The gordian sound: values and complexities of local listening.[1]

Luís Costa
(Coordinator of Binaural Nodar, Viseu Dão Lafões, PT)

www.binauralmedia.org

 

  1. I am from where I listen

Nodar, São Pedro do Sul, Portugal. May 1968. The beginning of a contingent anonymous life like any other, in a place I have always known. I was born from people who knew that place intimately and I grew up knowing it and hearing people talk about it. I physically returned to it ten years ago, which is not to say that I stopped knowing that place when I didn’t live there. I lived all these years admiring the farmers of my place, for their hard work, for their love of the land, for the precision of their cyclical rhythms, for their belief in values as simple as ancient, for their independence, freedom of thought and expression with respect to all powers: the hard and the soft, the political and the moral.

In 1975, a year after the Carnation Revolution in Portugal, I was seven years old. The children in the village of Nodar (still) spent all their free time outside their homes, investigating unusual places, building strange objects and talking to the local old men. One of these old men was Augusto, who was a bachelor, a shoemaker and lived alone in a barn/workshop where there was neither water nor electricity (pipe water and electricity only came to the village in 1980, as first world artifacts). Augusto had a small mustache that reminded me of a certain Adolf from the history books; he was a quarrelsome, a grappa loving person who, over the years, had less and less work, fact that made him lazy and not much of a perfectionist.

One day, some friends and I climbed the stairs that gave access to the barn/workshop and I indelibly engraved in my memory a visual and sound postcard of a time that no longer exists: Augusto walked slowly in the darkness of the barn, with his clogs clacking on the old wooden floor, while he cursed, whistled and sang under the influence of the alcohol he consumed on a daily basis. You could hear his “thick” accent of one who never went to school and never left the region. Suddenly he stopped and turned to the children who were at the door laughing at such a strange character (it is characteristic of every village to have its own characters) and, with the longest smile, he said: “What are you laughing at, you rascals? At that moment I realized and felt that there is a strange complicity between the madman and the child, because unlike “normal adults”, both exist to break the rules, to walk on Ariadne’s thread between the rational and the irrational, to explore to the limit the freedom of expression and action.

These memories were fixed in me in a very particular way. The latter I think came about because of the understanding I have subsequently had of reality as complex, dense and full of situations, people and spaces that deviate from the conventions associated with normality; normality that is modeled or influenced in the journey of life and individual decisions, which is almost always a kind of recipe for a less authentic, more authoritarian and more superficial society. Even today, Augusto would be a paradigmatic example of what many call politically incorrect; such was his concentration of “quirks” (alcohol, his language, or his near-hermit status). However, for me, he was and will always be a valid (not to say beloved) person, for the (desperate) courage not to follow the narrow social canons of a remote and conservative rural village.

And what does this story have to do with the sound practice, besides the clack clack clack of the clogs on the wooden floor?[2] Ah, my friends, this story condenses what a local listening really means, from the inside, from the folds of a body almost in the wild form, far from all politics of listening and from the somewhat aseptic protection of “sound heritage”.

Regarding sound heritage, and as a result of the rediscovery of Portugal after the 1974 Carnation Revolution, much attention was paid to rural areas, almost always from the perspective of capturing something close to the “soul of the working people “[3], in my assumption useful to create a collective sense of people’s power from the awareness of the historical inequalities between exploited laborers and agricultural landowners. Of course, this was far from the truth in many Portuguese rural regions. This narrative was expressed, for example, in the rediscovery of the rural songbooks of agricultural work, re-interpreted by young musicians from the cities who had been fascinated by the ethnomusicological recordings made in those years by the Corsican Michel Giacometti for the Portuguese public television. This process has evolved over the years towards the heritage awareness of the territories themselves, and today there is no municipality that is not the capital of something: landscape, gastronomy, music, etc., and therefore the icing on the cake, very fashionable nowadays are the local candidacies that apply for UNESCO intangible heritage to the delight of tour operators, regional and national politicians and mass media.

All this context seems very nice, but I believe that these processes of “hyper-representation” of the rural world serve to diminish the sense of density, complexity and freedom of the rural spaces themselves. They are reducing millennial cultural evolutions to mere slogans, and the profoundly free and individualistic character is suspect of all power over the populations themselves (Bloch, 1930). Therefore, there is a huge intermediate space between the real and its representation that must be critically explored. This is also the usefulness of sound research derived from new (and free) local listening.

