On Saturday the 30th of March I attended Sunn O)))’s concert at the De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill in my home county of East Sussex, in advance of writing a sensory ethnography detailing and examining the nature of the experience. I was anxious about the many reports and accounts I had read online about audience members who had sustained hearing damage from a Sunn O))) concert, and so prepared myself accordingly. I wore in-ear plugs and large, 3M ear defenders over the top. I required almost 40dB in reduction to be truly safe, which was intimidating. The concert itself was excoriating in its sustained extremity of volume and spectacle. Vast smoke machine and laser lights worked with the music to create a transportive, mystical atmosphere.
What surprised me the most, something that I had not anticipated at all prior to attending, was that the concert would increasingly relax me as it progressed. The low frequency vibrations had a calming effect, once the initial shock had subsided. It was almost sedative, like a no-contact massage. Experiencing it was something I truly enjoyed, inspired to examine in further detail via a sensory ethnography.
With all transparency, radio is an artform I rarely encounter purposefully. I had a minor, youthful and wholly inherited relationship with radio comedy, Hancock’s Half Hour, confused by the BBC’s ripping audio from the television series and putting that on wax as a radio version. Is that radio? Despite the uniqueness in live broadcasting of the radio medium, like many art forms, delineating the boundaries between categories is not so easy.
As an adult, I first found out about Prince Philip and Queen Elizabeth’s deaths organically via workplace radios as the news broke. Vividly, I remember BBC radio on a particular early morning in February 2022 as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine commenced. I remember the desolate, history-making solemnity that cyclical transmission ushered into the kitchen. A sense that the staff’s job to make the unthinkable a digestible, formalist presentation. That uncanny, suspended tension when broadcasting without significant new information that’s a signature of live radio.
I listened to Democracy Now!, who are rebroadcasted in the UK by Resonance FM, in particular a programme from titled ‘”I Died That Day in Parkland”: Shotline Uses AI-Generated Voices of Gun Victims to Call Congress’. Host Amy Goodman conducts an interview with Manuel Oliver, father of Joaquin Oliver, a student shot dead at age 17 during the Parkland high school shooting on February 14 2018.
The spotlighting of the human voice, is a core quality of the radio medium, and the human voice is given a distressing context in this story. Using AI to resurrect the dead is a dystopian, deeply disturbing concept, yet an extremely effective lobbying tool for change. The ability radio has to spotlight unusual cultural nexus points, unique moments in history that may otherwise be overlooked make the application of radio to stress the need for political action and change a crucial means of broadcasting true varied opinion and observation on current events.
Our piece for radio concerns itself with the darker aspects of human life, memorably, Arad’s sample collage is an absurdist scraping of foaming-at-the-mouth Rush Limbaugh cursing at a caller, and Democracy Now! makes very worthwhile liberal radio programming, there is an undeniable fascination with the inanity and blatant grifting of highly suspect conservative, libertarian to far-right agitators like Limbaugh. Current affairs, and the kernels of dark, disturbing absurdity are a central throughline in our piece, from hinting and gesturing towards it, to transparently sampling and referencing specific events and individuals.
Gathering prospective sources in my research aided me in collating a number of key points or topics I could structurally build my essay around. Based on my knowledge of the band’s dynamics, I selected books from the library that spoke to their core dynamics.
In Resonances: Noise and Contemporary Music, I found an essay discussing the contradictory risk of ruining the very organs we use to appreciate music through high volume. The sheer volume of Sunn O)))’s music is perhaps the defining control element in their manipulation of frequency, and stylistically the core of their upending of metal norms.
‘By and large, more or less, generally speaking, most culture does not crip, its consumption or production is not disabling. But pop – and more specifically, rock – seems to have developed a self-negating potential. The irony is indeed profound; it’s heavy. The very discriminating organs that make most possible profession and pleasure in popular music are those under threat of dysfunction by popular music’ (2007, pp. 69)
McKay, G. (2007) ‘To Be Played at Maximum Volume: Rock Music as a Disabling (Deafening) Culture’, in M. Goddard, B. Halligan and N. Spellman (eds) Resonances: Noise and Contemporary Music. New York: Bloomsbury.
