Raging Affirmations

Sound Piece

In her sound piece, artist and educator Shanti Suki Osman explores the sonority of rage. Listen to a new episode of the Sonic Worlding column, which asks how one’s positionality is created by the people who listen.

In 2023, I was invited by friend and dancer Birte Opitz to feature in her dance and voice performance, Raging Affirmations, which was performed at the end of August and beginning of September 2023. The performance was a beautiful opportunity to sing and sound and explore the notion of rage and rage. It became apparent that narratives of rage do not always correspond with or complement each other. Alongside rehearsing and workshopping ideas for this performance, I was also developing methodologies for my current academic research which involved listening and positionalities and, more specifically, how my positionality is created by the people who listen to me. Whilst writing about these methodologies, I felt connections and repetitions from and in the performance and vocal work I had also been doing. This piece, Listening to Positionalised Rage, is an attempt to concretize some of those connections and considerations in sound.

«Sonic Worlding» is a monthly Norient column. It invites writers and artists from all over the world to to think and speculate with and not only about music. Where most music writing treats music as something that can be categorised and placed in pre-determined boxes (personality cults, end-of-year lists, genres, origins, styles), «Sonic Worlding» is interested in the vast potential of rhythms, ideas, and worlds that are still to be unlocked, attempting to spin new webs of thought spanning the globe. Edited & curated by Norient editor Philipp Rhensius.

Biography

Shanti Suki Osman is a Berlin-based artist, educator, and researcher working with song, sound, and radio, exploring the topics of identities, privilege and power, anti-racism, and feminism. She is a research associate and doctoral candidate for Music Pedagogy at Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg in Germany. Her PhD research investigates the experiences of women* of color and Black women* studying popular music in German Musikhochschulen.

Published on February 13, 2024

Last updated on August 21, 2024

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Is this real? (photo: Flickr/MAE II, 2015).

Re-Animating Things With Sound

Essay

by Piotr Tkacz-Bielewicz

What is real in recorded reality? While listening to the music of Lucie Páchová and Paweł Kułczyński, our author speculates on their use of field recordings of seemingly natural sound sources.

What I find fascinating about sound is its ability to create its own worlds while at the same time referencing the outside world: so-called reality. Pieces made with field recordings often blur this boundary. Listening to them invites questions like: what is the «real» of recorded sound and the act of listening in itself? How can we be sure that what we are listening to is real? We can’t, and that’s a good thing. After all, these questions are a variation on a theme of representative art.

I asked myself these questions while listening to two albums that use field recordings differently. Крънджилица is the result of Czech artist Lucie Páchová’s visits to Bulgaria. She was there looking for abandoned villages. She eventually found one with only three permanent inhabitants and some temporary residents. She recorded their daily lives, including some conversations. While not pastoral – and even rough at times – the work as a whole gives a sense of calmness and there are even cheerful moments. Páchová doesn’t alter the natural sounds but plays with the montage of material from different sources. Sometimes she puts sounds side by side, resulting in a change of resonance and meaning.

Крънджилица by Lucie Páchová

There is one important intervention. Páchová plays a zither with objects found on site, a nice touch that brings these abandoned objects back to life – literally animating them. These interventions are so delicately interwoven that, on listening for the first time, I didn’t notice the addition. I’m still not sure if it’s a cowbell or a zither.

If Крънджилица is cinéma vérité, then Biosignatures, by Polish artist Paweł Kułczyński, is more like an action film. In the first piece, the gritty sound of walking seems to duel with shiny electronics. But this dichotomy seems false as all the sounds on the record are derived from nature in one way or the other: recorded with conventional microphones, hydrophones, or electromagnetic and seismographic sensors, or obtained via data-driven sound synthesis. Still, at many moments, the music doesn’t sound «natural» at all. Maybe that’s the point – to question that dichotomy, to force us to think anew.

Paweł Kulczyński - Biosignatures by Pointless Geometry

It seems important that Kulczyński didn’t travel to a faraway rainforest but recorded nature in the city. I think we sometimes perceive different natures. It’s easier to be concerned about something far away but well-defined, like rainforests, than something that is close but not defined yet, like nature in the city. If we think about separate entities (us and nature) then we don't feel part of it and don't feel responsible. This resonates with Páchová’s work, which listens to the lives of people who are very close to nature. They are so dependent on it (for example through raising cattle) that they don’t have the option not to pay attention to it.

They have to attune to it.

These two artists are able to create worlds that don’t only represent reality, but stand for themselves. While aesthetically different, the two albums deal with the same themes: sounds at the peripheries, hidden, obscure(d), unspectacular, small – those that require attention to be heard. Sounds that we are losing as we are losing nature, as the first is of course part of the second.

Rather than composing a requiem, these albums try, in the short time that’s left, to rescue some of the world that is passing away. Maybe we should all be creating our own archives of extinct sound. For me, the conclusion is as usual: only listening can save us. Listening beyond divisions, listening to small, unnoticed, away-from-the-center sounds. Listening to ourselves, but only in relation to others.

