Patrick Farmer
+447769732635
patrickwilliamfarmer@gmail.com
In 2020 The Sonic Art Research Unit commissioned me to make a selection of my field recording archive public through ‘RADAR’, a repository of original research and publications authored by staff and students of Oxford Brookes University.
The field recordings, created between 2008 and 2017, range from car washes to pill boxes on Hoo Peninsula, magpies recorded through drain pipes to gorse pod dehiscence.
Whilst I’ve taken care to make sure that recordings in this archive can be experienced through laptop speakers, if possible, please listen through hi-fi speakers or headphones, this will of course go some way to approximating a degree of their past life. Most recordings haven’t been specifically mastered or even edited beyond a pragmatic necessity of framing, as most of them were never made with regard to a particular project. They are indicative of a phase in my life where I was rarely without a microphone, and there are undoubtedly many ‘errors’. You may participate their ‘unedited’ voices (volume swells, handling noises, pleasing contingencies) however you wish. I’ve come to enjoy their presence, I even look forward to them. I feel this archive says potentially very little beyond what listeners make with them moment by moment.
Listening again has been a wildly different experience who also feels like a listening combined, a time-space where mind experiences and enjoys themselves as living, to all sorts of degrees of recollection, fabulation, and speculation.
Who compels us to record who we do?
I can’t say that I often remember recording with a clearly defined purpose. Time enjoyed as listening is their own kind of experience, residue of consciousness who moves between environment as organism. Time however, does not give us much leeway. Field recordings, and their listeners, shimmer, lean, slip.
As listeners, we probe, forage and form, repeatedly (in formation in between these organisms) plotting points and collapsing distances, apertures through whom ground becomes figure and figure becomes relational possibility. With this mind, categories projected upon recordings are meant only as a gesture of convenience, they are not meant to delineate any kind of rigid demarcation message.
I often consider field recording to be a place of listening residing in temporality. Field recording fills time. I consider such a place of listening to be a presence, an experiential-choreography of moving relations.
Who is this place, where will they be?