"It has been a year of sound" was the punchy thing I was going to open with, but I've been finding punchiness disingenuous. Of course it's been a year of sound, every year is a year of sound, Sound is time, is society, is the substance of our interaction with the world. And to resist the 'soundbyte', the punchy lead, the tiktok bass drop, is to sit with the banality of where we are and the unprecedented yet utterly boring evil visited on our lives (and thousandfold on lives in Gaza, in Sudan, in the DRC, in the United States, in the plantations and the dormitories and the kampungs and in the cobalt mines). Unprecedented yes, but only in scale. Surprising? Not one bit.

I told a dear friend that I had stopped field recording because everywhere in Singapore sounds the same. Cars and insects. She protested very wisely and sympathetically - I forget the words, but 'It is all unique, you just have to be alive to it' was the gist. And I think the version of me from 2022 would have said the same thing. There are indeed subtleties and spirits and histories that reveal themselves through sound, I fully agree... I just no longer want to do the work of being soft, being delicate, alive to the details, because it is so tiring. The world is being robbed from me and I am told again and again that I can claim it back if I am just a little more attentive, if I Listen more Deeply, if I reach toward connection. But some weeks I really can't.

And it takes something to admit to yourself that you've been robbed! Why should it fall on me? That feels like gaslighting. That feels like liberalism. And I don't want to do the work anymore of celebrating the scraps of connection to nature or my body or Sound Itself that we are allowed. I want more. I want to go to a real beach. It was taken. I don't want to give more of myself. I want the world given back to me, to us, goddamnit.

You know what's great though? Music is. Where field recording is the work of accepting, inviting, music can sometimes be the work of taking.And that comes wrapped up in violence, especially here in the neocolonial state. Who you take -from- becomes a matter of principle. But the potential for violence comes bundled with liberatory futures, with the forceful reclaiming of sonic and temporal worlds, with actual armed struggle. (I know that's too big a responsibility to put on music - smash cut to DJs who have never feared a cop in their lives brandishing decks with 'THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS' stickers)

In a different way, field recording is taking too. But the kind of taking that involves defining, cataloguing, circumscribing. Remember: before it was the tool of bourgeois sound artists, it was the tool of anthropology, of empire, of workers in the colonies 'documenting' and 'preserving' as the advance guard (let's think of the phrase 'avant garde' for a sec) for waves of displacement and exploitation . Or even the sympathetic folk recordists chasing down Robert Johnson in order to enmesh him in a thoroughly white, demeaning, teleologic narrative of the blues. We should suspect the urge to document.

What I am -not- saying is that the valences and effects of our tools are fully determined by their history - I find that kind of twitter gotcha EXTREMELY tiresome - but nonetheless, the histories are real and relevant! We could have made field recording into something different, maybe, but I don't think we have, or I don't think I have, and I don't want to find the beauty in the differences. I want to stop hearing cars. I want no child ever to have to know what a Merkava Main Battle Tank sounds like. I want the F-15s to fuck off and die.

I'm not sure even the hippiest of listening-circle enjoyers (myself included) ever thought we were going to Mindfulness our way out of this dismal, military-capitalist hell-soundscape. But it's worth asking whether or not we have inadvertently let go of our ability to say that some sounds SHOULDN'T be music. Some sounds DON'T deserve attention. Some places really ARE silent dead graves, and maybe we should move on, or maybe - just maybe - we should start screaming.

POSTSCRIPT #1 - FREESOUND.ORG

If you are interested in the stuff I nonetheless felt compelled to field-record, it's all here on my freesound profile - truly an excellent website for Creative Commons and other open-licensed recordings, sound design elements, foley, nature recordings -

https://freesound.org/people/madamdata/

POSTSCRIPT #2 - A THANKLESS STAR

I am recording a new album, entitled A THANKLESS STAR, and for the first time in years I'm super excited about producing and releasing a work of music. More information in an upcoming missive but for now here's a demo from one of my rehearsals -

POSTSCRIPT #3 - A CALL FOR PERFORMANCES

note: the first show is already booked but please reach out if you're interested in future shows ~~

--- a call for performances for GUITAR IS DEAD in Singapore ---

Buried beneath the dense web of cultural touchstones that is the body of modern guitar music is an instrument that is surprisingly strange and terrifying. The voices of the unaccompanied guitar speak in soft and strangled tones, very unlike the refined polyphony of organs and pianos. It is an instrument whose limitations are songs in themselves, where voices are always interdependent and fragmented and struggling toward the light, even as they shimmer with colour. It is an instrument whose parsimony of sound always calls out, inviting the rest of the body to join in ecstasy or in quiet intimacy. One thinks of the body percussion of flamenco, or the plaintive voice of folk song, or the stomp of the blues. Equally, the same parsimony calls out to electronics and amplification, creating cyborg formations with amps and effects pedals. This strangeness runs deep, twisting the orthodoxies of music, manifesting sometimes in passing harmonic uncanniness and sometimes in walls of obliterating noise. Everywhere the guitar goes, it changes the music and is in turn changed.

This is a public call for written or improvised performances that speak to the strangeness of our instrument. It seems timely, in this year of unprecented shattering of our social formations, to stare into that mangled void of aloneness and isolation, and ask what the shape is of the coming darkness. The guitar will be the lens.

We are putting on a small show, and hopefully several, involving performances of the solo guitar and body. No style or genre is mandated except that the guitar be unaccompanied or only accompanied with the voice or body. Songwriters are welcome, if you consider your music to metaphysically be 'guitar music'. However, no backing tracks - including performances that are recognizably of the 'live looping' sort. In keeping with the intimacy and clandestinity of the bare guitar, no photos, videos, or recordings will be permitted, and a limited number of tickets will be sold. Performances will be paid a small fee, but we do not have a big budget.

POSTSCRIPT #4 - I ONLY HAVE EYES FOR YOU

I’m still figuring out whether to separate the ‘here’s some links to cool music’ posts or to just bundle them together with these more rambling letters. Leave a comment if you have an opinion (and tell me if you can’t, everyone should be able to comment, not just paid subscribers). But sending this link around was a surprising hit with my friends, so here it is - longtime favourite of mine, Lester Bowie’s (of Art Ensemble fame) Brass Fantasy, doing a cover of the doo-wop cover of an old jazz standard. It’s gorgeous and raw in a way a lot of brass bands just aren’t. Enjoy!