The Sonic Witness
On the Political Potential of
Field Recordings in Acoustic Art
G e r a l d F i e b i G
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Contemporary sonic artworks often use field recordings from
places of historic or social significance to address political issues.
This article discusses relevant works for radio and fixed media by
Peter Cusack, Jacob Kirkegaard, Eliška Cílková, Anna Friz and
Public Studio, Stéphane Garin and Sylvestre Gobart, Ultra-red,
and Matthew Herbert and outlines how they use both audio and
visual/textual information to create awareness of the issues inscribed in
these places, from current environmental concerns to the memory
of genocide and displacement.
In his seminal 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Me-
chanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin claims that there is
one immaterial quality of an artwork that necessarily evades
reproduction, and that is its genuineness:
The genuineness of a thing is the quintessence of everything
about it since its creation that can be handed down, from
its material duration to the historical witness that it bears.
. . . We can encapsulate what stands out here by using the
term “aura” [1].
John Mowitt [2] has shown how the concept of aura—and
its decay—can be applied fruitfully to acoustic art forms.
Mowitt’s focus is on The Sound of Music in the Era of Its Elec-
tronic Reproducibility, but it opens up perspectives for ap-
plying Benjamin’s concepts to nonmusical sonic artworks as
well. For instance, the aspects of aura quoted above—the gen-
uineness of an artifact bearing witness to a specific time and
place—are crucial to the aesthetic of an increasing number
of artistic practices that have been emerging across various
genres of acoustic art in recent years. These practices share a
concern with political issues, and they all address these issues
by using field recordings from specific places with particular
historical or social significance. The following discussion of
some examples of such practices will show how the politics
Gerald Fiebig (artist, writer), Kazboeckstrasse 21, 86157 Augsburg, Germany.
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files associated with this issue of LMJ.
of the practices are tied to an idea of the genuineness of the
documentary recordings they employ, which, as we have
seen, also informs Benjamin’s concept of the aura.
Benjamin saw the demise of aura as liberating, with re-
production technology bridging the gap between iconic art-
works and “the masses”—a tool for the democratization of
culture. Therefore, his text tends to cast aura as something
deeply reactionary, if not fascist. In the works I discuss here,
however, the contextualized use of field recordings is a means
“to politicize art” [3] in a progressive way, as advocated by
Benjamin. At first glance, the aura-based strategy of these
works would seem to contradict Benjamin’s negative view
of aura, but upon closer analysis these works confirm Mow-
itt’s insight that Benjamin’s terminology must be understood
in its historical context, which “implies that the question of
aura must always be posed anew, even if the question means
something different each time” [4].
The obvious difference between music (and its technologi-
cal reproduction)—as discussed by Mowitt qua Benjamin—
and field recordings is that musical works exist as original
human artifacts before they are reproduced. In contrast to
this, field recordings are original artifacts themselves, be-
cause what ontologically precedes them is not a “more origi-
nal” artwork but simply acoustic reality. It is only through
the act of recording that they become artifacts at all. Only
through recording do parts of the sonic continuum acquire
the possibility of becoming aesthetic objects to be passed on
through time and bear witness to a recordist’s presence at a
certain place and time in history.
Bearing witness is also a key factor in Peter Cusack’s prac-
tice of “sonic journalism,” exemplified in his project Sounds
from Dangerous Places:
Sonic journalism is based on the idea that all sound, in-
cluding non-speech, gives information about places and
events and that careful listening provides valuable insights
different from, but complementary to, visual images and
language. . . . In my view sonic journalism occurs when
field recordings are allowed adequate space and time to be
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©2015 ISAST
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heard in their own right, when the focus is on their original
factual and emotional content, and when they are valued
for what they are rather than as source material for further
work as is often the case in sound art or music [5].
