A Continuing Archive

A Spectral Geology offers a continuing archive of sources interwoven around centrally positioned field recordings of the spomenik sites. These sources can prompt the listening process through both their content and their discontiguous, fragmentary nature, hinting at some of what we may be able to hear were it possible to listen deep into the past of these sites.

As Brandon LaBelle has noted:

              The medium of sound seems to inspire such relational approaches and concerns [as                            expanding our perspective onto the world through a deepening of the listening sense]; as                  if sound is already unfolding a broader horizon, leading us to heighten our attention to                      the proximate as well as the distant, to what is present as well as the shimmering trace of                  what is no longer there. The propagating, vibrating and resonating movements of sound                    draw us toward this greater view, and importantly, put us in dialogue with all that                              surrounds. (LaBelle 2015: 296)

In A Spectral Geology, the archive avoids exalting one site over another by continuously randomizing the order of the vitrines that represent each site as they appear. Moving from one site (vitrine) to the next, we hear one field recording fade out as the next fades in to escort us downwards.

The loci of these listenings, the spomeniks themselves, appear masked in this presentation, not in an attempt to erase them or out of any sense of disrespect or denial, but rather to counter the historicist’s imbalance between foreground and background. They seek to refocus attention for a moment on their surroundings, buzzing as they are with continual activity rarely considered significant in historical narratives. The subject of the work after all is not the spomeniks in themselves but the contexts in which they maintain a presence.

To listen to the work in the way it is intended requires a certain apprehension of causal logic, in favor of a hopeful poetic and a deferential ethic. To close with Voegelin:

              While the possible-thing-of-sound is an alternative state of affairs that might not convince                everybody, that might not be taken into account, that might be deliberately marginalised,                it nevertheless demonstrates a possibility or possibilities even, in how things might be if                    only we listened. It will for many remain a lesser, or less noticed influence on reality, but                  there is a momentum of conviction in its coherence and truthfulness strong enough to                      consider the ‘if that…’ and come to a sonic ‘then what…’ of possibility. (Voegelin 2014:                        168-9)