AudioSpaces #8
October 2024. Bodies of sound, base camp at Mount Everest and an exclusive single release in Rome.
Happy November everyone. Before we cross the threshold into what might be end times, depending on how that election turns out tonight (only slightly joking), it’s time to have a look back at the last thirty days of AudioSpaces. Deep breaths.
As always, hello hello and welcome to our new subscribers here on Substack, and of course all our amazing new contributors on our app. If any of you are confused as to what this newsletter is—and what AudioSpaces is more generally—then read here for more info.
AudioSpace(s) of the month
Every month there are even more sounds to pick from, and soon I think we’re going to have to come up with a new selection system for our favourites.
AudioSpaces are now popping up pretty much all over the world, from Cataluña to Belgrade to Nobeoka, from Manhattan Bridge to Trellick Tower to base camp at Mount Everest. This is also the first month in which I’ve been directly addressed through an AudioSpace—extra points each time you do this.
Meow for your supper (Pippin & Frankie)
by adrian blazquez
action at a distance
by lucaantinorii
Ovelles i xais a Alos
by amanyosa
korg ms-20 notting hill
by dossena
Mass at a Russian Orthodox Church
by vadim
Twins listening
by sebastian sw
Annual March for Women's Safety
by miruna
Nobeoka Trainstation Sunday
by alx
cat purring to comfort me while I’m crying
by misty
wildtrack a la de una, a la de dos, a la de…
by laura gantes
Don’t forget we also post weekly highlights on our Instagram for those who don’t yet have the app. Considering how many of you there are now, it would also be great to hear some of your favourites that you’ve come across wherever you are. We’ve made a WhatsApp chat just for this, and for general feedback, so feel free to send them over and we’ll feature them right here on the newsletter.
Recent goings on
This one’s been a while coming, but we’d like to first say a big thank you to Andrew Backhouse for his generous first-impressions review of AudioSpaces. The field recordings he’s uploaded so far have been a real pleasure to preview, and it would be great explore them in their full glory up in North Yorkshire. He’s got a few well-considered Collection labels that make this even easier, like Human Activity.
Make sure to go have a look and a listen to his personal website, where his multidisciplinary art is listed—music, radio art, collage, photography, and more.
Another thing to mention is that this month we had our first music exclusive on the platform. Italian songwriter Keyron got in touch with the great idea of releasing his new single Keep it in Piazza Navona, Rome through the AudioSpaces app. While it was available only as an AudioSpace for a limited time, it’s now out on a variety of platforms. But if you're in Rome, why not go listen to it in its original pinned location? Send us a pic if you do.
Click on the link above to read Keyron’s words about the song. Note that we’ve posted this in a new section of the site. This will now be a place to find shorter micro-dose pieces that spotlight individual uploads, users, and series from the app, plus a repository for all my own weird sound thoughts and memories that don’t fit into a full-length article. For now these won’t be sent out to your inboxes like our longer posts, so keep an eye on the section for updates—I’ll remind you in these monthly digests too.
Other stuff to explore
We usually like to round things off with some extra recommendations which should be of interest to anyone into what we’re doing with AudioSpaces. A couple of things to share that have caught my attention this month.
Bodies of sound
Some of my favourite AudioSpaces from October were miruna’s from the Annual March for Women's Safety in Bucharest. We’ve discussed the underlying politics that lies behind audio as a historical medium in this newsletter before. But in some cases what we decide to record can be much more straightforwardly political, as in things like protests or testimonies. Sounding and listening are obviously on some level very personal and intimate—listening comes from the body, in no small way—but the personal, as we know, is always also political.
This upcoming book edited by Irene Revell and Sarah Shin with Silver Press focuses on the embodied politics of sound using a broadly feminist lens. This is poised to be a treasure chest of sonic thinking, and though likely to be a bit theoretical at times I’d still highly recommend it to anyone who wants to deepen the thoughts that go into their recording activities.
It includes contributions from some real conceptual heavyweights, to many of whom I owe a lot of my own understanding: Salomé Voegelin, Marie Thompson, Ximena Alarcón, Pauline Oliveros, Sara Ahmed and so on.
I’m also signposting this now because, for anyone in London with a spare evening this Thursday (7 November), the editors are holding an event to discuss the work with some of their contributors at the Southbank Centre.
Phantom Brickworks
We tend to avoid talking too much about music here. This is partly because there are already so many good Substacks that already do—but also because we’re especially interested in sounds in their relation to spaces and memories, which goes way beyond music.
At the same time, though, there’s an obvious link between the sonic creativity of music and that of recording. Music also nearly always gestures to spaces and places in one way or another. In some cases, like with a lot of ambient music, the physical contours of spaces, real or imagined, can be texturally reflected in and of themselves.
We can remind ourselves here of that famous, almost aphoristic quote from R. Murray Schafer, AKA the big daddy of the soundscape:
“The final question will be: is the soundscape of the world an indeterminate composition over which we have no control, or are we its composers and performers, responsible for giving it form and beauty?”
Now, Schafer was especially concerned with paying closer attention to and taking control of the actual, physical acoustic environment, in order make it less noisy and more amenable to (what he considers) healthy human life. But this quote is also a call to affect the wider soundscape, which we share between each of our own lived experiences, through art and performance—and this obviously includes music.
In precisely that sense, Bibio is one of those producers who seems preoccupied with this task of taking responsibility for our collective soundscape’s form and beauty. His new release Phantom Brickworks II channels the “gradual decline” of various sites he’s visited around Britain, in characteristically wistful sonic nostalgia.
Lots of you show an interest in sharing the sounds of forgotten corners of your local environments—an intensely creative activity, if you ask me. If you don’t do so already, maybe injecting some music like this into your lives will lend you some extra inspiration. Enjoy, and speak soon x
Que chiiido todo esto