We’ve never been natural.

These recordings were made around 2018, when I was thinking about field recording and concrete music in some way. I put some natural sound pieces in a feedback loop where the natural sounds trigger feedback. The feedback was modulated in real time and mixed together with natural sounds to output. I put some natural sounding pieces in a feedback loop where the natural sounds trigger feedback.The feedback was modulated in real time and the two were mixed together for output. It is worth mentioning that these natural sounds are not “field recordings”, I did not record them in the field, but were generated dynamically by an app made for sleeping aid. I actually performed this way once later, and in order to reduce the equipment, I simply used my phone to produce feedback loop instead.

These were some of the attempts I was making at that time. On the one hand, I wanted to reduce the localization of field recordings. I was suspicious of the naturalistic tendencies of contemporary field recordings, and I was tired of the aestheticization and subjectivization of natural sounds. Is our frenzied collection of “never-before-heard” sounds, as we travel over mountains and oceans, into the heart of rainforests or touch the skin of glaciers, a true nature listening experience? Is this a revisiting of our old dreams after modernity has transformed us into cyborgs? Maybe we just think we are part of “nature”, maybe our sensibility for nature is lost in the process of deliberately recording it, not to mention the destructive way of giving it an anthropomorphic emotional label. Yes, we may never have been natural.

On the other hand, I try to blur the border between field recordings and electronic sounds. Why are chaotic and disordered natural sounds calming, while electronic feedback sounds more annoying and relegated to the trash can of noise? Why are natural sounds always considered concrete and electronic sounds always considered abstract? Doesn’t a feedback sinetone sound have a clearer auditory image than natural sounds? In short, I tried to suspend these two kinds of sounds and observe the generative relationship between them. Is the electronic-acoustic sound a kind of imitation of natural noise, or is the sound of nature itself an electronic noise?

So this is the final presentation of several recordings, with feedback inspired by computationally generated soundscape, and then these two sounds juxtaposed indistinguishably. Since it is a feedback loop, these recordings will be a little bit of out-of-control and unexpected , which is also very good. Just like ecological balance, a little bit of imbalance will lead to the collapse of the whole eco-system.

leftear

mastered by Zhu Wenbo
design by Liu Lu