It also felt significant to me to pursue and analyse the psychological effects of the music Sunn O))) are performing, an examination of the internal world would be equally significant and necessary when writing a sonic ethnography. Their music is uniquely glacial in form and pace, but could not perhaps be considered sedative in its excoriating parameters of volume and distortion.
‘A hypothesis often tested is that stimulative music increases physiological responses, while sedative music decreases them… research findings do not unanimously support such a direct relationship between stimulative and sedative music and physiological responses.’ (2011, pp. 179)
Hodges, D.A. and Sebald, D.C. (2011) Music in the Human Experience: An Introduction to Music Psychology. New York: Routledge.
In choosing to study Sunn O))) it would be necessary to draw on sources directly from the band themselves, and to reflect on metal music as a cultural touchstone with which to compare them to. The emotional character and colours that core member Stephen O’Malley attributes to the Sunn O))) concert experience is indispensable in creating an argument within an ethnographic context, and can lead to further interrogation of what power and transcendence mean in the musical space.
‘To me it focuses completely on the power that Metal music is able to access in pure ferocity, energy and even bliss… To me “Into the Pandemonium” provided a certain type of challenging influence which in some ways may be a Rosetta stone “Monoliths & Dimensions” perhaps. Somehow the direction and ambition could be interpreted as 21st century interpretation of that album. Not entirely, but honestly it is there in spirit. I will also tell you this: A Sunn O))) concert is raw power personified and its execution transcends the typical Metal experience people have become accustomed to.’ (O’Malley, pp. 699)
O’Malley, S. and Kristiansen, J. (2011) Metalion: The Slayer Mag Diaries. Edited by T. G. Warrior. New York: Bazillion Points.
After fielding feedback from Milo our tutor and our peers, it was clear to us that it was necessary to be more overt or arch in how we conveyed our narrative to the listener. However useful it was as a functional framework to help us create, it became immediately apparent that it was too opaquely drawn in that iteration of the draft.
A resolution we decided upon was narration, in keeping with the tone of the archival radio drama samples. In my writing and performance and processing of the narration passages, I drew particular inspiration from British Pathé news and documentary segments, as well as Leonard Nimoy’s “space, the final frontier…” opening monologue from Star Trek III: The Search for Spock.
The domestic, stolid, almost quaint narrative entry point of a kitchen proved extremely difficult to sonically render in a coherent fashion. I experimented with recording Foley of cabinets and dishes, a spoon stirring sugar into tea, and creaking doors and a gently ticking clock, in an attempt to capture the environment without words. To purely immerse the listener within the environment they may well already be listening within. However, despite these keynote sounds deriving from real kitchens, my own and the room tone from my girlfriend’s grandmother’s apartment in Korea, alone they were not enough to even suggest a kitchen environment. We had to lean further into transparency, even kitsch, to come close to successfully drawing the listener clearly into a kitchen in the radio medium. Sizzling bacon, could perhaps be another sound to include, or the toaster.
We agreed that guiding the audience’s focus and immersion through narration was a pragmatic way to centre the listener and prevent them from losing the narrative thread. I focussed my efforts on the final sequence set in space, because of its lack of keynote sounds and acousmatic nature, feeling that the kitchen scene as rendered was concrete enough for the listener to enter the space without
The way Nimoy’s voice has been treated is fascinating to me; it has a muffled, very close proximity effect, reflecting the suffocating acoustic dynamics within his makeshift naval coffin. Paired with this is a plate reverb or echo, adding a shimmering, cosmic colour. It’s as though he is talking through an interstellar cup and string telephone, an interesting contrast of muffled and expansive inspired my microphone and processing choices when recording the short section of narration leading into the final act of the piece.
I wrote the narration script in a florid, detailed style, drawing on Rod Sterling, H.P. Lovecraft and the mystery radio drama style:
‘Out in the expanse of space, someone, or something, listens at the crack in the door we breached. All of our minuscule, full-blooded voices teeming data on the solar winds. Like a great, celestial fly-fisherman, it, or they, attunes to the current, casting ringing electrons wide and reeling in our subatomic cacophonies. Learning about who these voices belong to.’
