In January of 2022, I traveled with my family to Catarata Gocta, a two-tiered waterfall in the high rainforest, just outside of Cocachimba in Peru’s northeast. I seized this opportunity to conduct an artistic research experiment combining field recording, mystical participation, dream work, philosophy, and psychology. I incite and analyze dreams, peel back the perverse layers of my capitalist induced fantasies, exhaust liquid metaphors, engage in forms of mystical participation, discuss whether it’s even possible to record a place at all and draw connections and conclusions whose coherence is, well, maybe not so coherent. This essay touches on Sonic Journalism, the psychologies of Jung, the art criticism of Sontag and Berger and the art of Cage, Duchamp, and Hunter S. Thompson. The field recordings and images presented here are shreds of evidence supporting my own twisted brand of Gonzo Journalism. It is a tight rope walk across microphone cables and book spines, fueled by coffee, internet databases, and obsessive listening. The gravitational current pulling the waters of Catarata Gocta earthward is the dense center around which this essay orbits. Stretching across its horizon, I feel myself emptied, my thoughts laid bare and made available for self-examination.
On Field Recording
This is not an impartial report, but a presentation of my collected subjective impressions and experiences while recording a location. I am using Peter Cusack’s definition of Sonic Journalism as a starting point. “Sonic Journalism is based on the idea that all sound, including non speech, gives information about places and events and that listening provides valuable insights different from, yet complementary to, visual images and language.” (Carlyle, 2013, p.25) This information is being filtered through me. Even if my intention was to present an unbiased work, my imprint as a recordist would be all over it, slightly twisting and shaping the sound message. Simple choices like when and where to record, what direction the microphones are facing, what type of microphones I’m using, how long I record for and what I record would leave the indelible trace of my presence and personality. If I decide, as Cusack does, to allow myself to be audible, then even more so.1
It has long been my conviction that a pure field recording is impossible. Environmental archivists like Walter Tilgner, whose mission is to record a “pure” soundscape without the presence of manmade sounds, carefully consider the location and time of day a recording is to be made. “Each recording is exactly planned. The recording of a certain countryside, forest or lake district do not exist by chance. The characteristic sound of a forest at a special time is the aim through observations, the study of literature and many inspections beforehand without recording equipment.”(Tilgner and Kürten, 2009, p.15)
Tilgner acknowledges that even with such precise and transparent methods of recording there is still a filter in play, implying that what the listener is hearing is not just the sounds of the natural world, but the recording process itself. “The produced recording has to be as natural as possible, that the listener feels back again where the microphone stood and that one can experience the recording procedure again.” (Tilgner and Kürten, 2009)
There is always a composer, and a field recording is a composition. Maybe not in the traditional European classical sense, but certainly this concept is not so far removed from the chance procedures championed by Cage, in which the composition is more of a prescription or a situation, rather than a notated score of tonal events. Field recordists like Tilgner are framers and have more in common with photographers than they do with our traditional notion of music makers. Susan Sontag, in On Photography, writes “…photographs are evidence not only of what’s there but of what an individual sees, not just a record but an evaluation of the world.” (2008, p.88)
Field recordings are aural snapshots of a specific location in time. Much like a photograph, they freeze time and space. “The photographer both loots and preserves, denounces and consecrates.” (Sontag, 2008, p.64) Susan Sontag’s seminal On Photography, could easily be called On Field Recording. The book could be read, mentally replacing the word ‘photograph’ with the words ‘field recording’, and lead to an incredible understanding of both art forms. All of us are armed with “smart” phones; cameras and microphones at our disposal. Instantly we can record any sound or image we find interesting. Amassing a collection limited only by the size of our hard drives. These frozen moments, quickly recallable to a present semblance, are our collection: a surreal pastiche of a child’s impulsive creativity. “Like the collector, the photographer is animated by a passion that, even when it appears to be for the present, is linked to a sense of the past.” (Sontag, 2008, p.77)
Turning now to my past and the beginning of my collection, rather, the beginning of a new, shall we say, shelf, in my already abundant collection of field recordings. Armed with ears, electronics, and a vague notion as to what this research may become, I board an Airbus A330-200 and journey from my home in Berlin, Germany to Lima, Perú, half a world away.
