Reading/Sound, 2013

Audio file plus text: 4 min

In the fall of 2013, my friends Cat Lamb and Bryan Eubanks invited me to participate in an audio essay they were compiling about “liminality” in music and listening, which they provisionally defined as “the area between the periphery and the core of perception.” I knew that most of the contributors would submit recordings of themselves talking, so I thought it might be interesting to submit a recording of me thinking instead. My hope was that, in addition to being humorous or aggressive, it would serve as an interruption, an “essay” that would enact rather than describe. So, while listening to a tape I made (The Studio Recordings) that I consider to occupy just such a space between presence, absence, attention, distraction, and “drift,” I typed up my thoughts about what I was hearing and how I was listening to it. I repeated the process until I made a recording I liked; the written words themselves were just a by-product of the recording process, like waste material. Later, however, rereading the words while listening to the recording, I found something arresting in their intersection, an even more in-between experience available by combining the two “texts.” Together, they illuminate nothing—what is a map mapping a map?—and maybe even obscure one another, but like a double negative, they produce something positive. Like much of my work, it becomes a record of an encounter between materials and times; a freezing of something fleeting that in the process produces affect. —MB, 2014