As stated by Crook (1999, pp. 162), ‘Radio’s fifth dimension of narrative communication, the listener’s imagination, is central to the cognitive, metaphysical and subconscious experience of the reader of written poetry and prose.’ In the purely sonic arena of radio, we have to be so much more gestural to convey the same density of information that the written word does. Enacting upon feedback and writing and performing this narration helps both imaginatively detail the world this story takes place within, while guiding the listener through a realm that was previously too obscure. In spite of that consideration, abstraction and experimentation also play a part in imaginatively shaping listener’s experiences. Balancing these concerns of clarity and abstraction will be a key challenge in successfully conveying our cosmic radiophonic narrative.
Perceptions of place and identity can be ontologically interrogated and mined for more dimensional, associative meaning through the methodological application of ethnography. Ostensibly following a trail of experiential description, a focused reading of the corporeal, technical, sociological and political circumstances surrounding a sonic artefact. Steven Feld’s (1996, pp. 97) term of ‘acoustemology’ is designed to express and ‘to argue the potential of acoustic knowing, of sounding as a condition of and for knowing, of sonic presence and awareness as potent shaping forces in how people make sense of experiences.’ Listening and sounding within the context of acoustemology can yield surprising, often challenging, results.
In our own brief ethnography, I was drawn to observe the construction site noise in the centre of Elephant and Castle. A busy circuit of traffic roars around the base of the megalithic concrete and steel core of what is to be the new campus site of London College of Communication.
Conceptual, cross-section render of the finished site
The amphitheatrical nature of the Elephant and Castle roundabout engenders a sonically reflective wash of percussive, arrhythmic machine noise and hammering. At that elevation and distance, it’s impossible to determine which sounds are generated by human or machine physicality. On a macro scale, all the audible sound is generated by human labour of some kind, and all the infrastructure that we depend on is a result of the fruits of that sounding. To reach a personally intimate ethnographic analysis would be interesting, zooming in on the blood, sweat and tears that can be overlooked as being base in an art world often sociologically walled-off from those who literally laid the foundations their institutions rest upon.
The ethical and pragmatic concerns large scale firms employing a proportion of foreign labourers and contractors enables the ethnographic exploration of working language and terminology, social pockets and structures existing within transplanted places.
The acoustic properties of construction are far-ranging and internationally variable; the landscapes there are interfacing with, changing or destroying, the people it employs, ensnares or relocates, innumerable factors engender multifarious acoustemological associations and readings. What makes London construction different to Jakarta or Murmansk? What factors separate rural building from chip factory construction?
The Ab Reinhardt quote ‘art is art and everything else is everything else’ annoys me to no end. To me, it alludes to the implicit establishment of art as a separatist staging ground against normalcy. Intentional or not, it plays into the narrow and performative institutional engagement with the outside world and its concerns. Much of the commercial art world is run out of, props up and promotes the continued existence of the elevated, ‘glass palace’ archetype. Does the art world truly reach back down to touch those who put them there?
Bibliography:
Feld, S. (1996) ‘Waterfalls of Song: an acoustemology of place resounding in Bosavi, Papua New Guinea’, in S. Feld and K. H. Basso (eds) Senses of Place. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, pp. 97
Welles performing The War of the Worlds from the Columbia Broadcasting Building, 31 October 1938
By the end of the 1930’s, 28 million American households owned a radio, it became the new hearth, enjoying a rapt attention not seen today. Welles’ infamous 1938 radio adaptation of H.G. Wells’ novel ‘The War of the Worlds’ was a seminal moment in the history of radio drama. Intentionally breaking the traditional narrative structure and form of the original novel, the broadcast was framed as realistic, detailed news broadcasts taking place in the contemporary world, rather than the 1890’s Surrey of the original novel. So realistic, that it inspired widespread panic; the public believed the story.
The genius of the work lies in its playful and faithfully deceptive understanding of the form of radio in that era. Beginning with fabricated weather report and musical programs, designed to thread in and out so authentically and seamlessly with normal radio that the audience would find it nearly impossible to distinguish it from mundane broadcasting. The eerie unfolding of events that is intrinsic to The War of the Worlds suits the slow drip propagation of information that rolling news coverage provides.
