Luca Manning
My NSOTA research project is a sonic investigation into the potentials of sound within the embodied impact of the Anthropocene.
I began by thinking about the various forms of entanglement that take shape through improvisatory processes and how this resonates with Haraway’s writing on kinship in Staying with the Trouble.
Sound is a deeply embodied experience. Our experience of sound is inseparable from our experience of our bodies. It is an active and ontologically unstable phenomena. In my project, I wanted to embody this nature of sound, to resist didacticism or any fixed point of arrival. I thought about the politics of sound and space - who gets heard? Who constructs the aural archive and what are the artefacts and how are they recorded? What role does the human voice play in all of this? I became inspired by Pauline Oliveros’ Deep Listening practice which paired with my curiosity for field recording practices. I became fascinated by how sound can evoke a sense of place, conjuring up memories of, dreams of, ambitions for, places. I pondered how field recording practice could become less extractive and more sympoetic, both human and nonhuman in conversational symphony. I had two invigorating site specific field recording trips to Epping Forest (itself a site of great political importance, land struggle, boundary points) where we spent the day recording various sounds, listening deeply and improvising in place with the forest as our instrument.
The project currently lives as a radiophonic piece that I composed using these field recordings as well as other recordings from my life during my time at NSOTA. The piece also features resampled sound sourced from elsewhere and is combined with a variety of sound design and synthesis techniques that help bring new textures into the piece. Towards the end of my project, I came to realise I was trying to express the feeling of shadow time, everything everywhere all at once, and this is what the contemporary feeling of the Anthropocene is. I leaned into this fragmented, incomplete, multidirectional approach in the making of the piece. The piece was put together as such, through composed, resisting the tendency to go back and edit as an experiment to see what intuitive and improvisatory processes can reveal to us about the choices we make.
My deepest thanks to my project supervisors Dr Eleanor Dare and Vivienne Griffin who held space for my ideas with such care and creativity. Thanks also to the inspiring Dr Sara Elisa Kelly for our early conversations on my themes. Massive thank you to my sonic buddy, Leonard Maasen for our days in the forest, and to Thymian Gadd for our explorations in music + movement together.
Listen to the piece here :