Watermarks (aka Mystical Participation)
Intentionally I look for signs, which I call watermarks (if you’ll forgive the pun). The aim was to have a sort of energy exchange with the world around me, to build a mental construct of the waterfall before arriving. “The behavior of new contents that have been constellated in the unconscious but are not yet assimilated to the consciousness is similar to that of complexes…Like complexes they lead a life of their own so long as they are not made conscious and integrated with the life of the personality. In the realm of artistic and religious phenomena, these contents may likewise appear in personified form, especially as archetypal figures.” (Jung, 1970, p.121) Jung has quite a bit to say about the concept of mystical participation (coined by French ethnologist Lucien Levy-Brúhl), and how this concept has evolved from early humans sharing a personality with another person or object, to our own mystical participation in modern day society within personal relationships and larger shared concepts like money, government, and corporations. This is incorporated into my artistic research, willfully calling out to the world to give me a sign, to imagine that I am being called by Gocta. That the waterfall had left me a trail of breadcrumbs, and if I paid close enough attention, they would be revealed to me. This worked better than expected, culminating in a powerful dream the first night we slept within earshot of the falls.
From the moment I stepped onto the plane in Paris (we flew Berlin > Paris >Lima), I found what I was looking for. On the winglet was a winged Hippocampus, ancient sea monster of Greek mythology, steed of Neptune’s chariot, symbol of Air France, and namesake of that section of the brain which generates new memories and calculates future possibilities.2
Midflight I heard a high singing pitch coming from behind the curtains in the cabin ahead. I listened for a while, in that state between sleeping and waking which is so common on long international flights. *Please listen yourself to the above audio file* As it faded away, I promised myself that should it return, I would get up and record it properly, having brought into the cabin with me my Sure MV-88 (a stereo microphone which connects to the iPhone). To my satisfaction, maybe thirty minutes later it did return, and I got up and chased it down, standing in the isle with my microphone amidst the sleeping passengers.
“There’s a vulture high overhead, in the blue, blue, blue beautiful sky” I’m waxing poetic after a few days in Lima, decompressed and over the jetlag of the long trip. Sitting on a rooftop, recording the city around me, a gorgeous tapestry of sound. *Please listen to the above excerpt of my rooftop recording session* I had been wondering what it would be like to interact with my environment. To step out from behind the field recorder, to work in concert with my surroundings. What does it mean to enter into a dialogue with a place? Without over thinking I decided to hit record, and let my fingers and voice find themselves.
Maybe my interjection would serve a purpose, acting as an announcer, “placing the listener more squarely inside the recording context.” (Lane and Carlyle, 2016, p.113) Westerkamp does have a point, we are so used to tuning out the sounds around us, it would be a matter of seconds before a listener here in Berlin (or anywhere else) begins to tune out another cities’ sound. Returning only when an exotic bird caws or the knife sharpener calls out in the street. My voice or playing could be the hook that reels the listener in.
The daily routine in Lima is a walk to the local coffee/bread shop Pan de la Chola3 – a place I have great fondness for. When I lived in Lima, I would play piano for two hours there every Sunday, improvising and drinking coffee; this went on for almost a year and I recorded each set. Now part of my collection, they sit on the shelf of my hard drive next to my field recordings and sample libraries. Hours upon hours waiting to be unspooled. Part of me thinks I will never listen and revisit this time. Perhaps this digital detritus will be left for my daughter to go through and discard like the moldy magazines and newspapers of a recluse recently passed. Next to the coffee shop is a bookstore, where I would spend time browsing. In pursuit of my watermarks, I come across a children’s book, Irma Sirena (Tabucchi, Giandelli, and Gumpert Melgosa, 2016).4I buy it without even opening it. There is a local legend that a mermaid lives at the bottom of Catarata Gocta, and is responsible for the disappearance of local men (“Gocta Cataracts”, 2024) – a supernatural force not unlike the Sirens which Jason and his Argonauts faced, or the ones which sang on my flight. After sharing this story with my friend Annika, she suggested I meditate and try reaching out to this spirit, but in truth I was too afraid.
