Archival Listening
A Satellite Essay
Somewhere in the second year of this research, I started calling a part of what I was doing "archival listening." The term came naturally, though I later discovered it already existed with a different meaning. Katherine McLeod (2023) uses "archival listening" to describe the critical practice of engaging with audio archives: old recordings, historical documents, voices from the past. Her usage is about listening to archives, with attention to what they preserve and what they lose.
My usage is different, and what I mean with it is to "listen to (your) own accumulated fragments as a resource for new work, not to preserve, but to transform and recombine, turning the remnants into a finished piece." The archive is not a collection of finished artifacts to be studied, rather it is a reservoir of material that I can draw from, revisiting other states of mind, other concepts, and memories, even; sometimes I realise I had a particular reason for recording one of these fragments and that realisation plays a part also.
What It Means
Over my years of making music and being a musician, I have accumulated a substantial body of recordings: released albums, unreleased sessions, demos, experiments, fragments and failures. Most musicians do this I think; working with something as fluid as sound means that recording constantly and release selectively is more or less the only way to relate to, or extract from, that ongoing flow of ideas that will be a part of you from the moment you realize that you can make music on your own. If we didn't do this, we would forget most of it, loosing track of ideas that might be turned into something valuable. I know some people say that if the idea is good enough, it will stick, but for me that doesn't make sense at all. There are always a myriad of starter seeds for ideas moving around and I cannot possibly remember them all. Therefore, when I want to play something, I go do it and I also record it, always. If I want to make something to selectively release, I look in this archive to find a starting point, sometimes it works and sometimes it throws me off, forcing me in another direction by the sheer amount of potential in the archive. I don't always do it, of course, but even if I don't look, knowing that I have this pool to extract from if I want gives a confidence that is helpful in a creative process.
Archival listening, as I practice it then, means going back through this material with a particular orientation. Not nostalgia, not evaluation, not cataloguing, but instead: what can I use? What can I take? What can I remove from its original context and bring into something new? This way of listening and searching does not look for recognition, and I'm not trying to quote my past work. Rather, I'm trying to dissolve it into new work, to let it shape what I'm making now, without being clearly identifiable and specific.
The Palimpsest
A metaphor I keep returning to is the palimpsest: a manuscript page that has been scraped clean and reused, but where traces of the original writing remain faintly visible beneath the new. Medieval scribes did this out of necessity; parchment was expensive and reuse was necessary because of that. The result was a layered document where multiple texts coexist, the older ones partially erased but never fully gone.
Thinking like this means it seems logical to say that my archival listening produces, or adds to, my musical palimpsests. When I take a phrase from an old recording, strip it of its context, process it beyond recognition, and embed it in new work, the original is still there in some sense. Not necessarily audibly, but structurally, perhaps, and most certainly metaphysically. The choices I made years ago shape the choices I make now, even when the listener (and sometimes I myself) can't hear the connection.
In the deconstruction phase of this research, I stripped away enormous amounts of material, breaking everything I've done into bits and pieces; I tried to remove the constraints, contexts, habits and assumptions connected to every little fragment. As it turns out, this process didn't erase anything (thankfully), it just relocated the information and made it available to me in a different way. It surely wasn't as clear when it happened as it is now, but I find that knowing this, and being able to trust this knowledge, made the effort worthwhile.
The removed material persists, invisibly shaping what remains. Like the intellectual implosion I mentioned in the starter essay, this phase was neither pleasant nor planned, but through careful reasoning and a firm belief in the value of the process, I could keep working and keep producing. Basically trusting the process, accepting that sometimes the accumulation of data is the only way forward even if you don't have any particular idea of what to do with it.
How It Works
In practice, archival listening involves:
Revisiting without agenda. I go back through old recordings not looking for anything specific. I listen randomly, look at the titles, notice what catches my attention, realize that something I thought was bad is actually good, and so on. The attention I give the fragments is what turns them into sources of information. Why is this fragment interesting and not that one? Why did I do it like that then, and why do I listen to it like this now?