«Sonic Worlding» is a monthly Norient column. It invites writers and artists from all over the world to to think and speculate with and not only about music. Where most music writing treats music as something that can be categorised and placed in pre-determined boxes (personality cults, end-of-year lists, genres, origins, styles), «Sonic Worlding» is interested in the vast potential of rhythms, ideas, and worlds that are still to be unlocked, attempting to spin new webs of thought spanning the globe. Edited & curated by Norient editor Philipp Rhensius.

Biography

Piotr Tkacz-Bielewicz is a writer, DJ, and organizer. Follow him on Instagram, and Facebook.

Published on March 06, 2024

Last updated on March 06, 2024

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Ecology

Nature

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Four ears for listening (photo: Stefano della Bella/Wikimedia).

Listening with Four Ears

Essay

by Marie Thompson

One day, when pregnant, our author listened to a song and began to cry unintentionally. In what ways, she asks herself in a new episode of the Sonic Worlding column, are the romanticization of music and pregnancy connected?

Content note: this piece discusses pregnancy and mentions pregnancy loss.

In April 2022, I found myself crying while walking into the city. I was in the second trimester of a pregnancy: an experience that was fraught with anxiety, difficult bodily transformations, gender policing, and hope. Listening to a song I had heard hundreds of times before – Aretha Franklin’s rendition of «I Say a Little Prayer» – triggered an unexpected outpouring of affect. I’m mindful that the figuration of a pregnant person crying for no reason is an unpleasant stereotype, underpinned by the devaluation of feminized displays of feeling. Nonetheless, during this time, music sounded – and felt – different. «I Say a Little Prayer» came closer and landed more intimately than before, causing tension in my chest and my eyes to prickle. Where I had previously been resistant to emoting through music, the ebb and swell of Franklin’s voice, intensified by the instrumentalists and backing singer, allowed me to let go of an ambiguous something.

It isn’t surprising that Franklin’s song sounded different to me, given that pregnancy can literally change your senses. Some experience a heightened sense of smell or taste, while others may develop hearing loss or tinnitus. It is not an overstatement, then, to say that pregnancy changes how the world feels and sounds, transforming our preferences and perceptions.

Although music writing has frequently referenced sounds’ purportedly womb-like qualities,1 there has been limited attention paid to pregnant listeners themselves. Yet, music has often been promoted as a tool of affective modulation during pregnancy. Drawing on common tropes about music’s soothing capacity and its status as a cheap cultural resource, pregnant people are told that music can relieve stress, or help them bond with their (future) child. It has even been suggested as a means of pain relief during labor. As a result, a significant subsection of the pregnancy consumer market consists of curated playlists, CDs, and music players.

Contradictory Sentiments

Both music and pregnancy have been subject to intense romanticization, sometimes concealing their proximity to negative feelings and ambivalent affects. In the case of the former, the oft-celebrated joy and pleasure of music is frequently found in articulations of heartbreak. As a technology of emotion, music draws out catharsis from suffering. Take «I Say a Little Prayer» written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David and recorded by Dionne Warwick as well as Franklin during the time of the Vietnam War, it is a song of love and devotion. And yet, the euphoric chorus ends on a contrasting note of vulnerability: «to live without you / will only mean heartbreak for me». As popular music has so often made clear to the point of cliché, love carries with it the threat of loss.

Pregnancy, too, can involve complex and contradictory sentiments. Scans and check-ups are a reminder that the making of new life comes with the risk of loss. This might be the loss of a fetus or embryo, or it may involve the loss of the pregnant person: be it the loss of life that can occur due to infections, blood clots, or high blood pressure, or the loss of self that can occur when you are treated as secondary to the contents of your abdomen.

While I am resistant to trying to «explain away» this listening encounter, it’s likely my own feelings of vulnerability meant that I experienced Franklin’s song more intensely than before. Rather than simply soothing away stress or exerting a calming influence, «I Say a Little Prayer» amplified. In so doing, it transformed my anxiety and ambivalence, illuminating how the messy relations between musical listening, sensation, and bodily and biochemical states can result in an undoing of the familiar: a hearing anew.

1. Examples of this include Simon Reynold’s Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture (2008), David Toop’s Sinister Resonance (2011), and R Murray Schafer’s The Soundscape: The Tuning of the World and Our Sonic Environment (1994).

«Sonic Worlding» is a monthly Norient column. It invites writers and artists from all over the world to to think and speculate with and not only about music. Where most music writing treats music as something that can be categorised and placed in pre-determined boxes (personality cults, end-of-year lists, genres, origins, styles), «Sonic Worlding» is interested in the vast potential of rhythms, ideas, and worlds that are still to be unlocked, attempting to spin new webs of thought spanning the globe. Edited & curated by Norient editor Philipp Rhensius.

Biography

Marie Thompson is a writer and researcher, based in Nottingham, U.K. She is primarily interested in the affective and materialist dimensions of sound and music.

Published on November 21, 2023

Last updated on May 14, 2024

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