One of the final watermarks I encountered before traveling from Lima to Cocachimba, was watching the film Waterworld5 (a favorite of mine – I know, I know). Curiously enough there is a part where the Mariner (Kevin Costner) teaches Enola (Tina Majorino) how to listen:
“I don’t hear anything.” Enloa says.
“That’s because you’re too loud.” The Mariner answers.
(Reynolds, 1995)
Practical advice. It’s impossible to appreciate the sounds of the world around us if we’re over saturated with self-produced noise. This moment in the film was quite beautiful, and very much on the mark for my journey ahead.
A Waterfall Divided in Two
The Catarata Gocta is 771 meters high and falls in two parts. The first descent is 230m and the second 541m. It is one of the tallest waterfalls on the planet and was brought to the attention of the western world in 2002 by German archeologist Stefan Ziemendorff. There is some dispute to its ranking as the 3rd, 5th, or 16th tallest waterfall; but for me it’s more remarkable that it has two halves. Light heartedly employing Philip K. Dick’s M-kinetics6 to a place, this waterfall becomes a symbol of the conscious and unconscious mind. The first drop shorter, shallower than the second. Corelating the familiar and known consciousness on the surface, and the profound and unknown drop that is the unconscious cascading to the depths below. The waterfall is the mind.
We were told its origin is a cave at least a mile farther upstream, coming from deepest earth and traveling at amazing velocity through the high mountains of Peru’s rain forest. A land of steep hills and valleys, the sides of mountains laid bare through rockslides and erosion, millions of years of sandstone layers both hidden and exposed. Once an ocean bed, it is now 2000 meters above sea level. This is a land of cactuses and orchids. The moisture and climate provide the perfect conditions for these beautiful plants to grow. In every direction the orchids could be seen in tree branches, on the sides of cliffs, or fallen to the ground while cacti sprout upward from every surface imaginable.
It was a six-kilometer, mostly uphill hike in, which took the better part of the morning. I was struck particularly by the sound of the wind moving through several of the pine glens we passed through. A soft sea swirl whispers, as if the mountains were transmitting their aural oceanic memories up through the tree’s roots, comforting those exposed parts of themselves, sensitive sandstone revealed to the sun and wind. In these places a deeper quietness prevailed, strangely muting the hoof falls of the horse carrying my daughter, the guide falling silent, my wife walking as if on tiptoe, and the sound of my breathing suddenly voluminous in my own ears. It was as if the area around us, bent on remembering epochs past, was patiently waiting for us to leave, interrupters of a nostalgic revery.
After three and a half hours we arrived. The air was filled with spray, the waterfalls moisture clung to every surface. I was stunned by the beauty and endless abundance of the natural world (how does this amount of water flow unceasingly year after year?). Coming back to my senses, I quickly set up my field recorder and microphones to make a first recording.
Being so familiar with the sounds of waterfalls from films, a deep thundering rumble as a continuous explosion of water meets the rocks below, I was surprised to hear (from my location) exclusively high frequency noise. *Please listen to the above audio file* This cascade of high frequencies becomes hypnotic. As I listen back to this recording, what first sounds static begins to move with wavey subtlety as the wind pushes the falling waters out across the cliff face. This sound of water could also be, transformed with a little imagination, the sound of air rushing past my ears as I fall from an unknown height. My thoughts become geologic, roaming among the centuries as Gocta’s voice sings out across the valley.