Taking into account these current tensions between a progressive and hyper-represented modernity and a hybrid localism, made of archaisms, contradictions and transformations (Giménez, 1994), we opt for the latter, saying somewhat provocatively: we are not progressives, we are listeners of the remains of a rural past. We are collectors of everyday life, idiosyncrasies and improvisations of particular people and places. We are… conservatives, anti-futurists, anti-patrimonialists, anti-utopians, anti-dystopians, ultra-listeners and almost always “pacientomans”.[4]

 

  1. The in-between listener

March 2006. Back to our village of Nodar, after three decades of emigration in the city of Lisbon. The first perceptions were made through sounds. The first one was a knock on the door on a foggy morning. Sound artisans[5] began to enter our rural territory with courtesy, acceptance, curiosity and service; they were the tools of our labor. Not just sound.[6]

Sound could have been a turning point or a fold[7] in the dictionary of stable certainties, for it is an intimate, subtle, specific and contingent type of language. But there are many other types of languages for an approach to a territory, and we like those that provide a sincere and empathetic communication with the people. And for that, sound is not enough. That’s why we don’t want to be swallowed by the new wave of “intelligent” sound researchers, so smart and aseptic. We are suspicious, for example, of globalized sound maps, in which each sound is torn from its context like a child torn from its mother’s arms.

We continue digging meanings… ancient and forgotten meanings of our place. We are sound miners, sound farmers, sound carpenters, sound puppeteers; located in a forgotten corner.[8]

And in these ten years hosting sound artists in our rural territory, we clearly understand that every listener is an in-between being[9], a mediator, a connector, sometimes an unhappy being for not belonging 100% to what he listens to, sometimes happy for living many lives through what he listens to.

The real that is heard and recorded is thus a complex system made of decisions, responsibilities and moralities that are fundamentally individual, however much we may want to compact these individualities into collective consciousness. Therefore, the listener listens more freely, escaping from positive teleologies (utopias) or negative ones (dystopias), some coming from the social engineering or innovation (so fashionable, risky or even dangerous), others coming from a pessimism without remission.

We therefore understand listening as a subtle mechanism of revelation; contingent, unstable, prone to error and derived from fundamentally individual mechanisms of perception.

The practice of sound should not be an activity liable to mystification (sound for sound’s sake, sound without context or even idealistic sound) (Brynjar, 2012). It can and should be quietly articulated with other knowledge, feelings, listening and – why not? – visualizations; that is to say, it all depends on the level of attention that is relevant in each situation.

In these accelerated, ultra-visual and noisy times, silence, constancy and humility towards what is real, heard, thought, felt and lived, are therefore necessary, radical and countercurrent acts.

 

  1. A chess of possibilities, between the local (whites) and the sound (blacks).

Regarding our condition of animals coated in permanent doubt, we ask ourselves the following questions/anxieties in our sound curatorial practice:

  • What is the need to think, document and creatively express specific and peripheral localities (such as rural ones) in a way that brings relevant values, escaping the clichés of endogenous over-representation or exogenous over-idealism?
  • What are the intrinsic characteristics of sound in the process of thought and expression of local contexts that can go beyond the rather common self-justifying tautologies of sound professionals or scholars?

Of course, we like to lower expectations about the ambition of both issues through a radical process of “context and contingency”, which puts all these variables (the artist, the sound, the project, the practice, the local, the community, the expectation, the mediation, etc.) in a prism of extreme uncertainty and fragility. In other words, we hope that the encounter between the listener/artist and the local inhabitant will be as unrigid and unpredictable as possible, precisely because one of the counter-values of local contexts is (still) the estrangement from progressive and global certainties and optimisms. We are, therefore, bringing Augusto, with his clogs and his breath of alcohol, along with unlikely sound guests, many of whom have already walked confidently through the halls of important temples of art or science.

It is in the potential value of these improbable encounters where – so we think – the Gordian knot of this set of complex dualities that we deliberately provoke through our sound curatorial practice (artist/community, local/global, perennial/ephemeral, manual/intellectual, work/art, rational/irrational, comprehension/incomprehension, correct/incorrect, etc.) can be untied.

While we bring these senses of “context and contingency” to the relationship between sound and the local, we try that “that specific local” can also incorporate a board of infinite possibilities for expression in a double sense: in the first instance, because of the inherent complexity (geographical, social anthropological, historical, etc.) of any place, no matter how small, and, in the second instance, because of the set of creative possibilities of sound practice in local contexts, such as geography as a medium for the projection of sound; the relationship with anthropological voice; improvisations in the landscape; space and sound as de/re-contextualized concepts; approximations to silence or sound works without sound; the amplification of sound spaces, among others.[10]

We know that talking about and valuing any local identity is a terrain prone to misunderstandings and criticism, considering the emergence of new fears and tensions deriving from the growing multiculturalism, particularly evident in “old Europe”. But we are at the same time aware that this problem must be faced without fear, since we cannot escape the fact that there is no humanity without the search for local “inscription” and the valorization (even if unconscious) of persistent realities (the house, the street, the landscape, the neighbor, the bar, the family, the sports club, etc.), from which the sound practice cannot escape. A contrary situation would be one of much hubris (Davoudi & Madanipour, 2015).

