Daniil Nebolsin

Let's start with a small list of activities:

- buying old answering machines that still have messages from previous owners;

- searching for and recording strange radio signals;

- surfing video platforms and cutting out sounds from obscure and random videos;

- using unidentifiable speech in music;

- rummaging through flea markets and family archives in search of old tapes of everyday recordings;

- making chaotic field recordings without a project or monitoring;

- searching for EVP (electronic voice phenomena — voice-like sounds in technical noise);

- slowing down and distorting random, "anonymized" music beyond recognition using techniques with unpredictable results;

- making music in a way that makes it sound like a forensic clue or a battered artifact of unknown origin. 

 All of these practices are part of modern music production, and they can be found in both independently-published, experimental releases and in mainstream ones. The style and technology of found sound can easily be confused with lo-fi aesthetics, field recordings and sampling, but this would be a significant simplification. Despite the similarity of techniques and results as well as еру the ambiguity of its definition, it would be useful to consider the rising interest in found sound as an independent phenomenon.

What distinguishes the practices listed above? Not only the means of searching and finding “no one’s” sound, and not only the musical or non-musical content, but also the intention to make the found sound both present and opaque, difficult to process. This desire often has to do with the romanticizing of the sound source, as old recordings of number stations: we hear sounds, but we do not have reliable information about their source or meaning, which only enhances our affective and interpretive investment in what we hear. It is important that in the practices of found sound, this paranoid structure of listening is very easily shared by both the listener and the musician who provides the result of their search and accidental discoveries. They may be equally surprised and disarmed by these sounds: in many cases, musicians do not enhance the found material with conventional musical elements and release it in its raw form. The simplicity, “naivety,” and unpredictability of found sound gives rise to a pleasant closeness, which is very different from the more familiar relationship between a virtuoso and an admiring audience. This convergence is characteristic of intense cultural forms where it is easier for the consumer to become the producer. 

Many compositions made with found sound use the format and style of an archive, which can refer to the research methods common in contemporary art, or to the atmosphere of an antique store, or to pop-culture nostalgia. This effect is not inherent to sound that was actually found; sound aging and deterioration are techniques that help recreate the impression of a found sound (with a seemingly lost provenance) in any sound. Even though such approaches are often related to nostalgia and a desire to stay in the past, you shall not be deceived: pseudo-nostalgic media expand and fill the present by drawing in everything they can reach. A clear example of this phenomenon is photography, which replaces the virtual past with the present act of looking; sound is similar — it happens here and now. Such media bring back the forgotten, attract the unnecessary, and remind us of the uncomfortable, but they also compulsively repeat the familiar (and for compulsive repetition, there is only the present moment). This is the classic commemorative role of presentation: to portray something in such a way that it is does not get lost in the past, but rather happens in the present.

The listed activities are less about archiving as a strict, specialized procedure and are more about hoarding, but not in a condemnatory sense. As the poet Kate Durbin shows in her book "Hoarders," each person has a unique emotional connection to items that usually are completely replaceable. In some cases, this connection takes on an animistic form, transcending the commodity-based relationship to objects, while in others, it leads to a self-destructive consumer compulsion. Hoarding is an example of how a mindful attitude towards the world does not always mean peace and reflection, but a panic-induced compulsion (both instances are not uncommon in music). The uselessness that an outside observer sees in hoarding is actually a useful resource. In conventional music production, unnecessary sounds tend to be filtered out, which creates clear boundaries between what is necessary and what should be discarded. However, the reluctance to erase the unnecessary is precisely what makes it possible for us to listen to recordings from someone else's answering machine and, in the end, be just as impressed by them as we would be by carefully produced and polished music.

The practices of found sound do not resist distortion, editing, or processing, but rather embrace them, emphasizing the mediative nature of recorded sound. Both sound "purity" and distortion require special means; sound "purity" is increasingly dependent on post-production and the technical infrastructure of recording, rather than on properties of source material. Cutting, adding, slowing down, and distorting sound often give rise to new auditory cultures and practices, similar to practices with found images: there is xerography-based art, photo books of random pictures, etc. After all, visual collage is often “found image undercover” with many authors emphasizing the “retro” aspect of their materials (often, the collage draws attention precisely because of the nostalgic atmosphere of the source image). Preservation through distortion, presentation through editing is an approach that often competes with classical representation for influence on our minds and affects. It concerns artistic processes as well as science and everyday communication. Found sounds draw attention not only to individual artifacts and oddities, but also to its own recording method as an epistemological procedure that subtly asserts the value and effectiveness of presentation — a key way of working with the present in the present.