The basin of the first drop is strewn with boulders, forming protected pools. The rocks are a brownish orange, giving the water a startling rust like color. Climbing carefully down we make our way over the rocks’ crooked and random protrusions, finding a place to slide to the water’s surface. Again, I place my field recorder and microphone, dropping a hydrophone as well into the water, attempting to capture my mythologized, Hollywood-esque low frequency rumble. In the end I do it myself with post processing, boosting the low end of the hydrophone recording, and imposing my idea of what a waterfall should sound like onto what it actually sounded like. *You can hear the result in the audio file below*
As the recording is taking place, I slide into the water. It’s ice-cold and electric. Instantly numbing. All my thoughts are struck out the moment my head goes under. Surfacing, I notice there is a small whirlpool close by, and I stare mesmerized at the glints and glimmers under the high sun, spinning as ceaselessly as the earth itself. In the water of this pool, I am in the substance of the very boundary level between known and unknown. Submerged in “a babbling procession of the best stories in the world, sent from the heart of the earth to be told at last to the insatiable sea.” (Grahame and Shepard, 1983, p.3) This is the twilight land of the evaporating self. The point at which the deep dreamer becomes lucid, or the dreaming sleeper drops off into a deeper slumber, taking with them the memory of both the icy, numbing cold of the boundary waters and the warmth of an equatorial sun.
Peter Pan Catches His Shadow
The importance of dream is revealed by Jung; “These subliminal aspects of everything that happens to us…are the almost invisible roots of our conscious thoughts.” (Jung et al., 1968, p.29) On my first night arriving at the Catarata Gocta, I had a profound dream that at once connected me both to the location, and to my own deep sense of spirituality, gradually pushed aside by the ceaseless activity of day-to-day family life. I saw it as an invitation from the deepest parts of myself to resume the spiritual practice I had enjoyed so much as a teenager and young adult.
From my journal:
Tue: 04.01.22
Arrived yesterday at Gocta – spent the day listening to the world around – filled with insects, birds, domestic animals like chickens and dogs, people talking – work/construction and behind all the quiet roar of the distant waterfall.
*My Dream:
Lucid. I decide to use my dream to meditate. I stand perfectly balanced upon a tall iron, black painted fence. I am in a tree, and leaning against a branch is an older man, Peruvian, with white hair. He begins to teach and tell me things (upon waking I do not remember what he said). I hear a deep voice behind me say:
“Welcome Back.”
I turn and see a wooden figure carved into the tree. It is this figure who spoke to me. From the tree I look down and see a swimming pool, filled with normal looking people fully dressed, who I realize are all spiritual masters. I jump into the pool and begin to talk with them.
A watery dream in a watery place.
“The concept of receiving in dreams is a time honored one. The messages can come from the voices of people we know or have known or from totally unrecognizable voices. Many have reported voices that appear to come from “Teachers” imparting important information.” (Ione, 2005, p.98) The older Peruvian with white hair bore a striking resemblance to my real-life meditation teacher, who lives in New York City, and who I have not seen or spoken with in quite some time.7 This dream feels like a double invitation, to resume my spiritual practice and a welcoming from the waterfall itself. In only two days I would be diving into the rocky pools at the base of the first drop.
Like my dream, this paper has woven into it my desire to unite two worlds: the subjective, personal world of the dream, and the objective universal world of academic research. Combining dream and the scientific method feels akin to Peter Pan attempting to catch his own shadow. The very beauty of a dream is that it is unquantifiable, whereas the beauty of the scientific method is its objectively verifiable nature.
