Tape Hiss: Hearing/Thinking/Learning/Gathering
What I hear:
Act 2 begins with a soft hiss, which is barely noticeable when I listen to the film over my laptop speakers, at a low volume, and against the noisy background of my office at my art school in Vienna Landstrasse: the windows are open, and the sounds of passing cars, construction and smoking office workers’ chatting drift up from the yard. When I listen wearing headphones, however, or when I turn up the playback volume, the hiss becomes distinctly present. In a way, I have to shut out the sounds of my present location to become aware of the hiss – I must amplify the hiss so much that it becomes my present, that it becomes the main sound event of my present listening situation. This attunement happens fast, though, within only half a second. Then the music sets in. Attuning my senses to the soft initial hiss of Act 2 makes this recorded signal that follows sound louder, sharper, painful even. The wail of a single clarinet makes my ears ring; the instrument’s dramatic, fast-paced, piercing cadence hits a tender spot as the composition slides into higher and higher notes. I register: listening carefully can hurt.
The hiss reemerges as loud and present, however, when the image track cuts to a frame of solid black at minute 2:05. The voices cease, the music keeps playing, now in somber notes that are considerably lower in pitch, and slightly softer in volume. For ten whole seconds, while the image track holds the black frame, I listen to how intricately the hiss textures the musical recording: it adds grain to the instruments’ timbre and a faint pulse (circular, like tiny wheels spinning) to the air that holds the space in between. At 2:16, sound and images move into a pattern that will structure the next 30 seconds: the hissy musical recording plays on, while a solid black frame (that comes with no additional sound of its own) alternates with short, washed-out looking news clips with sound, most notably a voiceover that is mixed to the aural foreground. The clips are from the 1982 WDR program. Its voiceover booms over all ambient sounds and over every utterance of the persons shown on the image track: a funeral procession, a young woman speaking while facing the camera in an outdoor setting. Although the voiceover is loud and grating, it does not dominate: as soon as it is cut (and in every instance it is cut very quickly), the hiss is back front and center.
At 2:42, solid black gives way to a still image: I see a photograph of Semra Ertan, the famous one that will later grace the cover of the 2020 German/Turkish edition of her poems. It shows Ertan on a beach, full shot, walking towards the camera: shoulders squared, lips parted, and chin tilted slightly upward, as if caught in mid-argument. The music still plays. In Bilir-Meier’s film, the photo appears glued to a sheet of black paper. It is held by a looseleaf binder, protected by a clear plastic cover that reflects a bright light from its lower left corner. Another aural shape emanates from the hiss’s loopy texture; I now hear slivers of distortion: single crumbs of noise threaded one after the other in a soft line, flexible in every direction, touching perhaps but not overlapping – like string beads.
20 seconds in, the hiss of the musical recording, with its soft fabric of entwining loops and twisting beads, is overtaken by a discrete, harsher hiss. It is the hiss of a voice recording. Between minutes 3’03” and 3’36”, I hear Ertan reciting shortened version of Mein Name ist Ausländer – probably her best-known poem, and the last one she wrote before her death. The hiss of this recording sounds sharper, more urgent, when compared to the hiss of the musical recording, which still plays as Ertan reads. It pushes through the pores of Ertan’s words: makes her T’s, S’s and Sch’s sound like tiny shards that explode in distorted peaks. Perhaps the hiss I hear in this recording seems so poignant because, in contrast to the musical piece, which has receded even if it runs on, Ertan’s voice is amped up to the max. It stands (and sounds) front and center in the film’s aural and optical space. Letters uttered magnify the recording’s granular sonic movement: hiss cycling at a higher speed now; grain polished to an edgier cut. Audible surfaces fracture into smaller patches that meet at pointier angles. Beads of distortion are no longer smooth to the touch. They fizz with a sandpaper scratchiness. Their sharpness corresponds with Ertan’s stance on the photograph: her lifted chin; her forward motion; her presence, all geared towards the frontal plane, in the direction that faces me as I am looking at her, listening to her. As her poem comes to a close, the sharp hiss within the recording of her voice fades back into that of the musical recording, the softer noise from earlier now back in the foreground.
