Writing the Field Recording

de Stephen Benson, William Montgomery

A field recording is any audio recording made outside of the studio. Such recordings have lately become important to contemporary musicians, sound artists and environmentalists. Less attention, however, has been given to the relation of sound, as manifested in the theory and practice of the field recording, to writing. The eleven essays collected here take the recent explosion of interest in field recording as the point of departure for an investigation of the sounded field in music and its relationship to literature, writing and sound studies. This book includes seminal pieces on field thinking by John Berger and Lisa Robertson, alongside the work of composers, musicians, poets and critics. As well as critical reflections on artistic practice, the collection presents an inter-disciplinary exploration of the various registers in which the field recording is written, including the essayistic, the creative, the experimental and the philosophical.