A dream is another way to experience a location. A way for us to be present in, and afterwards, to remember a place. I had intentionally charged my mind by looking for my so-called watermarks enroute to the waterfall.8 Perhaps this is a technique where everyone who wishes could have a new, unique, and creative angle from which to experience the world around them. Each dream would be different, personal, and yet all would experience that same sense of dream. Much in the way we all (who are not blind) experience the sense of sight, yet each sees through their own set of eyes.9
How are we to get outside of ourselves, outside of the routine and facts which we already know, if we are not afforded a glimpse of something “other” through the dream state? There is a classic example, cited by Jung, of how “The 19th century German chemist Kekule, researching into the molecular structure of benzene, dreamed of a snake with its tail in its mouth.” (Jung et al., 1968, p.26) This led to his realization of the shape of the molecule. The dream world has much to offer to the world of scientific and academic study, and is another valid way to interpret, experience and assimilate our research.
“A pond becomes a lake, a breeze becomes a storm, a handful of dust is a desert, a grain of sulfur in the blood is a volcanic inferno. What manner of theatre is it, in which we are at once playwright, actor, stage manager, scene painter, an audience?” Sebald asks. (2004, p.80) I wonder the same. The waterfall, from the vantage point of the pool I was currently dreaming in, I mean, swimming in, has a much richer sonic texture. There is a danger in the sound, a glimpse of its colossal power. It made me afraid. Mingled with respect and awe, it was the fear that comes with the dissolution of one’s own self-importance. Sensing the primal impulse that gives life to this towering, impossible waterfall above me. Here I am below with my tiny machine attempting to capture some of its immeasurable essence. To take it home with me, as if this waterfall were a lion to be hunted and stuffed. Or is my obsession with recording an attempt at immortality, a hope that some part of me, now married with the sound of the waterfall, will live as long as there are playback devices and fingers to push the buttons on them? I guess I am at heart a rag-and-bones man.10 Staring into the whirlpool beside me, hypnotized by the sun’s reflection dancing on the water’s rivulets, I lose myself in looping revery.
Pristine, Untouched, Virgin
I imagine what it would sound like without chickens. Here I am, obviously somewhere, but also in the middle of nowhere (at least for a city boy like me) and all I hear are chickens. The sounds of civilization – dogs, chickens, machinery, cars, planes, rumbling. They disturb me. Maybe I really am an old man shouting at the modern world, like R. Murray Schaefer, to get off my lawn!11 I know that I can love and appreciate almost all sounds, but there is something deeper at work here. A parallel between my wanting a pure recording of the natural world and the “male gaze” John Berger talks about in Ways of Seeing. I wanted the natural world for myself. Pristine, untouched, virgin. Transposing and inheriting cultural concepts of sexuality in my field recording practice. The soundscape is mine the way the nude in the painting is mine. A field recording is something I can show off, something to impress, to make other listeners envious, not just with the quality of my recording, but with the exotic objects recorded – a glimpse of nature impossible for anyone else, difficult to accesses and untouched. I am the judge of this beauty; and natures prize is my ownership. (Berger, 1997, p.52) I was her first. I am here first.
I am, after all, a consumer. A child of shopping malls, strip malls, food courts, fast food, and Saturday morning cartoons spliced with advertisements for brightly colored toys and cereal. Perhaps the real damage of watching too much television as a child is not a limiting of imagination or damaging of the eyes, but the inculcation of a desire for stuff through exposure to countless advertisements. In the consumer culture of the West, what we own defines us, gives us our sense of self. As David Levine concisely puts it “Our possessions pertain to us in a way that expresses the qualities of the selves they represent. Respect for the integrity of our space and the things we put in it has the same meaning as respect for the integrity of our selves, which is to say respect for the boundary that separates self from other.” (Levine, 2013, p.15) No longer a child, I find my material identity in recording and music equipment, in the recordings themselves, in the hording and collection of material that makes sound and the speakers which play them back.12
While we’re on the topic of recording equipment, I should note that I used the following gear for most of the field recordings made in Gocta. A Sound Devices Mix Pre 6, a pair of LOM Audio Uši Pro omnidirectional microphones, and an Aquarian Audio H2A hydrophone. For headphones I prefer my Sony MDR-7506’s, a headphone I’ve been using for at least 15 years, I think I’m on my fourth pair. The Uši Pro’s make great recordings, the only thing is that they distort easily with loud sounds, and with omni mics you have to be careful of phase issues, I’m always sure to place them at least a meter apart, or if closer, with some sort of solid object between them to prevent phasing. Bruce Swedien recommends six feet (1.8 meters)13, so if you won’t listen to me at least listen to him.