I have a memory of listening to it on cassette when I was young, and having little to no impression of it. Reflecting on that apathy now, I think it’s deeper than child-me not being able to relate to old, tinny media; rather, listening with intention on cassette whenever you like is entirely antithetical to the surreptitious, near-hijacking conceit of the original broadcast. Even studying the artistry of its performers and musicians, is only experiencing half the point. One of the most thrilling aspects of radio is, if convincingly rendered, the potential to sow doubt in listener’s minds. That singularly hovering, dawning sense of discovery allows us to momentarily destabilise the bounds of our perceived reality. Welles’ drama is an early highlight of an exciting framing device more often found in found footage cinema, genre film and internet-based art: “Is this real?”
Comparison can be drawn between The War of the Worlds and Jean Shepherd’s I, Libertine hoax. In 1956, Shepherd, a radio host on New York’s WOR station, encouraged listeners to order the novel I, Libertine by Fredrick R. Ewing by the hundreds. The problem being, the book did not exist. Embittered by his 1 to 5:30 a.m. slot, Shepherd drew a delineation between the organised ‘Day People’ and the isolation of the ‘Night People’ and sought to prod the status quo, seeing the bestseller list-adhering bookstore clerk as the target for his hoax. Later in September, the book was written and published for a reader demand Shepherd had fostered as a prank.
In the radio field, the broadcaster has access to trusting ears; by the nature of the media’s constant presence, a passive, semi-attentive listening mode is formed. The audience perhaps subconsciously trusts the information broadcasted is vetted and programme formats sharply defined, despite the relative youth of the technology. The sneaky exploitation of the audience’s solid, pacified trust in the radio machine is a core thematic interest of our group project, especially within a science fiction context, and Orson Welles’ chimeric adaptation of The War of the Worlds provides much inspiration, straddling realism and heightened theatricality.
Bibliography:
Schwartz, B. A. (2015) The Infamous “War of the Worlds” Radio Broadcast Was a Magnificent Fluke. Available at: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/infamous-war-worlds-radio-broadcast-was-magnificent-fluke-180955180/ (Accessed: 5 March 2024)
Wagoner, R. (2021) What really happened during Orson Welles’ ‘War of the Worlds’ radio broadcast. Available at: https://www.dailynews.com/2021/10/26/what-really-happened-during-orson-welles-war-of-the-worlds-radio-broadcast/ (Accessed: 5 March 2024)
http://web.archive.org/web/20020427051336/flicklives.com/Articles/Wall_Street_Journel/8-1-56/8-1-56.jpg (2002) (Accessed: 20 March 2024)
Presenting the band and their gestural approach to physically imposing sound, and simultaneous subversion and harnessing of Metal cultural signifiers
Ethnographic description of concert
Thick description of the intensity of the concert experience, safeguarding measures for hearing protection and observations about the music itself and audience behaviour
The physiology of damaging and dangerous decibel levels in extreme music
Encapsulating Sunn O)))’s extended technical approaches to conventions of metal music, namely volume as a tool for sculpting uniquely vibrational low frequencies
Analysis of distortion
Exploring distortion’s role in harmonically enabling frequency manipulation, its elemental qualities in the ritualistic concert setting
Metal cultures as avant-garde source material, Sunn O)))’s lineage from Cage, Xenakis and Stockhausen
Analysing Sunn O))) as avant-garde in relation to Fluxus and electronic progenitors
Subversion of concert experience:
Investigating emotive and visceral conceptual ideas of power in the metal arena and concert archetype, linking back to achieving vibrational frequencies through extreme volume
On Friday the 1st of March we gathered in M113 to record the central call-in radio show segments of our radiophonic piece.
There were a number of key technical challenges in effectively and productively recording together. Initially we intended to include a room mic, to metatextually bring the listener into the real-world space of the radio studio, however our available interfaces only had two inputs. We then ran both the vocal track microphones, a Shure SM58 and Neumann TLM 103, into a Mackie mixer. Our Sennheiser condenser was creating piercing feedback, so we reconsidered and removed the room microphone; something we can always re-create with Foley processes afterwards. There were also gain and level settings to make, and creative decisions such as performing in an affected voice, or accent. We selected the Neumann TLM 103 as the host’s microphone for its clarity and professional quality, and the Shure SM58 as the caller’s, to allow us to functionally work with a little more abrasion, lending itself well to be later processed and edited as the caller’s phone signal.
