2 - The Nondescript

Summary

‘Gonna test a few bonds … see how friendly we are.’ Graham Lambkin and Jason Lescalleet, ‘Hotdog Harris or the Road of Remembrance’, Photographs

The field of the field recording as the latter is conceived in the present volume is often anything but common ground. It is the field of the unusual, the remote or the hard-of-access; of the little known or the not-before-heard; of the ‘hidden’ or the microscopic.1 It is the field of the ‘Inaudibly Loud, Long-Lasting, Far-Reaching’, or of the near silent and the fugitive; a field heard, not infrequently, late in the day or strikingly early. Sounded felds of these kinds are precisely uncommon, in themselves and in respect of their sources, a late reminder of the origins of such transcriptive and archival practices in anthropology and ethnography. And in being variously uncommon they are uncommonly interesting, hence our being drawn to listen and, in response, to make a case for their aesthetic and ideological value, a case based in part on novelty, whether of sound or source. Field recordings thus made and heard propose a sounded ethics of the uncommon.

Elsewhere, however, we find other sounds, resolutely not sublime, the sounds of recorded fields closer in spirit to the field as imagined by John Berger. This field, while not necessarily common ground in legal terms, is ‘a common one’, figuratively and experientially: a field with ‘the same proportions as your own life’. A field, that is, such as we have to hand, un-ironically acknowledged in recordings of domestic spaces and everyday goings-on, of mundane and uneventful happenings, ‘immediately recognizable’, sometimes, in source if not sound (Berger, ‘Field’, p. 32). These are the fields, to put it in simple terms, of the ordinary not the extraordinary; or rather, these are the fields that implicate and lay claim to something we might call ordinariness. Uncommon they are not. And so, given the often loosely organised, muted and indistinct sounds of these common field recordings, their scrappy fuzziness, what is it that holds the attention, however tenuously, or enables the attention to wander in ways that feel still to be significant and promiseful?