"Memories of Memories of Memories of Memories: Remembering and Recording on the Silent Mountain"

This chapter found its catalyst in the Picentini mountain range where I had been invited to a residency programme by the arts organisation Fondazione Aurelio Petroni and contributed to an exhibition there entitled Viso Come Territorio (The Face As Territory). Travelling to Southern Italy and returning home over a period of five months sharpened previous experiences of field recording, particularly in terms of the complex relations between that sound arts strategy and the operations of memory.

This chapter proposed an approach that is inspired by addressing the acoustical functions of sound as themselves ‘memorial’ – in the sense that sounds remember their origins in a prior release of mechanical energy and recall the propagation path through which they have travelled. From that initial impetus, I go on to consider recording technologies and techniques as active participants in the character of sound rather than the transparent, blank forms of registration they might otherwise be assumed to be. I attempt to open up the practice of field recording to processes of listening, remembering and composing which are not staged in linear, chronological fashion, but which fold back in on each other in iterative cycles. The cyclical nature of these processes suggests the need to reconfigure our definition of the field as a discrete, distant territory; instead, field and home might be connected in a shifting, partial and contingent morphology. The chapter is populated by short first-person texts. These texts perform two tasks: they engage with Wittgenstein’s fragment on memory from "Zettel" and adapt his formula to think through memory-sound, memory-words and recordings; and they are mechanisms through which the ‘remainder’ might intrude (a remainder that is made up of everything from the field that the recorder cannot capture). The chapter finishes by projecting a account of two dimensions in field recording practice: the first internal, connected to the solitary listening and remembering recordist; the second, external, opening out to those others who share the expanded field of environmental sound.

The chapter is intimately connected to the "In The Shadow of the Silent Mountain" project, one that exists across a number of outcomes, most recently an album published by the German record label Gruenrekorder.

• http://www.montesilenzio.com