Performing as the host in the Ohio train derailment conspiracy theorist segment, and as the alien caller in the following sequence, I had to experiment with and access different characters’ voices. A crucial aspect to emulate the natural, casually-evolving conversation of talk radio was to follow the detailed script while allowing for deliberate sloppiness and mistakes. The benefit of working from a script ensured an intentional backbone of our work, while freeing us to experiment with the material without losing focus or time.
Playing into the performative conventions of radio hosts and callers was a fun subject to explore, and spoke to the ease and creative rewards this particular collaboration has been in comparison with the previous project. Our efficiency in reaching common ground has proved fruitful in generating immediacy in both our idea-generating process and our acting upon that impetus.
With a small 5-watt FM transmitter, we performed and listened to an extract of Mike Cooter’s reinvigoration of the early 1940’s experimental detective drama ‘Dingus’ on our individual radios. Creating our own transmission and listening on different radios in varying settings informed the way I perceive the capabilities of radio as a medium for genuine, intimate and collaborative performance.
In contrast to clean, professional radio, what made the experience and performance so distinctive was the performers’ audible freshness and unfamiliarity with the material, form and technique. The small mistakes; being off-mic, misreading lines and cues for instance. This organic and wholesome transmission felt more approachable, warmer and more charming than traditional radio, something akin to watching movies made in childhood. Despite this, and perhaps the abstract nature of Dingus itself, I found it hard to focus on the events of the actual story.
While listening to our colleagues reading of Dingus was engaging and charming in appreciating its relatively homespun-sounding mistakes, participating in the performance itself was far more interesting, exciting and revealing. Our group of three, myself, Arad and Minsoo, were encouraged to forego the script, and improvise a transmission. Imaginatively, this made for an entertaining broadcast; Depression FM, having reached that by way of reading a news headline about a Mars habitation trial, the weather, pink and blue sunsets, describing the colours pink and blue for those who are visually impaired, blue being the colour of depression, and so on. We even encouraged, and received, calls from our colleagues in the corridor, acting as irate and depressed callers. What I learned was how electrifying being live can be, how it stimulates the imagination to improvise and create unpredictable, entertaining stories in collaboration; something I want to incorporate into our group project.
Choosing John Cage’s 1951 composition Imaginary Landscape No. 4 (March No. 2) may seem like a diversion from radiophonic art, in the sense of rather than being broadcast on the radio, it utilises radios themselves as instrumental objects to compose with his signature alchemical ‘chance operations’.
In our group discussions, a central pillar of conceptual thought that we gathered around continually was radio’s propensity for randomness. The way we consume media is increasingly granulated and fragmentary, radio’s segmentation and diversity of content can lead to a dissociative, schizoid experience when listening laterally. Just turning the dial once can take you from harrowing news to pop music and gameshows, sometimes on the same station. I see a similarity in Cage’s emotionally detached compositional technique, designed to circumvent conventions of taste and memory.
12 radios are operated, or performed, by 24 performers who follow a score instructing manipulations of volume, kilocycle and amplitude. The nature of performance engenders a total randomisation of content material. It is unpredictable and largely impossible, depending on location and time of performance, to preempt what sounds can emerge from the tuning static. This achieves Cage’s goal of the suppression of the artist’s will, his ‘chance operations’.
Extract of the score for Imaginary Landscape No. 4 (March No. 2)
This sweeping collation of randomised broadcasts as subject matter is inspirational in our current collaborative work, reflecting our vantage point in a way; avoiding traditional perspectives of taste, we are exploring the volatile mix of the banal and horror in the contemporary, chaotic tapestry of media and radio. The selection of subject matter will be vital, and telling, so Cage’s method is perhaps the purest distillation of ‘chance operations’, and a portrait of radio itself.
As Robert Worby (2009) notes, a poignant aspect of the piece is the fact that it ‘will not be performable at all when analogue radio is switched off in a few years’. Despite the age of the reference, it is interesting to consider the relative short lifespan the composition has due to its dependance on rapidly ageing hardware infrastructure. In a sense, ‘Imaginary Landscape No. 4 (March No. 2)’ can not only never be performed the same way twice, but evolves in response to the changing availability, accessibility and sonic landscape of FM radio.
Bibliography:
Worby, R. (2009) Turn on, tune in: John Cage’s symphony for 12 radios. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2009/aug/06/john-cage-symphony-for-radios (Accessed: 24 February 2024)