It could be that the sole purpose of this essay is to make the reader jealous (of the exotic location, of my recordings, of my stuff and life in general), but this is just one side and a very extreme side at that. Field recording is not some dark art. I do love sound and I love listening. The heightened experience of listening to the world amplified through microphones is thrilling. On a deeper level, the practice of field recording has provided a window for self-reflection. I begin to ask myself these questions. Why do I prefer one sound over another? What is it I’m really recording, and why am I recording it at all? And what am I going to do with all these recordings?
I have an absurd amount of field recordings, un-named, uncategorized. I would guess at least half haven’t been listened to at all. Maybe five percent have made it into songs, or have been chopped up and manipulated into samples, into something “cool” (not unlike clay from a river bed being shaped into a vase.14) Many times, the sound was never allowed to be itself, never allowed to be naked, only nude. (Berger, 1997, p.54) This essay then serves as a device to allow all these gathered sounds to exist as their naked, unpossessed selves. “Sound on its own is as incomplete as visual images and and language on their own.” (Carlyle, 2013, p.28) Perhaps this notion of Cusack’s is true. The listener perhaps always needs a context. This could be why I always sought to process field recordings and place them in a piece of music, to give these disembodied sounds a context.
I proposed a listening experiment to myself. I would remove the sounds of human presence, a sort of undressing. Reversing the Duchampian sequence of “virginity to bridehood”(Siegel, 1995, p.87) and re-flowering the sound world. Duchamp! You know, “ ...he also painted numerous waterfalls and springs in the course of his artistic career that allude directly to a womans sex.” (Banz, 2012, p.55) Here I am at a waterfall in pursuit of virgin nature to record and preserve for all time. The more I learn about Marcel the more I feel that he is the driving force of 20th century art. One of the reasons I pretend to be good at chess is because he loved playing.15 I sat down at the computer and tried to remove all evidence of civilization. It was impossible, the chickens were so present, the activity of all sorts of machinery so persistent, that it became an unlistenable Frankenstein. I let the world remain itself. *Please Listen to the audio recording below*
I woke up at 4:45 in the morning to make this recording. According to the owner of the lodge where we were staying16, there was a particular bird, with a very special call, which arrived to sing at around 5:30, and only for a few minutes, before flying off to start its day. I wanted to arrive at the location (under the deck of the main lodge) to set up and leave without disturbing the bird’s natural routine. Over the course of the two-hour recording (here only a short section is presented) the listener hears the gradual awaking of the high rainforest as the sun rises, and bird call gradually replaces the nighttime insects and frogs.
Hunter Becomes Hunted
This discovery of my inner collector, the hunter, was at the top of my mind when we arrived in Gocta – even before we left to fly from Berlin to Peru. Knowing that I was going to be field recording I decided to not let myself be driven by a subconscious impulse to control. To approach the sounding world as an equal, a being with whom I co-exist, an ocean to float in. I took to heart Budhaditya Chattopadhyay’s technique of taking the time to listen. While he was recording in Bangalore for his album landscape in metamorphosis, he spent the first month of a three month stay just listening to the city and how the soundscape changed over a twenty-four-hour period.17 I find this type of patience fascinating, as I usually take the recorder out right away. I realized during my first day in Gocta, how important it is to just listen, and to allow myself to be a part of the sounding world, rather than placing a recording device in-between and isolating myself from my surroundings.