Removing context. When something catches my attention, I listen to it as being extracted it from its original setting. This is not something I choose, it's just what happens when you put something in an archive and leave it there. Over time the context withers away and the isolated phrase, the texture or rhythmic figure, once thought uninteresting, bad, or even as something blocking a current process, might turn into something else when listened to without the attachments it once had.
Processing beyond recognition. Usually I transform the extracted material so thoroughly that its origin is undetectable. Time-stretching, pitch-shifting, granular synthesis, layering, etc, might happen if the audio fragment itself is re-used, but mainly this transformation happens on a theoretical level. Mostly, I extract musical meaning from these fragments, and when I find that meaningfulness, I go on and start to create something from it.
Trusting the residue. The transformed material carries something of its origin even when unrecognizable. This is something that I both trust and know, even though it's hard to articulate. It can be heard, though, there are many little details in my artistic result, the album III, that proves this. The history embedded in the fragments that underlies that album has clearly shaped it on many levels, and this is valid both for me and Juhani, and Andreas, even though it's not something we have discussed at all. Hübner (2024) describes a similar orientation toward accumulated material as "documenting-as-habit," a continuous state of being "ready to document" that captures unexpected insights and makes them available for future work (p. 77). The difference is that where Hübner emphasizes capturing the new, archival listening emphasizes revisiting the old—though both trust that fragments carry meaning beyond their original context.
Why It Matters
Archival listening is a method, in the sense I've defined elsewhere: a deliberate, repeatable strategy for generating knowledge. Someone else could do it, the results would obviously differ, but the approach can be shared and can be done over and over.
It's also something personal, like a way of acknowledging that I never start from zero which carries both a positive and a negative. If every piece of music I make is connected to every piece I've made before, it also means that I cannot really start fresh. Sometimes that is not the most inspiring thought, but it's an underlying fact that cannot be changed. In reality, perhaps we are just making the same stuff, over and over, again and again, repeating and reiterating. In any case, the method of archival listening is what makes those connections usable turning accumulated history into available material, and even if the connections may be invisible, they're real and very much present.
This method matters for the research because it points towards a way to address a central problem: how do multiple musical identities coexist? One answer is that they coexist through time, through accumulation, through the layering of past selves onto present work. The drummer I was in 2005 is not the drummer I am now, but he's still there, embedded in habits, preferences, tendencies. Same with the singer I was in 2009, or even the piano player I was in 1999; all of these identities are also in an archive that can be revisited and used purposely. So, practicing the method of archival listening, but expanding it to be about more than just recorded fragments, it can be thought of as something like archival awareness, which provides a way to access any embedded past and bring it into dialogue with the present.
The Listener's Role
There's one more dimension: the listener. In archival listening as I've described it, I am the listener, actively engaging with my own archive, adding to the work by choosing what to remove, where to leave gaps, what stories to embed. The method requires active engagement to complete the circuit.
But this principle extends beyond my own practice. When someone listens to the finished work, they too become an archival listener of sorts. It's not background music, but an active position where listening is an invitation to attend, to notice, to participate in the making of meaning. The fragments provide material; the listener provides attention. Through this combination, something is completed.
To reflect this I designed two installations to present the albums III and Spirit of Rain. They consist of a Raspberry Pi computer and a touch screen, placed inside a simple MDF box I made in the workshop. The Pi runs custom software I programmed to require active engagement. To listen to the album, you put the headphones on and place a finger on the play button on the touch screen. It will play as long as your finger is there, and it stops when you remove it. It will also, like a tape machine, stop at a location in time, and start from that same position when the button is touched again. In other words, the listener is forced to choose whether to stay or go, and the design externalizes what archival listening already assumes: that listening is an active practice, that the listener is a collaborator, that the work is not finished until it is heard, and that the traces of the past play an invisible but important part in the current experience. Oh, and you cannot skip, of course.
References
Hübner, F. (2024). Method, methodology and research design in artistic research: Between solid routes and emergent pathways. Routledge.
McLeod, K. (2023). Archival listening. Essays on Canadian Writing, 48, 325–336.