Nicol Parkinson
Alongside historical and archival research on the entangled development of sound art and live art in the UK, for the past several years, I’ve been making audio recordings at performance events, usually tucking a small microphone out of sight and beyond the potential splash zone. These performances often take place outside, in public, or in queer nightclubs, in unfurnished or repurposed spaces. Outside, on a windy day, I wrap the microphone in my scarf. In many cases, the resulting capture is muffled and low to the ground, shuffling footsteps taking precedence over human voices or textual meaning. The illusion of certainty leaves the document entirely. Listening back can be a perplexing experience, and labelling files deep in after the fact becomes a difficult task. In my retrospective listening, I find that the performance has become (or been allowed to remain) inscrutable, mysterious, and defying of casual interpretation.
In attending performance events and in making and listening to these recordings, I have been struck repeatedly by the open possibility of a total environment to a listener, one devoid of a central point of focus, employing new sense and senselessnesses from chosen materials, set pieces, or within spatial happenstance. The invitational and navigable perceptual field inherent to the power of so much performance is made plain (or at least approximated) by the stereo sound recording. In the performance situation, pluralities of attention are offered to an audience of individual participants (rather than the imagined, singular, forward-facing mass), but in relocated sound, it becomes unavoidable.
There are many perspectives from which to approach sound and listening in the contemporary live art field. The use of sound as material in the construction of a work, the sounding of performer and environment as it occurs in the actual doing of the work, and the reception of sound through the experiential (or retrospective) hearing of the individually located perceiver – each are their own independent areas of study, observably and materially distinct.
I seek a practice of retrospective listening which resists the icon-making and shared symbolism of an art history-criticism reliant on language grown from, and dedicated to the visual, and might retain the confusions, boredoms and excitements of performance in action. Performance, like sound itself, has no option but to occur in time. After a sound has decayed towards human imperceptibility, we may only deal with it in retrospect, in memory, in writing, in recording – a facsimile copy of an event. Any personal reflection, criticism, or canon formation on acts of performance are, by their nature, essentially retrospective and disconnected, taking place in a combination of memory, documentation, and imagination. Sound and its relationship to the imagined, the half-remembered, and the seemingly concrete allows occurrence and activity to become many things while remaining troublesome and mysterious.
Live art has been burdened with a history that is primarily constructed from photographs, bringing with it all the trappings of visual logic, training audiences and scholars as watchers and lookers. ‘The sound itself is gone’ Salomé Voegelin cautions us, ‘chased away by the certainty of the image.’1 The photograph cannot help but assert a singularly situated perspective with a directed and focused framing. In photo documentation, and in galleristic, archival or domestic visual reproduction, a given work of performance, fleeting moments of extremity, risk or tension are subject to extraction from the spatial-temporal totality of the piece, often inadvertently implying an imaginary structure, process or extremity, an uprooted moment, allowing us to believe that THIS is what this is. Material in this way becomes icon, and worse, activity becomes symbol. I’m curious what an audience of performance listeners could be, and how a work itself might otherwise transform in its afterlife.
Come Hell or High Water (2020)
Between the winter solstices of 2019 and 2020, I spent one Sunday each month attending and documenting Come Hell or High Water, a series of performance events held on the tidal foreshore beneath Canary Wharf activated and organised by Anne Bean, George Pringle, Sarah Andrew, Hayley Newman and Phoebe Patey-Ferguson.2 Described in the emailed invitations as ‘a pocket of resistance on the banks of the River Thames […] a place that exists between water and land, private and public space, wealth and poverty, past and present, and an unknowable future’. The sand, pebbles, concrete and debris of the foreshore was exposed at low tide for several hours at a time, creating a temporary site for artistic experimentation and offering. While the restrictions of the period could not have been predicted at the inception, the commitment remained steadfast to present something each month – working within the shifting permissions and possibilities of the lockdown.3 Listening back in 2024 to these recordings from that time-collapsed window seems to offer access to a past shaped by subsequent and ongoing experience. It is a documentation without sensationalism or nostalgia, a constant reimagining, generating new possible performances in retrospect. I am curious what happens when we listen back to the event of performance. I know I was there, in that space of time, often with the microphone in my hand or on my body, oriented in the same direction, creating a facsimile file of my hearing during that succession of moments. But any attempt at certainty remains overtaken by obscurity and question. I offer here my real-time reflections, writing between listening, imagination, and memory. My often-chaotic labelling system in some cases adds to the uncertainty, a trouble on the hard drives of many field recordists, I’m sure.
NEONATURIST.WAV
Some recordings are easily identifiable. Light wind. Three women scream and cheer, voices in wide-unison, pockets of joining-in all around, yelping. Fire-crackle accompanies the howls of the Neo-Naturists4 uncomfortably close to my distorting microphone – was it held forward and aloft or tucked in my coat? Giggles surround, in confusion and delight. Single note scraping violin. The howling moves in waves, one voice thicker and more desperate than the others. Low chuckles simultaneous. Any operatic grandeur is punctured by giddiness, laughter, the catching of breath, before beginning again. Plane overhead? The river bus?
C. Binnie’s (mock?) disgruntled demand to the audience: you’re not singing! A violin is repeating a simple phrase. Voices join, Santa Lucia! Santa Lucia! There seems no need to attempt verses or development of any kind. I remember now, it’s the shortest day of the year. The fire cracks and pops. A recorder violently replaces one of the singing voices. The arrival of the police is nervously announced by a participant with a tremble in their voice. The violin continues to scrape, some voices continue to sing, heads are turning, most ritual participants stop at some point, but a number always keeps the two word chorus in the air.
