2.3.2. Recordings of the Common
Stephen Benson distinguishes between recordings of the “uncommon” (uncommon sounds or sources), which easily draw the ear to them, and recordings of “fields that implicate and lay claim to something we might call ordinariness” (Benson 2018: 61). Typical of the genre are, for him, The Breadwinner (2008), Air Supply (2010), and Photographs (2013) by the duo Graham Lambkin and Jason Lescalleet. Benson deems these works capable “of provoking interest” but also observes that the reasons for that interest are not easily put into words.
If Lambkin and Lescalleet can be said to have made a field recording of one thing in particular, albeit inadvertently, we might nominate this most common of sounds: the ambient sound of the passage of air and of the immediate acoustic environment. And if we were to nominate a true commons of the field recording as acoustic object, it would be this: same-sounding but endlessly variable in texture and volume, a muffled quasi-presence, animate and yet somehow inert, unrepeatable and yet universal. Description’s limit, if we imagine such a framing, is marked by this unmarked sound. (Benson 2018: 67)
On the other side of the limit lies what Benson calls the “nondescript.” He sees the term as “singularly fitting in the disjunctions of its three meanings: as that which is ‘undistinguished or insignificant’, or is ‘not easily classified … neither one thing nor another’, or ‘has not been previously described’” (Benson 2018: 77). This nondescript of sound can also be understood as an excess, that “figural excess,” perhaps, in which Pinney sees the very definition of materiality (Pinney 2005: 266).
Instead of a linear time where objects are necessarily contemporaneous with each other, Pinney sees “cataracts of time”: a concept borrowed from Siegfried Kracauer to express the view that time is not “a single river or a mighty cascade. It is a series of cataracts, each pursuing their own uncontemporaneousness in incoherent trajectories” (Pinney 2005: 264). In this non-homogeneous time, objects appear as “densely compressed performances unfolding in unpredictable ways and characterized by what (from the perspective of an aspirant context) look like disjunctions” (Pinney 2005: 269). Exit the “context,” then, as there is not much to bind the objects together logically in contemporaneity. What remains is the possibility to contemplate in conjunction the cataracts that come together in illogical relation to each other. That would be a “field” in the Bergerian sense. Field recordings of the “common” don’t have much to offer. In this perhaps lies both their failure and their force.