Phonographies

There is no gentle fade in or out to introduce the wax cylinder recordings collected by London-based musician and artist Aleksander Kolkowski in the Phonographies archive. Each recording lasts two minutes – the maximum length materially allowed by the dimensions of a cylinder – and the listener is dropped abruptly in medias res: in the middle of the sonic thing. It appears like a sonic patch from another time, roughly stitched on today’s complex listening experience.

Akio Suzuki Cylinder.mp3 by phonographies

Phonographies features a growing series of recordings of improvisations, readings, compositions, electronic and experimental explorations by musicians, poets, artists and writers, made by Kolkowski since 2002 as part of his wide-ranging investigations into early recording and sound reproduction technologies. In this project Kolkowski – who is a keen collector, as much as he is a researcher – uses two phonographs from 1909 and 1906. Sounds are gathered through a horn attached on the phonograph, that channels the audio signals via a stylus onto the wax cylinder. ‘When the groove is being cut,’ he explains, ‘the sound energy from the recording source will vibrate the diaphragm and its attached cutting stylus to varying degrees in accordance with the sounds being made, resulting in a spiral groove consisting of microscopic undulating bumps.’

Phil Minton Cylinder by phonographies

Low volume, two minutes’ length, a prominent background noise of hisses and crackles: the material qualities of these audio inscriptions are impossible to ignore. The recordings in Phonographies challenge this physicality, engage with its limitations and with the strong sense of sounds coming to life and falling back into oblivion. Akio Suzuki’s improvisation with self-made percussion instruments exists between presence and dissolving, its near-silence teasing the cylinder’s threshold of audibility with its soft sonic gestures, wrapped in a layer of quieting. All the tracks by improvisers – such as Evan Parker, Phil Durrant and John Butcher – double the unstable nature of the medium with their unrepeatable performances: time is captured in its own vanishing, the uniqueness and fluctuations of the sounds is enhanced by the frail aural quality of the recordings.

In the ‘Electronic Music’ section, the crackles and pops produced by computers and devices are captured in the noisy patina of pops and crackles of the cylinder, to create an uncanny hybrid of aural anachronisms. The mix of non-philological yet plausible effects is prominent in Keith Rowe’s screeches cascading and arising into and out of shortwave radio frequencies and in Phill Niblock’s sustained tones.

The tracks grouped as ‘Experiments’ and ‘Field Recordings’ are an array of bold takes on the edge of impossibility, tackling the unstable relationship of site-specificity with a medium that is so self-specific. Such a relationship can only be asymptotical – like in BJ Nilsen’s track, where the bare hissing sounds of Lapland arctic winds tend to but are forever disjointed from the hiss of the wax cylinder – or paradoxical – like in Michael Esposito’s EVP recordings that allegedly capture muffled screams and voices from the dead. Arthur Machen wrote in The Three Impostors (1895) of the voice ‘of some one speaking deep below under the earth, and there was a strange sibilance, like the hissing of the phonograph as the pointer travels over the cylinder’. Similarly, many of the voices collected in Phonographies give the impression of being emitted from beneath a thick layer of matter, ingrained in the materiality of the medium, its timing and structure: the echoes and refrains of Katy Price; Aaron Williamson’s mock-operatic rendering of ‘Tutti Frutti’; the wailings of Phil Minton’s ‘Feral Choir’; Ute Wasserman’s whirl of grunts and deep tones – they all sound completely other, yet speak back at you in a close aural encounter.

“Tutti Frutti” from the ‘FIVEPENNY OPERA’ by Aaron Williamson Cylinder by phonographies

Kolkowski introduces Phonographies with a quote from Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever (1996), mentioning ‘a compulsive, repetitive and nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin’. Although compulsive and repetitive, the recordings in this archive don’t have much to share with nostalgia or a return to origins; rather, they bring sound inscriptions to life, they are a statement on the protean quality of a listening experience as it’s actualised in every other today. The philological apparatus that supports the project doesn’t claim for the permanence of an original past, but for the fluctuations of a mutable now that it is up to us, the listeners, to mold. It captures transient sounds. It points at its own oscillations and decay. It raises questions on the time of recording and the time of listening.

Phil Durrant Cylinder by phonographies

Allen S. Weiss wrote in Breathless (2002) of the ambiguous status of early voice recordings, fluctuating between utterance and thing, between a fleeting presence and an actual recorded trace. The voice is reified, the word’s eventfulness amplified, and yet each recording points at its metamorphosis: in listening. While it evokes an impossible permanence, the Phonographies archive exists as a collection of fading traces. Caught and reproduced right at the edge of their dissolving, the sounds and the voices in Phonographies do not stand for the solidity of a document. They point at something else: a sense of vanishing and transformation, an intimation of void, the presence of alterity.

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Aleksander Kolkowski hosts a weekly broadcast on www.resonancefm.com with selections from the archive and new recordings, Wednesdays 7.30pm. In the next few months ‘Phonographies’ will feature recordings by Christian Marclay, John Tilbury, Bob and Roberta Smith among the others. Kolkowski will be sound artist in residence at the Science Museum, London, in 2012.