Angus started the lecture by showing an image of an exotic beach, followed by a field recording of waves.
The Beginning – The Zines.
Angus started by designing zines – one was about a definition of house music. After those 10 years, Angus incorporated a writing methodology based on writing constraints. He wants to get away from the banality of his own writing. Themepark was a way of thinking about several different approaches according to other things. In Felt the Moonlight on my Feet, Angus goes by writing with encompassed morse code implemented in the punctuation.
Field Notes
Field Notes are part of Angus’ process of field recording. They’re usually compiled in black notebooks or on his phone. He writes about bringing together observations of different kinds of ideas in the future. Another type of note recording is tracking your paths – documenting your presence. Time stamping is very important. In a project called Zawawa, Angus was asked to record his presence live. Even file management could be a way of field notes, Angus says.
In a project from 2018, Angus started reading his notes on his field recordings. He says that he didn’t work. A download index, Night Blooms, is a book that describes the period when Angus recorded his own voice. Cave Mouth and Giant Voice (2015) with Rupert Cox was a work that represents the testimony of a survivor of a battle in Japan – a film with subtitles, with no voice, and field recordings of the cave where the subject hid.
With Chiara Caterina, Angus experimented with a different form of note-taking – On the website, as one scroll downward, one can see the written notes, documented photographs of the site and audio documentation (Website – 2016). In Il, Vertice notes were incorporated in score notation. The words of the field notes became allocated by software.
Field Notes Against Sonic Exceptionalism
Field notes (as text and as sound) as un Cinematic, unMusical; Field notes as awkward, partial, mistaken, oblique; Field Notes as remainder/reminder of cortisol listening; Field notes (with constraints?) as “no input” field recording; Field notes outside the field, outside the sugar cane, the surf. Cortisol Listening is a phenomenon that happens alongside note-taking – when one realises the importance of place and sonic awareness, one feels a sense of realisation.
Field Recordings as Field Notes and Field Notes as Field Recordings
Angus Carlyle.