Recordedness
I was attempting to make a record that exploited its 'recordedness' in the same way that a concert exploits its 'liveness'.” Sean Ali
Recordedness is dedicated to questions related to documentation of sound and the act of recording.
What is the purpose of recording when we practice an art form that is placed in an ephemeral time? What is our relationship to materiality and what is the purpose of a materialization of sound? Is it a question of archiving, of leaving an imprint, a trace, such that the recording would only be an "objectified" or concretized means, a materialization to relate our sonic relationship to space and time? Or will the final material indicate and influence the sounds that will be fixed and crystallized? As for the material, why the choice of this or that format and not another? What is its influence on the work? Is the sound document made with the aim of propagating and sharing a thought, an idea, a narrative, revealing a space and a time? Can we separate the author from the content of the object? How does recording affect the way we think, conceptualize and feel about music and sound? Why would the moment and process of recording be different from a live performance? What are the contents of a sound document? Is it "just" music and/or sounds?
The aim here is not to give definitive answers to these questions, nor to give voice to a critique from a single point of view. As Brunhild Ferrari says very well in her text The Microphone's Gaze (in Spectres n°1, Composing Listening), between the one who captures (makes) and the one who listens, there is a difference in the inner perception of the same object seen identically. Dialogue is the way to exchange and enrich each other. We wish here to dialogue and above all to give the voice directly to the artist, on their work, their thoughts and their intentions. Through dialogue, we wish to address different analytical approaches and perceptions, to question the process of creation, which seems to us to be just as important as the final result and would give us additional keys to understanding. We would like to discuss different themes concerning the content, the relationship to its author, the formal and narrative construction, the inspiration and the will that pushes to fix the sounds and the music, or the relationship that these creators have with space and time and their influences on them. In the end, what we want is to enrich and give the possibility, by addressing everyone, to better understand the intentions fixed in a document and a sound work and to push and question beyond the simple relationship that we can have with a sound media.