What I think:
A concern with representation is audibly at stake in the way Bilir-Meier administers her sonic cuts. Answering Ertan’s “plea to be heard,” and at her own terms, her film’s Act 2 grants time to speak out to Ertan only. Everyone who talks in the WDR-produced material is cut short, cut off mid-sentence, drawn out of the rhythm of their own syntax into the staccato of the artist’s edit. Over and over again, insistently, Bilir-Meier cuts into the speech of the voiceover, which stands in here for a German Dominanz media archive that, as Doughan reminds me, has labelled transnational subjects like Ertan as “undesirable” and continuously and systemically worked towards their “erasure” from public memory (Doughan 2022: 64). Bilir-Meier explicitly names her work an act of refusal, which she sets out to counter the “truth effect” of 1980s and 1990s German mainstream media reporting “about” Turkish-born migrant laborers (Bilir-Meier 2016: 110-111). She points out how, during this time period, news reports, TV documentaries, and radio discussions render diasporic subjects in general, and female migrant laborers from Turkey in particular, as nameless stereotypes, whose racially charged, imagined cultural Otherness all but obliterates their ability and power to self-actualize (Bilir-Meier 2016: 108, 109, 111; see also Kourabas 2021: 199). Migrant laborers’ professional, private, and political goals that exceeded German Dominanz imagination, as well as the individual diasporic subjects themselves, usually remained unnamed in Dominanz representation (Bilir-Meier 2016: 108). In playing the recording of Semra Ertan reading a poem authored by herself for thirty consecutive seconds, while chopping all other archival speech recordings into truncated fragments, Bilir-Meier’s film asserts a straightforward representational strategy that, in amplifying Ertan’s “own voice,”[10] overpowers her (mis)representation in Dominanz archives.
Still, the hiss that dwells in Act 2 makes me pause. I wonder: in a figurative interpretative move – in which I hear in the hiss during and between Bilir-Meier’s cuts a meaning it does not immediately carry in itself – could tape hiss signify a trouble with representation when working with archival materials as a minoritarian artist? A trouble that haunts simplified strategies of letting archival material speak for itself? A trouble that Bilir-Meier shows, in how she speaks and writes about her work, that she is well aware of? And a trouble that I, in my sonically inspired speculations, hear hissing back at me from the grain of the audio texture of her film?
After all, tape hiss in Semra Ertan lends a haptic, material sense to all archive material used as archival – as “coming from another time or from another context of use or intended use” (Baron 2014: 9). Tape hiss qualifies as what Andy Birtwistle calls the “ground noise” (Birtwistle 2010: 86) of a recording technology: it generates from randomly charged magnetic oxide particles, which sit on the surface of the tape not only when it is blank, but also after signal has been recorded (White 1992: 27). In a production that caters to present-day audiences who believe that contemporary digital sound recording ought to produce supposedly silent soundtracks (like the one I hear in Semra Ertan’s Act 1), the audible ground noise of magnetic tape announces a noisy datedness (Birtwistle 2010: 91-92). As a noise that registers with me more as a “‘felt sound’” (Campt 2021: 136) than an actual audio signal that I am meant to hear, and as a “drone of microsounds” (Birtwistle 2010: 100-101) that gives me a lively impression of bathing in a multitude of tiny sound objects instead of standing face to face with a large and concrete one, I am inclined to approach the tape hisses in Bilir-Meier’s film as Campt approaches the haptic, droney “hum” she hears in (silent) images (Campt 2021: 136). With Campt, I hear this hiss as a “quiet” frequency that invites me to listen out for traces of “the physical and emotional labor” it takes to engage with the materials I am looking at and listening to (Campt 2021: 78). As the hiss has made it into Semra Ertan, as the artist has made it part of the sonic form that carries her strategy of refusal Dominanz representation, I hear the tape hiss in Act 2 invoking the affective work that remediating the archival recordings of the WDR report– not to mention of Semra Ertan’s voice– demand from Bilir-Meier as a filmmaker.
