four questions # 12: Zoe Irvine

JrF: when & why did you become interested in field recording ?

ZI: My interest in sound began with voice recording and then editing for Audio Arts Magazine
I was taught to edit the artist interviews on reel to reel tape by audio artist Bill Furlong. At the time, 1994 I was focusing on visual art work – installations and photography. After a while I realised that the activity I enjoyed the most was editing sound. Soon after leaving college I got a minidisk recorder and suddenly the world of field recording opened up. It was amazing and immersive. I loved walking around almost anywhere with the small stereo microphone, discovering a whole level of acoustic environment I hadn’t really noticed before. The electrified, amplified hearing through the machine helped me to develop an ability to attend to sound without a microphone and headphones.

This new passion lead me to find a great variety of sound works which were permission giving and inspiring for my own work.

A small selection include:
Alexandra & Aeron’s releases and their Lucky Kitchen Label, - I loved that the sounds of microphone clunks were in there, it was so human and delicate and unpretentious.
Luc Ferrari – Presque Rien etc.
Walther Ruttman’s 1930 Weekend
Dominique Petitgand – not really so much field recording as domestic
Chris Watson – of course
Jean Luc Goddard’s Nouvelle Vague (CD version)
Chantal Dumas

JrF: how do you use your field recordings in your own artistic output ?

ZI: Well I make a variety of different types of work from installations to participative projects, radiophonic works and sound design. I have used field recording in a broad sense in all types of work I do. When I am composing a radiophonic work or a sound design, field recording is central. However my approach generally is to treat sound sources equally, I do not think of voice as primary, or field recording as musical or music as incedental etc etc. I seem to favour a democracy of different elements but it is hard to say if that comes through in the listening.
In works like Travels Together and Illiers-Combray I use field recording in what I think of as a figurative and visual way, perhaps a filmic way.

In radio mixes and sound walks I have made as part of Magnetic Migration Music (found cassette tape fragments project) I use field recording primarily for it’s sense of place. The sounds of the environments where tapes are found and recorded conversations with people from the area, serve to geographically and physically lodge and reinforce the tactility of tape as a medium. Even in documenting the DIAL-A-DIVA project (documentation still in progress) I use recordings from the venue, the preparations and the atmosphere to provide a pivot for the geographically dispersed disembodied phone voices.

JrF: do you regard the sounds you capture as a musical element (bearing in mind that the conventional definition of 'music' is rapidly becoming obsolete) or as just 'sound' ? is this definition important ? does it matter ?

ZI: I regard music as an element of sound rather than field recording a musical element. I may work with field recordings in what could be considered an abstract musical way – focusing on rhythm, harmony, melody or other aesthetic effects and musical qualities, however, generally I do not abstract the sound. This means its figurative aspect remains evident and appreciable as part of the piece. I am using the word figurative to denote a sounds potential to be subjectively identified and understood semiologically (correctly or not does not matter). In this sense all recorded musical performance has a figurative element and like other sounds it also has a web of reference that can be drawn upon in a work.

For me, these definitions come into play more at the point my work meets an audience. That is not to say it is an afterthought, often the context in which a piece will be shown or engaged with by a public is the only thing I know at the beginning – a show in a gallery or a CD release or a radio programme etc. It becomes an issue of framing and that does change how the sound is received and what kind of effect and meanings it can generate.

JrF: has the act of making field recording had an effect (positive or negative) on the way you listen to your everyday surroundings and how has it affected the way you listen to other music and sound (if at all) ?

ZI: I think I began to answer this question in my response to the first question. Yes it has changed the way I listen to the soundscape around me. Likewise if I have just been working on a piece or a sound design and I’ve spent a day focusing on footsteps or door bangs or the acoustics of space or how a musical passage can carry a momentum forward then suddenly I hear my surroundings in those terms, every footfall sounds very purposeful and particular, the music from a 3rd floor window, the cars passing, the general city hum, birdcalls and so on.
Generally though making and working with field recordings gives me a feeling of agency in the domain of sound which spills into my whole perception and attraction to it, whether I have a recording device with me or not.

May 2008