The reference to “factual content” and the choice of the
term “journalism,” with its associated codes of objectivity, ve-
racity and fact-checking, emphasizes Cusack’s trust in sound
recording as a “witness” of certain places and conditions. The
recordist acts as a reporter gathering information in places of
danger, “whether it is pollution, social injustice, military or
geopolitical. The project asks, ‘What can we learn by listening
to the sounds of dangerous places?’ ” [6]
The lesson of Cusack’s recordings from the Chernobyl
Exclusion Zone in Ukraine and the Caspian Oil Fields in
Azerbaijan—the two places that feature most prominently in
Cusack’s project—seems to be this: Even when we know that
these places are emblematic of the operation of technologies
and policies that endanger life on our planet, they “can be
both sonically and visually compelling, even beautiful and
atmospheric. There is, often, an extreme dichotomy between
an aesthetic response and knowledge of the ‘danger’ ” [7].
Cusack’s sounds encourage listeners to contemplate, in the
very act of listening, the network of social and political signi-
fications and power structures within which his “dangerous
places” are enmeshed. Sound seems ideal for addressing the
dependencies and ambiguities related to these places because
“listening situates us within a relational frame whose focus,
clarity, and directness are endlessly supplemented and dis-
placed by the subtle pulses, mishearings, and fragmentary
richness of relating” [8]. The veracity of the “historical wit-
ness” presenting these recordings is crucial in getting listen-
ers to engage with this network of associations. After all,
why should they follow the artist’s invitation to reflect upon
a place he claims he recorded if it turns out he lied to them
in the first place?
The peculiar aesthetic quality of dangerous places, particu-
larly the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, has inspired many other
artists. Jacob Kirkegaard has captured the atmosphere of its
deserted buildings in Four Rooms (Touch Records, 2006) and
Wermutstropfen (West German Radio, 2011). The latter piece,
a collage of field recordings, is closest to Cusack’s documen-
tary approach. Four Rooms, on the other hand, employs a Lu-
cier-inspired process of playing the sounds of empty rooms
back in the same rooms and re-recording them. The resulting
resonant drones heighten the sense of looming danger. In
her piece Zone (Czech Radio, 2013), Eliška Cílková actively
engages with sound sources found onsite, “seeking out the
abandoned musical instruments of the Chernobyl Zone in
order to visit and record them” [9]. Kirkegaard’s and Cílková’s
strategies are not purely documentary as Cusack’s are, yet the
integrity of their work equally relies on the aura of the real
place: The broken piano one hears in Zone gains much of
its emotional impact from the knowledge that it was in fact
abandoned due to a nuclear disaster.
While an image presents itself as an object that allows the
viewer to step back and distance herself from it, sound “is not
the object but the medium of our perception. It is what we
hear in” [10]. As Tim Ingold argues, the sound of a place en-
ters the listener’s body just like breath, which creates a com-
pelling symbol for the listener’s connection to a place and the
bodily presence of others that were there before her. Thus,
field recordings are also suitable for alluding to What Isn’t
There, as in the title of an installation project by Anna Friz
and Public Studio. In gathering the sonic materials for What
Isn’t There, the artists sought out the sites of former Palestin-
ian villages in Israel in March 2014 and would “just simply
record whatever we found there” [11], from parking lots to
factories to war memorials: “These sorts of things told us a
lot about how much things have changed but also just sort
of what memories are still retained by the landscape” [12].
A similar attempt at representing absence through field
recordings is Gurs. Drancy. Gare de Bobigny. Auschwitz.
Birkenau. Chelmo-Kulmhof. Majdaneck. Sobibor. Treblinka
by Stéphane Garin and Sylvestre Gobart (Gruenrekorder/
Bruit Clair, 2011), which captures the sounds from the sites
of former concentration camps and other sites related to the
Nazi-perpetrated genocide, which are meticulously listed in
the title. As in Sounds from Dangerous Places, the contrast
between the apparent innocuousness of the soundscape and
the atrocities committed in the very same places stirs listen-
ers’ imaginations.