“Recording kills the situation” (Lane and Carlyle, 2016, p.54) and in a way Budhaditya is right. The moment I hit record, actually, the moment I intend to record, I separate myself from my surrounding environment, and alter the world around me (much like the appearance of a sudden vacuum, something must take the place of my absence). The event changes from happening to happening and observed. Through this situational multiplication we can see that the act of recording has forever altered the world around us. The recording we create is a recording of us recording an event, much as Tilgner described. My recording is a recording of my process, there just happens to also be a waterfall there. My hard drive of field recordings is just a catalogue of negative space with frosting on top. Capturing these moments, what was lost? “… Essentially the camera (field recorder) makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own.” (Sontag, 2008, p.57) -Italics mine. Even if I go so far as to cough, tap my foot, or whistle, making myself audible and part of the sounding world being captured, it would not be enough. My absence and observance have already been recorded.
A hunting accident, both laughable and terrifying. From this paralyzing acknowledgement how does one stay afloat? Michael Pissaro’s ideas of place give us a way out, some ground to stand on. “Place is not static; it is continually undergoing change and transformation. It may be that sound is therefor a natural partner to an aesthetics of place, since it too cannot be recouped - only summarised. The mental image we retain of a collection of sounds continues to transform itself in our minds, in many cases, long after we have heard the composition in which the sounds are placed.” (Pisaro, 2019, p.115)
Even as I lose myself, I gain something in return; the memory of an event past, the outline of a location, whose borders have meshed with my own. These new, unfamiliar shapes fold and refold, distort and bend, evolve and live within me. I ferment. Alvin Lucier’s Hartford Memory Space plays with this idea. Hildegard Westerkamp, the eternal voice of field recording, takes me one step closer to salvation, inviting the chasm. “Perhaps I should say that it is the space between fields, the bridges, the balancing points, the lines of departure or connection, the in-betweens which are my favourites" (Lane and Carlyle, 2016, p.121) This drawing of lines, this bridge between worlds would not exist if only one world existed, and one frame of reference were present. Recording creates an absence in one world, but a fullness in another, new and uncharted space. From this vantage point I can assemble, organize, store, love, and share these perspectives in a personal sequence of events, overlaps, and cut ups. A bricolage, a whirlpool, a waterfall of sound.
“I find that water and sound are similar. The human mind conceives of water, a nonorganic substance, as if it were alive and organic. And sound, which after all consists only of physical vibrations producing soundwaves (a secret code for language!), once heard arouses various emotions in us.” (Takemitsu, 1995, p.133) What language do I imagine Toru hears, and what new element is created with sound recordings of water sounding? My Waterdrop Descending a Cliff Face No. 2. The layering of moments of sound in time, an impossible point-of-ear now revealed. Sound is a bridge across time. I listen to the water falling and feel the mist cooling my face, remember my concern over the equipment getting wet, the pressure I felt, knowing my family was waiting patiently for me below while I took my time to set up and place microphones. I remember how good my body felt at the physical exertion, the warmth of the sun, the excitement, the view looking out over the glacier carved valley. All this carried on the frequencies of sound, transcribed into vibrations’ secret language.
Naeco oceaN
The final recordings serve as bookends, a temporal play in the ocean of sound. A homage to the past and the present’s ever shifting location as our “…memories go either way." (Kaufman, 2021, p.54) I spent a considerable amount of time recording the Pacific Ocean prior to arriving at Catarata Gocta. I sat on the beach with my well-spaced Omni’s and a long-ly cabled hydrophone, staring out at infinity framed by ancient and jagged cliffs.
Recording this ocean before I ever knew that Gocta itself was once submerged under these same prehistoric waters. It’s sound stored in the field recorder. And then, in the recorder, I had unwittingly brought the mountains ocean memories with me. Once again, the ocean covered the mountain tops, carried above the rocks as so many zeros and ones. Reversing the flow of time, a counterclockwise motion. To play with time seems dangerous. It could be that my own grip on time is so fragile that the slightest tap might send me out of our linear freefall and into an orbit of repeated sequences. However, this semi-circle I’ve made, bringing the sound of the past physically to the present strikes me as beautiful. I reversed time by moving forward. I wish I had done it on a conscious level in the moment!