What I learn:
From speaking with Bilir-Meier about her work in June 2022, I gather that a large part of this affective labor consists of confronting audience expectations that the story of migration could be exhaustively told in one film, one book, one account, by one person – and that watching, reading, listening to a single work was enough to understand the totality of a very nuanced history. Bilir-Meier says:
Sometimes people ask really silly questions: "So, you’re working on another thing about migration? Another film on representation and history, again?" Other artists don’t get these questions, even when they make their one-hundredth film about, say, architecture. For me, my works are never just "another film on migration." For me, the topic is as multifaceted as life itself. I learn something new every time. And I always try to link a historical perspective to what’s happening now, in the present.[11]
Repeatedly addressing and entangling with the layered, complex histories of labor migration from Turkey to Germany between the 1960s and 1990s (Bojadžijev 2008; Kourabas 2021), and thus upsetting some contemporary audiences’ belief that there was only so much to know about it, in itself already links the historical moment the artist connects with in her film to her own lived present. The “silly questions” Bilir-Meier gets in 2022 re-actualize a narrative practice common to many German TV documentaries about migrant workers from the 1980s and 1990s, such as the WDR material reworked for Semra Ertan (Bilir-Meier 2016: 110). Like other documentaries from this period, the WDR report falls back on almost comically formulaic editing of highly predictable images and sound bites in order to frame diasporic subjects as generic types who follow one generalized trajectory. In our interview, Bilir-Meier sums up the generic visual narrative logic of the WDR edit as such:
OK, take: migrant worker family, they don’t have a name anyways; cut: some random factory somewhere; cut: closeup of a face; cut: some random wall of a random building.[12]
Following a very similar editing script, the WDR program thus cues (Dominanz) audiences to assume at one glance that they already know everything there is to know about this story, as they have heard it many times before. Does the markedly dated tape hiss, which stays present even when Bilir-Meier audibly dissects the problematic material from the past to lay bare its structure, present a tangible proof of the stickiness of 1980s sensibilities spilling into current epistemologies?
But what do I make of the fact that the predominant hiss I hear in Semra Ertan, in particular in between Bilir-Meier’s demasking cuts of the WDR material, does not derive from the TV documentary but rather from two contemporaneous documents that challenged 1980s Dominanz media (mis-)representation: namely, the recording of Enjott Schneider’s musical piece Oktett for Semra Ertan and the recording of Ertan reading her poem in a phone call to a radio station the night before her suicide? As I perceive it, the material composition of tape hiss here teaches me something critical about Bilir-Meier’s artistic strategy of working with fragments, of refusing to replace the one overused, simplifying Dominanz media story with her own singularly “complete, stringent narrative” (Bilir-Meier in Güleç 2018: 35). As Bilir-Meier puts it in our 2022 conversation, she faces the challenge of framing individual memories within a larger collective memory without allowing one to overpower the other. She says:
What I find so precious about working with postmigrant estates is when I suddenly realize: this one, single, personal moment, which is tied to a particular person, is also something that many other people have experienced. […] My work gives me the chance to tell stories that have been “overtalked”/ignored[13] and generalized in the German media. I get the chance to tell […] the story of an individual person, and, at the same time, to tie this individual story back into a larger collective. My work insists that Semra Ertan, naturally, cannot stand for everybody. […] She is an important example [of migrant resistance], but she has her own story, and her own biography, which are as particular as the next person’s. It’s important to watch out for pitfalls like these, […] so that stories like Semra’s don’t end up sounding like this: ‘Ok good, now we have Semra Ertan; now we know the whole history of all of migration.’[14]
Technically, tape hiss generates from gaps within a recording. Oxide particles that store signal carry a magnetic charge that has been modified by electrical impulses from said signal; oxide particles that are blank maintain a random charge (White 1992: 27). As I have noted above, it is the random charge of the non-signal carrying[15] particles that registers with human listeners as the hiss characteristic to magnetic tape storage systems. While these technical materialities are (and, arguably, might also sound) the same in any artwork that allows for audible tape hiss, I would still argue that within the film Semra Ertan, and especially when considering the particular context of its production and Bilir-Meier’s artistic intent, they draw attention to a tension between what the film can (and wants to) say and what it cannot (and does not want to) communicate. This film cannot – and does not want to – tell Ertan’s as a narratively satisfying, well-rounded story that can be consumed and safely stowed away after the closing credits. Its material, sonic texture dissonates against the notion that the epistemological trappings effected by longstanding misrepresentation (or lack of representation) of migrant worker subjects in German Dominanz media could be remedied simply by better representation, and it belies the idea that watching this (or any single) minoritarian film would exhaustively illuminate the listener about, in Bilir-Meier’s words, “the whole history of all of migration.” By making audible openings, blank space, and recordings yet unrealized, tape hiss in Semra Ertan embodies and sonically performs Bilir-Meier’s awareness that, as a filmmaker, she “show[s] one perspective, and therefore exclude[s] many others,” and that consequently her films “say […] a lot about what I don’t say” (Bilir-Meier in Güleç 2018: 35). The technical composition of tape hiss as a texture comprising a multitude of microsounds evokes the large number of unrecorded experiences that are necessarily omitted, without feigning knowledge of what they might be.
