Reasoning with Inner City Rhythms

Podcast

The first episode of the podcast series «Modes of Listening & Sound Practices» explores the modes of listening that sound researcher Carla J. Maier and rapper Manmeet Kaur adopted on their sound walks through Berlin. Together with the city’s architectures they unfold a unique sonic narrative.

This episode is a co-produced interaction of Manmeet Kaur (rapper, beatmaker) and Carla J. Maier (researcher in sound cultures and auditory research practices). In their words, reasoning with inner-city rhythms is a manifestation of listening experiences that they shared while doing a number of sound walks in the city of Berlin between March and November, 2020. Throughout these documented adventures, they engaged with the city through listening and recording, and had conversations based on that. They explored how interacting with the city’s materialities and sonic adaptability amplifies it’s sonic fictional thinking.

This podcast progresses through three different localities, each emphasizing a particular sonic engagement with the urban environment. The first locality is a response to the «concavity of sounds contained in objects» by performing upon public sculptures to later compose out of. The second locality takes the listener to their listening in transit and panning impulsive realities of motion. The third locality is a refractive and emotional engagement with a monument of historical injustice.

The sonic material consists of recordings that were taken during sound walks, using field recorders and a contact microphone, as well as additional recordings and samples. The intro features some of the sounds the listener will encounter during the audio piece and includes a short verbal intro for the episode. The three parts take the listener on a journey through the city, in which the listener experiences the different localities through a close listening to each locality’s specific sonic materialities and unfolding sonic fictions, which never simply reveals an actual place, but rather is constructed by Maier and Kaur’s perceptual respondings and sonic imaginations. This also includes poetic and musical expressions which were inspired by their listening interventions and further conversations that were continued during the editing process of the audio piece, such as the rap part which concludes the episode.

A podcast by Carla J. Maier featuring Manmeet Kaur in collaboration with Norient
Location Berlin, March to November 2020
Conceptual direction by Carla J. Maier
Musical direction by Manmeet Kaur
Field recordings and vocals performed by Carla J. Maier and Manmeet Kaur
Mix and Master Toma Sound Factory

An essay by Carla J. Maier with the title «the here and now of listening» – written on the episode «reasoning with inner city rhythms» for the LISTENING BIENNIAL READER (2021) – can be read and downloaded here.

Manmeet Kaur’s debut self produced rap album, «The Groundwaters are Connected» made during her art residency in Berlin (Dec 2019 – Feb 2021) can be bought and listened to here.

Biography

Carla J. Maier is researcher of multimodal anthropology at the Centre for Urban Studies at the Institute for European Ethnology. Prior to this she was Visiting Professor of cultural studies at the Department of English and American Studies (Potsdam University). Her focus is on sound and listening, particularly in relation to questions of decolonization in academic and artistic theory and practice. Follow her on Instagram, and LinkedIn.

Biography

Manmeet Kaur (India’s pioneer femcee) creates and performs poetry on rhythms, voicing her hope-full social perception as a stoic explorer of sounds to materialize harmony, challenging the often ignored, self-destructive social aspirations hailing in today’s hyper-competitive digital world of materialistic humanmind.

Published on July 19, 2021

Last updated on April 01, 2024

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René Magritte «On the Threshold of Liberty» (Yvette Wohn/Flickr, 2009) .

Listening at the Threshold

Column

by Carla J. Maier

What is real and what is imagined? In her text inspired by a Laurie Anderson lecture, our writer thinks of listening as a possibility to become a stranger to oneself.

I put on my headphones and press play. Laurie Anderson’s «Norton Lectures» are about to start, at 23:00 Berlin time. It’s dark outside, and only a tiny table lamp illuminates the room where I am sitting, on a couch, with a cup of tea which I will forget to drink, because I am getting lost in a state of listening and watching that lets me forget where I am.

«Where am I? What time is it?»

This is a recurring question that Laurie Anderson asks in her performance lecture. She sits in front of a green screen, on which the listener observes a variety of moving images: a car driving through the night with snowflakes constantly hitting the front screen, driving into nothingness, getting lost. This is a recurring theme in the worlds she creates in VR such as Chalkroom (2017), which was created in collaboration with the artist Hsin-Chien Huang.

