not empty; it holds space for the forest, real and imagined, to be heard without being consumed or overwritten. The piece does not try to reconstruct the forest or bring it back. It lets the recording remain what Stiegler calls a default of origin, something already outside its first context but still alive in new ways.

The work also follows Jean-Luc Nancy’s idea of listening as exposure, being open to something that comes from elsewhere and cannot be fully understood or controlled. It accepts that the original place and time cannot be restored and that the act of recording was shaped by unequal power. Yet it asks whether we can still listen in a way that acknowledges that history without turning it into an aesthetic resource. The piece tries to hold that fragile space, one of care, hesitation and attention, where another kind of future listening might become possible.

Forest sounds with bird calls and distant thunder reimagined by Jacob Calland.

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Part of the project A Century of Sounds, reimagining 100 sounds covering 100 years from the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. Explore the full project at citiesandmemory.com/century-sounds