What I gather:
As I listen to Semra Ertan transit from Act 2 into Act 3, it makes me wonder if the film’s representational concern – its urge to assert the richness and complexity of Ertan’s life against reduced and depersonalized Dominanz narratives (Bilir-Meier 2016: 108-109; Doughan 2022: 67) – even serves the representational end of speaking for history, or any of its minoritized subjects, in the first place. Listening to Act 3, what I hear is not a wish to accurately represent (for example, Ertan’s biography), but to conjure: to extended a hand towards Ertan as a transhistorical collaborator. In our 2022 conversation, Bilir-Meier explains:
I like to think of it as a little mystical. Maybe someone is no longer alive. That does not mean, however, that this person lost the right to be listened to. We can still listen out for, and make room for, what this person can pass on to us. […] I am a filmmaker; Semra Ertan was a poet. She wrote poems to which I found these images. It was a collaboration.[16]
It is in Act 3 that Bilir-Meier most palpably asserts how her own artistic work relates to that of Ertan’s: that there are contemporaneity and complicity that connect the artistic and political concerns of Ertan’s past to those of the filmmaker’s present. In Act 3, Bilir-Meier lends her voice and her breath to her aunt’s written words: while she reads Ertan’s poem Begegnung, the image track holds close to neat curvy print in blue ballpoint on squared paper, which, from the context, can be safely assumed to be the poet’s own handwriting. Sonically, the artist underlines this collaboration through an affinity in textures: like with Ertan’s voice in Act 2, the recording and mix of Bilir-Meier’s words in Act 3 distort the consonants she utters. Her Z in “zusammen” and Sch in “schön” are soft explosions, thus adding to her tender voice (and to the tender lines of the love poem) a note of readiness, and of defiance. These are digital sonic artefacts, not at all of the same material composition as the tape hiss in the recording of Ertan’s broadcast address. These two voices speak from different moments in historical time and locate in different technologies. Their affinity-yet-difference in sonic textures acknowledges that while racist continuities can (and do) connect struggles from one period to another, concrete practices are situated and historically specific. Herein lies the freedom to learn from and appreciate each other’s work, while still adapting one’s strategies to the demands of one’s own situatedness in one’s own historical moment. What Ertan’s and Bilir-Meier’s voices share is their activism: despite all their softness towards each other, as these textures seem to attest, they are more than willing to fight, to claim a right to speak, and to remember what hurts. To me, Bilir-Meier’s sharp consonants echo the grating hiss that suffuses Ertan’s voice in Act 2 and the sharp beads that string through her cadence as she delivers the poignant lines of Mein Name ist Ausländer to the public the night before her planned death. Offering all but a smooth surface, both sonic textures – the hiss in the NDR recording of Ertan’s voice and the distortions in Bilir-Meier’s own recording of her voice reading her aunt’s Begegnung – seem to tell me that matters are not resolved.