Yet another week of missing class to travel back to London, so another week of purely remote work. I read over the text suggested last week, which was : Weaponizing Quietness: Sound Bombs and the Racialization of Noise by Pedro J. S. Vieira de Oliveira, and it was quite related to the previous week’s topic of racial and classist interpretations of listening, applying it to a less theoretical and more ongoing issue of police oppression of Brazillian Funk and Pancadao genres through the use of “Sound Bombs”. This also could inform my writing if I am to go through with the sound/harm idea as it goes into sound based methods of violence, which could be drawn parallel to noise and explored how sonic violence can be repurposed as something powerful and exciting rather than purely damage.

I did one of the suggested tasks for this week which was to create a mind map based on “sounds that are important to you for your project”, which I reinterpreted since I don’t have much of an idea for the project at the time being still.

I abstracted the task to being just “sounds that are important to you” and I kind of just highlighted my ideals for a few genres I primarily concern my life with. The task didn’t necessarily enlighten any new kind of though really, other than I guess conveying a love for clumsiness, especially in Power Electronics as I think that is one of the main aspects of the sound that is stuck to, intentional or not, that the Shock aesthetics are always – no matter how “done with intention” or “intelligence” they are, bound to juvenile desire for extremity, and I find that extremely entertaining.

I am still not entirely sure of a topic though yet so I decided that this term I’d finally start going through my reading list as a means of idea generation, and I got out the book Sound Art by Alan Licht due to being a pretty big fan of Licht’s solo guitar music and duos with Loren Connors. So far the book speaks generally of Sound Art’s aims and history in quite a concise form, some choice quotes that I have collected I will list below;

“Many sound artworks are often one-liners. Too often an electronic signal is set up by a chain of effects and left to run in a room on its own, and the result is merely decorative.” Pg 16.

I found this one particularly funny since it is kind of a diss of what I had done for the Gallery 46 installation work last term, but the decorative aspect of the sound was something I was prioritising, so I guess it is just a general difference of interest, but funnily enough he follows this with a quote that directly speaks to what I enjoy;

“Sound art, then, rejects music’s potential to compete with other time-based and narrative-driven art forms and addresses a basic human craving for sound.” Pg 16.

The desire for sound, in my case for “extreme” sound, as a “basic human craving”, speaking to Sound Art’s “non-music” separation as a purification of work to treat this desire for sound that strips it of its narrative and time reliant structure to speak to purely this natural urge. It is kind of exciting to have something I have been thinking about articulated right in front of me better than I could have conceived it as.

After the introduction to Sound Art, the book starts to become more of a historical recounting of Sound Art, illuminating key figures like John Cage and Alvin Lucier but also, appealing to me also, is occasional nods towards a Rock Music lineage which is one of my favourite parts of Alan Licht’s music, creating a sonic environment where everything related to guitar is accounted for and the acknowledgment for the lineage of what he is doing is evident just through the outcome of what he’s playing (drone tracks based on Gang of Four basslines, covers of Captain Beefheart + solos over disco tracks simultaneously, just constantly giving nods to a grand lineage of music, sound and guitar, which is why I knew this book would be worthwhile).

Davis on when the levee breaks – “the setup was heresy; room mics were never used to record drums… as Andy Fyfe puts it, what you hear is not just the drums, but the drums reacting to the acoustic space of the room. But you are also hearing something more uncanny than this: you are hearing the room respond to the drums.” Pg 47.

Anyway, I really liked this inclusion, it is obvious that the parallel drawn is towards Alvin Lucier’s I am sitting in a room without even mentioning it yet, and creating this general genre free reduction of everything into “sound”, homogenising Sound Art and Music development as Sound development because it is the truth, even though often a distinction is made by practitioners to eleviate expectations from their work where they are not applicable (that it doesn’t have a beat, or melody, etc), it is to me that the distinction is purely terminology and not actual. Although Alan creates the distinction earlier in the book, I am not sure he agrees with me, and I am definitely extrapolating what I would like from it, but still it is exciting to have these things articulated so well!