The spectre of recorded time and place

This piece for the Century of Sound project began with a single field recording drawn from the archive of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford. Rather than this recurring functioning as an objective document of place or event, I approached the recording as a temporal fracture, a sound that had already been severed from the moment that produced it. I was inspired by the thought that a recording is made not to preserve presence, but to register our disappearance and that an archive does not store the past intact, it stores its decaying remains. 

Thus all recorded sound is hauntological, and exists as an audible ghost or spectral presence of something or someone, the reanimation of the past as a memory becoming a new memory and so on, each time changing its perception. The record I used carried voices and environmental details (mostly of work activities) that no longer exist, yet through the recording can never fully vanish, as sound has folded time back on itself.

The entire composition is derived from this single archival recording, utilising a range of techniques and methods serving to evoke the idea of decay and ephemerality. My influences were from Basinski’s Disintegration Loops, early Fripp and Eno tape looping (Frippertronics), and ambience and texture processing such as that used by Burial, all of which led to an approach to the recording where erosion and degradation was treated as source material. 

The conversational voices and percussive hammering elements, were fragmented and reassembled to drift in and out of intelligibility. suggestive of memory replayed imperfectly, half-heard and misremembered. Here noise reduction processes from Izotope RX were used against their intended purpose, rather than cleaning the recording, they are used to reveal what remains when inverted, for example the removed reverb, or the removed spectral artefacts, recording scars, and otherworldly sonic residues. Also analogue processes were central to the compositional methodology, where the recordings and echoes were run through delay pedals and recorded on to cassette, the composition was then rerecorded using worldising (playing sounds in to a space and rerecording them) as a method. Through the repeated rerecording, tape saturation, wow and flutter, and worldising techniques, distance and materiality became embedded into the composition.

As such, the composition does not progress linearly, but I hope that voices and sounds return altered, degraded, unresolved, yet seeming forming a newer narrative where the listener is evoked into considering their own sound world and memory. I am trying to evoke a past which is neither accessible nor gone, but caught in a loop, yet re-embedded in the present. In this sense, the work reflects a hauntological impasse, where the archive continues to speak, even as it itself continues to disintegrate.

Laarim elder recounts the history of his people reimagined by Neil Spencer Bruce.

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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