The script for my audio paper, written with audio cues and assorted notes.
Audio Paper Script Draft:
How are Sound, Memory and Nostalgia connected, and what does this mean for the future of music?
[BEIJING AIRPORT FIELD REC.]
Hearing this, I’m desperately trying to recall the images of that now half-remembered day. The sweltering heat seemed to pulsate throughout that place, the glass latticed ceiling, high above, spinning in my exhaustion. I hadn’t slept for almost a day, and I wouldn’t in my eight hours at that Beijing Airport, so perhaps it’s only natural my memory is so fogged and fragmented.
Now, half a year later, my only tether, the only thing that ‘colours’ my memory to that time and place is this recording I took on my phone. In my bleary state, the sound echoed through the empty white halls of the airport – in a location and language I couldn’t perceive.
[FIELD REC PLAYS AGAIN, THEN FOLLOWED BY MUSIC]
–A change of location from the previous section. This must be perceivable to the listener (e.g. indoors to outdoors) —
-Ideas to consider: Echoing footsteps (perhaps separately recorded and layered on top of my voice, for clarity) which could intertwine with music.
In his book Sinister Resonance, David Toop notes that sound, an invisible, temporal medium, reflects and interacts with memory in a multitude of ways. It is ghostly and transitory; it occurs and dissipates. The same is true with memory.
Therefore, in their similarities, sound can be used to explore memory and vice versa.
For example, a loss of memory is a silence, often accompanied in old people by a loss of hearing. Scattered by the cold winds of age, sonic events of the past grow fainter. Loss of cultural memory also, is silence…Ilya Kabakov’s 1993 work, School No. 6, on the site of Donald Judd’s Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, is a reminder of how memory survives in scraps of nostalgia and shards of memory. In desolate, abandoned school rooms, a dusty violin lies on a bench. As if the children had left music practice one afternoon, then never returned. In the intensity of their silence, a faint music asks to be heard.
[MUSIC FADES BACK IN, SLOWLY]
–Change of location, outdoors to indoors, more intimate–
Toop goes on to explain that a close listener is like a medium, attempting to summon meaning from something that isn’t entirely there – that sound often functions as a tether to immaterial, metaphorical worlds.
I believe that through memory, particularly nostalgia – can be used help ‘colour’ the images and meaning summoned by a close listener.
The skipping of my family’s mixtape CD, a now long misplaced soundtrack to car journeys throughout the countryside. Droning church bells and the laughter of schoolchildren – these sonic artifacts are woven into my subconscious, and on hearing them – my desperate nostalgia colours these images.
It’s clear therefore, that memory – particularly nostalgia can act as such a vast pool of creative potential to draw from.
It’s no surprise that so much music is created as an ‘homage’ or ‘tribute’ to cultures and sound that have existed before, even subtly- referential material sneaks its way into so much of what we consume today.
[MUSIC FADES IN]
I’d like to argue, in this audio paper, that in this often-desperate attempt at finding meaning or connection through nostalgia, danger is certain to arise.
[THE MUSIC INTRODUCES MINIMAL PERCUSSIVE CUTS/CLICKS FOR THE FIRST TIME]
The temptation of nostalgia is irresistible, it’s exquisite yearning, bittersweet romanticism and hazy comfort provides an incredible allure for artists.
Yet, if we rely on the allure of nostalgia, we run risk of trapping ourselves in a culture that constantly recycles the past, blocking the ability to create new sounds and futures for ourselves. I’d like to argue that like Mark Fisher, this has already happened.
Open the door to any music venue here in South London, and you’ll be greeted by the tired ghosts of rock or the empty husks of punk music. There is a tangible yearning for idealised past glories.
[SILENCE]
—This is my main point; silence will help convey the importance–
I’d like to propose that this phenomenon could be dubbed ‘symptomatic music‘ – symptomatic of a culture that is choking on its own lack of identity, forced to idealise a past that never really existed in a kind of renactment.
Ultimately, this is a by-product of what Mark Fisher describes as ‘Capitalist Realism’ – the belief that nothing outside the current system is possible. Nostalgia works in tandem with capitalist realism by making radical transformation seem unthinkable.
If the only “good times” are behind us, then no future alternative feels believable.
However, I believe that while music may act as a symptom, there is also diagnosis.
[PLAY BURIAL HERE(?)]
Mark Fisher described Burial’s work as a diagnostic evaluation of societies relationship with nostalgia. Noting that Burial understands the continuum of British dance music, and his position as an artist in relation to the near past- the collective euphoria of the 90s.
Acknowledging this, Burial stages his work as an attempt to return to this period of nostalgia, yet finding himself unable to continue it in a much bleaker 21st century.
This perspective does not come from saying things were great in the 90s and now they’re not. Rather, there was a trajectory running through post-war culture, a trajectory Fisher calls popular modernism, which created high expectations. That trajectory terminated and it’s the craving for the futures that we projected from the 20th century that is the crucial thing.
[BURIAL FADE OUT]
Where I propose ‘symptomatic music’s existence, its opposite also arises.
Burial’s music is what I would call ‘diagnostic music’ because it diagnoses nostalgia’s problem, accepting its tensions and proposes something new.
In ‘The Poetics of Space’ Gaston Bachelard perfectly encapsulates this sentiment –
“One must always maintain one’s connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it”
This duality of sustaining connections to the past yet endeavouring to ‘pull away’ and manifest something new is the essence of what I describe as diagnostic music.
[MUSIC FADE IN]
A temptation lies in wallowing in the stagnant nature of the 21st century’s music culture and the gloom of capitalist realism – I’m certainly guilty of it – yet, I think in the face of such an oppressive atmosphere, an equally potent resistant force can emerge.
The more I consider it , the idea of diagnostic music exists as more than just analysis of contemporary conditions but also a creative objective or challenge – one that can encourage us to evaluate our situation both in the now, and in the near-past – critically understanding the tensions of the nostalgic urge and harnessing it to push towards new futures.
With this, I have optimism.