Floating Consciousness

The noises, music, and above all, Anderson’s voice, are leading me in and out of stories, like a stream of consciousness. Real and speculative worlds overlap and are weaved into each other at a slow pace, moving forward without linearity, dissolving in so many open threads and in dead ends, and capturing me on a deep-felt level.

Listening with Laurie Anderson is listening at the threshold – between dreaming and being awake, between the spoken and the unspeakable, between remembering and forgetting. It is about a state of listening in which the imagined and the real blur.

Anderson’s Chalkroom, as well as her «Norton Lectures», create a world of simultaneous noises and visuals that never synchronize, and thus, what I experience as a listener never synchronizes with what is actually heard, or seen. Instead, I find myself lost, flying through space (or falling?), at the threshold of the known and the unknown. Her practice is to create (often eerie) wonder and surprise, about the things we remember, or the things in life that we tend to forget. Listening at the threshold means becoming a stranger to oneself, or of recognizing oneself as an other.

Listening with Laurie Anderson is entering a space where one does not usually allow oneself to go, moving off-track, moving at an awkward speed, thinking things that are not speakable.

«When someone asked me: who are you talking to in your songs? I replied: I am talking to the part of you that never speaks».

Words Come and Go

Fast forward: the next day, I am sitting alone in the car at the end of an impasse I haven’t encountered before, unsure of how I landed here. I stare out of the window, realizing that I was caught in a kind of daydream, which had already started the night before while listening to Anderson’s storytelling. I am still wrapped up in the sonorous feel of her voice and in my head I am still listening to chains of words, this time though not as words, but as rhythmic noise, merging with my own imagination. And the realization that «my» voice may be someone else’s voice – that voice is never simply owned.

Listening at the threshold means humble listening: memories, dreams, other people's words and stories are always treated by Anderson as fluid, affective assemblages. As part of her storytelling, they just pass through, and although they are framed – through sounds, video, effects, filters – they are never simply captured; she does not own them, she only temporarily becomes-with them, and lets them go. It resembles the way in which Anderson uses technology: to constantly shift modalities of sensation, and to challenge how we know through sound and vision.

When she modulates her voice in the famous song «Oh Superman!» (1981) to become robotic, or when, in her recent «Norton Lectures», her mouth becomes part of a moving cut-up collage featuring the head of John Cage, speaking his words. Using technology becomes yet another form of storytelling, and her shifting of technological parameters becomes an aesthetic practice of blurring the boundaries of human and non-human, reality and dream: «Daydreams are on the same plane as facts, as with the Edison phonograph», she says. In this in-between state new stories are created, and new perceptions become possible.

«Sonic Vignettes» is a Norient Special discussing sound: one fragment, one experience, recording, one viral video, stream, one monograph or encounter at a time – in all its depth, its historical and affective ramifications, with the finest expertise in Sound Studies. Initiated by Holger Schulze, Rolf Großmann, Carla J. Maier, and Malte Pelleter, published as a monthly column.

Biography

Published on October 25, 2021

Last updated on April 02, 2024

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photo: Brandon LaBelle, «Sonic Agency: Sound & Emergent Forms of Resistance», 2018.

The Agency of Sonic Thinking

Column

by Carla J. Maier

Sound is able to merge supposed contradictions: in the audio walk Zero, Land der Zukunft at Dystopie Festival, our writer finds herself entangled both in dystopian and utopian worlds. Here is a short essay on listening as a mode of creating critical agencies.

The audio walk Zero, Land der Zukunft by Macchina Som Allstars 1, transmitted through a small receiver with headphones, is «a composition of a staged situation in the urban space and live music, placed theatrically in what can be discovered in loco» (sounding situations 2020). A live feedback loop which connects different localities (Berlin and Salvador da Bahia), technologies (radio/sequencers/microphones), voices (human and non-human), and noises (of various grains and shapes) generates an urgency and tension that upsets my listening positionality.

A pull toward a dystopian sonic and visual perception is created in this live audio walk, which leads me along the river Spree in Berlin, making me restless. Distorted radio frequencies merge with acoustic percussion and two narrative voices all of which incite my mind to delve into fictional worlds. Sounds played from cut-up vinyl records and different percussive instruments swell in and out of the mix, both soothing and eerie, blurring my clear sight on the surroundings.