A different, yet related, type of political artwork based on
field recordings uses the sounds of political demonstrations
as source material for electronic music. La Economía Nueva
(Operation Gatekeeper) by Ultra-red (Fat Cat Records, 2001)
or “The Whisper of Friction” by Radio Boy (aka Matthew
Herbert) from the album The Mechanics of Destruction (Ac-
cidental Records, 2001) respectively credit as sound sources
a demonstration against the militarization of the U.S./Mexico
border at the San Isidro Port of Entry on 10 December 2000
and anti-globalization protests in London on 1 May 2001. By
placing the sounds of demonstrations at the heart of their
practice, these works encourage political activism on the part
of their listeners without indoctrinating them. These works
also validate the “agonistic” view that in a living democracy,
not only should political differences be negotiated in the
sphere of parliamentary politics, they should also be played
out in public places “where conflicting points of view are con-
fronted without any possibility of a final reconciliation” [13],
thus keeping the process of political engagement in motion.
Like the other artists discussed here, the strategy of Ultra-red
and Radio Boy relies on the truthfulness of the claim that the
source recordings were actually made at the rallies.
As works of sonic art, all of the artworks discussed here
rely heavily on the specific experiential quality of listening to
their actual sound, but they only become signifiers in a politi-
cal discourse through the listener’s knowing that they come
from places with specific connotations. This knowledge,
however, cannot be transmitted by the ear alone. Therefore,
the works examined above supplement their sonic elements
with additional information in the form of photographs and/
or text—as CD liner notes or whole books—to establish a
contract of veracity with the listener and to “engage the rich
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Fiebig, The Sonic Witness 15
cultural, technical, social, ontological implications of [the
sounds’] origins” [14].
In other words, these works use sound as part of a larger
conceptual strategy, as advocated by Seth Kim-Cohen in his
book In the Blink of an Ear. This differentiates these sound
artists’ take on field recordings from two major traditions
that also draw on recordings of ambient sounds. Much elec-
troacoustic music in the tradition of Pierre Schaeffer uses
field recordings as raw materials for the extraction of sonic
objects, proposing that audiences should “listen to the objet
sonore blindly, ignoring who or what might have made it,
with what materials, or for what purpose” [15]. Acoustic ecol-
ogy, on the other hand, is predicated on using audio record-
ings to preserve intact soundscapes of mostly natural origin.
This practice often risks turning a deaf ear to the social and
political aspects of the acoustic lifeworld, thus “undermin-
ing the soundscape in general, for what the soundscape (and
the environment in general) teaches us is that place is always
more than its snapshot” [16]. In the works presented above,
however, enough information about the places is provided
to spark a critical discussion of the related issues. By rais-
ing issues of origin, context and agenda in relation to field
recordings, the concept of aura can help to bring out the
political significance of such audio material.
References and Notes
1 Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduc-
tion (London: Penguin, 2008) p. 7.
2 John Mowitt, “The Sound of Music in the Era of Its Electronic Re-
producibility,” in Jonathan Sterne, ed., The Sound Studies Reader
(London, New York: Routledge 2012) p. 213–224
3 Benjamin [1] p. 38, original italics.
4 Mowitt [2] p. 220.
5 Peter Cusack, Sounds from Dangerous Places (Thornton Heath: ReR
MEGACORP, 2012) p. 23.
6 Cusack [5] p. VII.
7 Cusack [5] p. VII.
8 Brandon LaBelle, Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday
Life (New York, London: Continuum, 2011) p. 182.
9 Eliška Cílková, “ZONE”:
ber 2014).
10 Tim Ingold, “Against Soundscape,” in Angus Carlyle, ed., Autumn
Leaves: Sound and the Environment in Artistic Practice (Paris: Double
Entendre, 2007) p. 11.
11 Anna Friz interviewed by Meira Asher, “RA106fm_#05,” on “Ra-
dioart 106fm,” 03:08:
12 Friz [11].
13 Chantal Mouffe, Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically (London,
New York: Verso, 2013) p. 92.
14 Seth Kim-Cohen, In the Blink of an Ear: Toward a Non-Cochlear
Sonic Art (New York, London: Continuum, 2009) p. 115.
15 Kim-Cohen [14] p. xvi.
16 Brandon LaBelle, Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art (New
York, London: Continuum, 2006) p. 205.
Manuscript received 2 January 2015.
Gerald FiebiG is an audio artist, writer and a member of
DEGEM, the German Society for Electroacoustic Music.
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Fiebig, The Sonic Witness
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