Christine, we’ve got police, shall we get off?
Oh, never mind.
Shall we get our coats? I don’t want to get arrested.
The singing regathers, now more gentle than before, attention has been divided, the ritual vaudeville nude cabaret on temporary and disputed land (and the first intervention in a projected year) has met an anticipated tension. Santa Lucia continues.
It’s melting.
Shall we go now?
Thank you very much everybody!
TASCAM
Immediate start (maybe the performance had begun before my pressing record – activity often emerges, without an immediately identifiable beginning or end), shoes crunch wet shingle. Something drags or rumbles, as feet trudge towards activity, gather and stop, shuffling of bodies gives way to lapping of water. I think this unlabelled recording is Moa Johansson at some point in the summer.5
Chat continues (has it started yet), seagulls call. The file’s metadata tells me it was created after 6pm in August of 2020.
Now, out of the hush are emerging more evenly treading footsteps with purpose and surety. I presume these to be the performer, who I am now almost certain is Johansson. There is audible intent in the walk of a performance task, the movement of a body aware of its own movement, setting a pace. It’s easy to satirise the art-walk, but I’m glad to hear it.
After almost three minutes without discernible activity an object (a stone?) lands in the Thames, and I recall Johansson’s fabric lines, anchored in the rising water, awaiting her retrieval, but immediately after the plop and splash, the laughter of a child disturbs me – is this incidental stone-throwing? That explanation is certainly implied by the sequence of sounds, and yet I don’t believe this is the case. My memory, my imagination, and the narrative conventions of the sonic are in argument with each other. The performing footsteps move towards the water.
A second stone-sounding object lands in the water.
Oh, she missed again! Laughter in the child’s voice. Is there a target? What could be struck and what could be missed? Seagulls continue, far louder than nearby conversations and laughter.
Another splash, another laugh (now the only voice). The quieted feet and mouths of the assembled crowd on the foreshore has become loaded and noticeable. Chatter has almost completely stopped, but presence is felt. A plane and the gulls.
Footsteps softer now, and a more distant splash. Beep of a digital watch. I look at the length of the unlabelled file: 17:11, longer than I remember these performances being. I recall Johansson’s struggle of anchored fabric retrieval in the rising tide, and the inhospitality of the river, and how much it delighted me then.
Footsteps with intent crunch across my immediate stereo field, at the same moment, a small dog barks. The hush is taking on depth and weight, the child and attendant adults are laughing nearby – behind? On the raised concrete of Canary Wharf? Within the assembled crowd? A stronger wave reaches my position, and I hear several pairs of feet shuffle backwards. Was I standing at the water’s edge, or had I moved closer? How quickly does the tide turn?
They’re wasting their time!
The moving sphere depicted in the status bar on the VLC media player I use has passed far beyond the halfway point, and scattered chattering has begun. Purposeful footsteps continue, weightier than before, pulling, digging into the ground with tension, moving close.
Oeough, a man, immediately to my left, is startled.
The engines of boats on the river approach, and I immediately think of their inevitable wake – although I don’t hear it yet, in fact, the lapping seems to have ceased completely. Oh, the waves, they’ve returned. Or have I reoriented myself? More back-shuffling. Attention has been divided – have some people have drifted away from their role as audience, or have some others have drifted towards the gathering, unaware of theirs? The child continues a roving commentary.
Excuuuuse me
Applause now, the group appears larger, than I would have estimated from the hush of the previous quarter of an hour, the majority emerge from nowhere, conjured by my listening. Through headphones in 2024, I hear my hands of 2020 clumsily fumble the device, and end the recording.
Nicol Parkinson is a researcher and artist working with sound in performance and music. Alongside their academic practice as part of CRiSAP, they maintain ongoing collaborations with Jo Hauge, Tamm Reynolds and Eirini Kartsaki, and work as a sound designer within the wider pool of live art.
Elements of this article previously appeared in a paper given at In The Field 2 conference, held at London College of Communication, Summer 2024: https://vimeo.com/showcase/11312811/video/1010598904
Notes:
- Salomé Voegelin (2010) Listening to Noise and Silence: towards a philosophy of sound art. New York: Continuum, p. xii ↩
- https://annebeanarchive.com/2020chohw/ ↩
- In March 2020, when gathering was impossible, Anne Bean installed an aeolian harp of seven strings, 6 metres long, strung over the foreshore. I recorded the sound of the harp, and together with Anne created the work From Source to Mouth: An inside/outside stream meeting between, for the Hear, Here exhibition at the Cooper Gallery, Dundee: https://sites.dundee.ac.uk/cooper-gallery-inbetween/hearhere/bean-parkinson/ ↩
- In this performance, the Neo Naturists consisted of their three founding members, Christine Binnie, Jennifer Binnie, and Wilma Johnson. The group, formed in 1981, are known for their ritual and chaotic interventions, usually and in this case, nude but for elaborate body paint. More can be found here: http://www.jenniferbinnie.co.uk/other-work/neo-naturists/ ↩
- Moa Johansson is an artist working largely in performance and textiles, based in London. Some of her recent and celebrated work can be found here: https://southwarkparkgalleries.org/moa-johansson/ ↩