Getting Lost

Nothing simply falls into place while listening to the multiple voices and noises. The audio walk increasingly disconnects me from the familiar noisescape of Berlin and I get lost with a dissociated musical body that winds itself around two fragmented fictional stories. While looking at the different shades of grey concrete and dirty red brick that surround me, I am distracted by a voice reading from the novel Brazil, Land of the Future by Stefan Zweig: «There was colour and movement, the excited eye never tired of looking, and wherever it looked, it was delighted. A feeling of beauty and happiness came over me, arousing the senses, stirring the nerves, widening the heart, keeping the mind busy, and as much as I saw, it was never enough».2

These utopian words press hard on my chest as I also hear an irritating colonialist sensory imaginary, a resonance of «hungry listening» – a kind of unmarked white «[settler] listening positionality» (Robinson 2020, 38) – for exoticized and territorialized sounds. All the more do I feel drawn to the «sonic agency» of the dystopian noises that distract and refract these utterances.

There are a number of instances throughout this live audio walk in which a powerful sonic-material fabric is created that reconfigures «acoustic territories» (LaBelle 2010) and creates a productive tension between utopian and dystopian sonic fictions.

Connecting Dystopias With Utopias

Another such instance is when fragmentary lists of words from the modernist novel ZERO by Loyola Brandão, which is situated in the 1960s during the Brazilian military dictatorship, meet the sonic responses by Andrea May aka may HD who sets out to «deconstruct utopian ideas by creating sound codes with the most realistic aesthetics, based on real facts, questions, social and political problems, our current dystopian world» (May 2020). Using the following tools, these aesthetic strategies «connect contemporary dystopia with a possible utopian future» (ibid.):

* loops in the fight against tyranny
* noise as a warning of corruption or dominance
* free cutouts against dictatorial rules
* technical failures such as rupture with hierarchies and outdated values (conceptual notes by May/September 2020)

This list of artistic tools reads almost like a manifesto for critical listening and sonic thinking, a quest for «listening as a mode of being-in-the-world and thinking which explores its powerful, critical, embodied and speculative agencies» (Maier 2020). And the audio walk provides a spatio-temporal node through which these modes of listening can be explored, and through which the dynamics of dystopian and utopian sonic fictions generate utopian aspirations, a futurhythmachine (Eshun 1998) that could «become a possible real world» (Macchina Som 2020).

1. The artists Milena Kipfmüller and Klaus Janek (aka sounding situations), with Lukas Matthaei form Macchina Som Allstars. For «Zero, Land der Zukunft», they teamed up with Salvador-based visual and sound artist Andrea May aka may HD and sound artist and improvisor Edbrass Brasil.
2. Translated by the author. The original German version reads: «Da war Farbe und Bewegung, das erregte Auge wurde nicht müde zu schauen, und wohin es blickte, war es beglückt. Ein Rausch von Schönheit und Glück überkam mich, der die Sinne erregte, die Nerven spannte, das Herz erweiterte, den Geist beschäftigte, und soviel ich sah, es war nie genug».

List of References

Brandão, Ignácio de Loyola. 2003. Zero. Dallas: Dalkey Archive.

Eshun, Kodwo. 1998. More Brilliant Than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction. London: Quartet.

LaBelle, Brandon. 2010. Acoustic Territories: Sound and Emergent Forms of Resistance. London: Goldsmiths.

LaBelle, Brandon. 2018. Sonic Agency: Sound and Emergent Forms of Resistance. London: Goldsmiths.

Maier, Carla J. 2020. «My Listening Protocol II». Sound Studies Lab. Accessed December 2. (http://www.soundstudieslab.org/listening-protocol-ii/).

May, Andrea. 2020. Conceptual Notes. Unpublished. .

Robinson, Dylan. 2020. Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press.

Schulze, Holger. 2020. Sonic Fiction: The Study of Sound. New York: Bloomsbury.

Situations, Sounding. 2020. «Zero, Land der Zukunft – concert walk». Klaus Janek. Accessed December 2. (http://www.klaus-janek.de/archives/3301).

Zweig, Stefan. 2013. Brasilien: Ein Land der Zukunft. First published in 1941. Berlin: Insel.

This text was created as part of the project «Travelling Sounds» and has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 750199.

Biography

Published on December 14, 2020

Last updated on March 27, 2024

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