“You should record the sounds of the city, it’s also like an ocean, right?” My partner Mónica suggests a few days after our return from Gocta. She’s right. Another thing I wish I had thought of! Later that night I wait for the apartment to quiet down, Alma (my daughter) is asleep, Mónica is out with friends. I open a beer and set up the field recorder, sticking the mics out of the fifth-floor window. I put on my headphones and crank up the gain, close my eyes and listen to the nighttime city. The hum of air conditioning, and the occasional plane making its final approach to Jorgé Chavez International Airport in Callao. The high whine of old brake pads as cars slow, the occasional horn or bus as it drives by. I’m reminded of a recent installation I visited, David Tudor’s Rainforest IV organized and re-created by Singuhr Projekte in Berlin. In this installation “Found, converted, or constructed objects are arranged as an ensemble in a special installation. Transducers attached to the objects allow the performers to activate them with sounds of their own choice, with the goal of creating, in Tudor’s words “an electronic ecosystem”.18 What struck me about this installation is how urban it was. These different objects had the distinct patina of industrial decay. All of them had seemingly been discarded or found on the street, previous tenants of abandoned back lots and dusty thrift shop shelves. They were hung at varying heights and at somewhat evenly spaced intervals from the ceiling, each illuminated and casting its own distinct shadow. In a way it was very much a realization of Evan Parker’s totter dream of a large space for storing the discarded objects of others. Once I closed my eyes to listen, the city evaporated and the decaying urban environment was quickly replaced by a living, vibrant ecosystem of timbral flora and fauna.
A similar transformation takes place as I listen to this late-night recording of Lima.*Please listen to the audio recording below* It is unmistakably urban, and in my mind’s eye I see the yellow sodium streetlights and randomly lit windows of the surrounding buildings. But removed from the city it was recorded in, the cars, planes, dogs, motorcycles, voices, begin to float in their own dense ocean of organic sound, and I along with them.
Listening to the sounds of one city (Lima) while I type this Berlin, there is a sense of sonic mysticism welling up inside of me. It must mean something, overlaying the sound of one environment on top of another. An undiscovered interval sounds when a Lima evening is played over a Berlin day. Perhaps my recording of Lima captured the sounding world of 10,000 people. All of those lives in a single recording. Combined with my acoustic world here. Multiplying all those sleeping, breathing, talking, dreaming others captured and preserved, below the liminal threshold but still there. Inaudible and indelible.
On the flight home I listened for my sirens. It was the same model plane, the same company, and more or less the same flight path. They decided to stay quiet. I guess that makes sense, we’re traveling in the opposite direction, and the opposite of singing is not singing; there is a consistency here. The Hippocampus on the wing was there, but now, with its back turned to the Falls, it lacked the magic of the moment when I first saw it. It was no longer a coincidence, a sign. I knew it would be there. It seems the universe has withdrawn back into itself as I return to my routine. But there is the pleasure of returning home, of sleeping in one’s own bed, that accompanies the end of any extended stay away from the familiar. We had been gone for almost three weeks, four days of which were spent in the valley under the watchful eye of Catarata Gocta. It somehow feels like a lifetime, it also feels like no time at all.
In the days following our return, I would play the evening sounds of Gocta, the crickets and frogs as they sing, in my studio at home. *You can listen in the audio file below* The recordings would be left to play as we went about our lives, preparing dinner or doing laundry. These sounds bubbled around corners and coursed through hallways. Rivulets of memory spinning and glinting, pooling and flowing across walls and floor, and in a final, lazy cascade, they reach out to us in a tidal embrace, reminders of a moment perpetually falling.
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