 

  1. Necessary listening

As an epilogue, we leave a brief manifesto, derived from the notebook of our anxieties and investigations:

Listen to the need, listen to what is necessary.
Listen from outside the system, therefore, listen more clearly.
Listening not thinking about power and accumulation… Thinking, on the contrary, in building spaces of understanding from the character of our places.
Listening from the grassroots, as a way of liberation from ready-made ideas.
Listen with temperance, humility, doubt and permanence.
Listen more with beauty and less with efficiency.
Listen more to impressions and sensations and less to “pure ideas”.
Listen more to the things of life and less to the act of listening.
Listen to what is authentic, true and sensible; wherever it comes from.
Listen more to the different manifestations of one place and less to one manifestation of many places.
Listen more to the small, old and particular and less to the global, new and abstract.
To listen to the inevitable process towards death, therefore towards the permance of many of our fellow men and women in our beloved places.

 

Bibliography

Bloch, M. (1930). La lutte pour l’individualisme agraire dans la France du XVIIIe siècle. In M. Bloch & L. Febvre (Ed.), Annales d’histoire économique et sociale (pp. 321-640). Paris: Armand Colin.

Brynjar. D. (2012). On Sound and Context, Schloss Solitude. New York. Retrieved from: http://franzson.com/on%20Sound%20and%20Context.pdf

Costa, L., & Costa, R. (2010). Three Years in Nodar: Context-specific Artistic Practices in Rural Portugal. Portugal: Edições Nodar.

Davoudi, S. & Madanipour, A. (2015). Reconsidering Localism. London: Routledge.

De Maupassant, G. (1884). Le vieux, in Contes du jour et de la nuit, [pdf version]. Retrieved from: http://www.quandletigrelit.fr/images/Guy-de-Maupassant-Les-Contes-du-jour-et-de-la-nuit-Le-vieux.pdf

Giménez, C. (1994), El caleidoscopio cultural europeo: entre el localismo y la globalidad. Documentación Social, 97, 9-34. Retrieved from: http://www.caritas.es/imagesrepository/CapitulosPublicaciones/636/02%20-%20EL%20CALEIDOSCOPIO%20CULTURAL%20EUROPEO%20ENTRE%20EL%20LOCALISMO%20Y%20LA%20GLOBALIDAD.PDF

Stoller, P. (2009). The Power of the Between: An Anthropological Odyssey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

 

Notes

[1] Originally published for Aural, a Chilean sound art magazine, 2017.

[2] There is a whole line of association between the rural world and clogs, as a symbol (even a sonic one) of poverty and rudeness in the realist and post-impressionist painting of the 19th century (Julien Dupré, Vincent Van Gogh, Jean François Millet, etc.) and in literature. Just as an example, I remember an excerpt from the beautiful text Le Vieux by Guy de Maupassant: “La barrière de bois s’ouvrit s’ouvrit; un homme entra, âgé de quarante ans peut-être, mais qui semblait vieux de soixante, ridé, tordu, marchant à grands pas lents, alourdis par le poids de lourds sabots plein de paille”. De Maupassant, G. (1884). Le vieux, in Contes du jour et de la nuit, [pdf version]. Retrieved from: http://www.quandletigrelit.fr/images/Guy-de-Maupassant-Les-Contes-du-jour-et-de-la-nuit-Le-vieux.pdf

[3] In this regard, the campaigns of cultural dynamization and civic action developed throughout the rural areas by the armed forces in the years of the so-called Ongoing Revolutionary Period (PREC), between 1974 and 1976, remained in the annals of the great Portuguese historical misunderstandings. Vd. Almeida, Sónia Vespeira de, 2009, Camponeses, Cultura e Revolução: Campanhas de Dinamização Cultural e Acção Cívica do MFA (1974-1975), IELT-Colibri, Lisbon (preface by João Leal and postface by Vasco Lourenço).

[4] Neologism derived from “patience”.

[5] These are the sound artists who have begun to arrive in our territory since 2006. I call them sound artisans by analogy with the craftsmanship of the rural context, but also because of the preference we give to material and manual interactions. That is to say, we do not like to immaterialize/mentalize too much the sound research, that is why we try to promote the rediscovery of ancient tangibilities, of walking, of knocking, of catching, of sweating.

[6] The first years of regular sound work of Binaural – Associação Cultural de Nodar in Nodar and neighboring villages were extensively documented in a retrospective catalog: Costa, L. & Costa, R. (2010). Three Years in Nodar: Context-specific Artistic Practices in Rural Portugal. Portugal: Edições Nodar.

[7] Fold in the Deleuzian sense.

[8] Here we are desperately trying to rescue a lost sense of manualism in the sound arts, making a free association between the farmer’s hoe or the miner’s pickaxe and the sound artist’s microphone and boom pole.

[9] The concept of the ethnographer (which includes the listener to any geo-social context) as being between contexts, or in-between, was addressed in detail in first person by Stoller, P. (2009). The Power of the Between: An Anthropological Odyssey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

[10] In “Three Years in Nodar: Context-specific Artistic Practices in Rural Portugal” we have developed an empirical matrix of sound possibilities we identified together with many sound artists we have hosted to our region since 2006: Costa, L., & Costa, R. (2010).