Noisy Memory: Recording Sound, Performing Archives

INTRODUCTION

Noisy Memory and Family Gifts

My father was a typewriter repairman, and in his spare time he fixed old radios, clocks, and record players. My mother was a contemplative, immersed in traditions that advocate quietly turning inward and a deep connection to the world. And both of my parents’ ancestors are rooted in the hills and small towns of Appalachian Ohio.

I see these traits—material and spiritual, noisy and quiet, and imbued with rural sensibilities—as gifts. My mother helped me to appreciate silence, to carefully read books on spiritual practices, and to pay attention to everything around me. She was not a musician; and in retrospect it seems odd that I would go on to become a composer and sound artist. But it was her qualities of insight, empathy, and a creative impulse that found their way into my interests in listening and sound.

As for my father, he was not a musician either but a bit of an inventor, and the hum, scratch, clack, and glow of his workshop were a part of my daily life. The constant search for a radio signal amid the din of static or the pleasure of a record needle contacting vinyl and exploding with sound—these moments were just as integral to my education as piano lessons or learning how to read. And although I do not personally identify as Appalachian (I grew up near Columbus, an hour north of the region), all the childhood day trips to visit his family in Appalachian Ohio made an indelible mark, leaving a strong sense of place that I still carry with me today.

As an adult, it took me a long time to appreciate these qualities and to see how they fit into my work. It was only recently when I realized the objects my father cared for and repaired represented a curious mix of words, sound, and time. The typewriters, for example, use the symbols of the alphabet to inscribe language; likewise, the clocks offer a mechanical depiction of time passing. Sound recordings, however, skip the symbols altogether and go directly to the sounds as they are: full of music and voices, background noises, and even the sounds of the record or player itself. These recordings, according to the media theorist Wolfgang Ernst, are nonsymbolic, and they also have a noisy memory: That is, they contain all the extra sonic information an alphabet cannot capture alone.¹

If I listen back to the first sound recording ever made, of Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville singing the French folk song Au Clair de la Lune in 1860, I hear many things at once.² His singing voice is the most obvious sound, slowly making its way through the first line of the melody. All manner of noise accompanies his voice, however, including the scratch of the paper it was etched onto and the distorted rumblings of each note. From the beginning, recorded sound was capturing both signal and noise, so that the medium, the history, and the voice’s grain and texture were rolled into one.

In the late 1990s, I was a student in London, England, studying music with the composer Michael Finnissy. I was enamored with his ability to collage fragments of notated music and transcriptions from the past. In doing so, he was critically exploring and commenting on history, as heard through music. In the following years, I made piece after piece of music that emulated Finnissy’s approach, in vain. These pieces failed to capture the mood and textures that I loved in old recordings, and I could not figure out a way to bridge the gap between the two.

It was only when I gave up on notation altogether and began to improvise with, sample, and collage sound recordings by themselves that everything clicked into place. Much like the alphabet, I realized that music notation is also a symbolic language, and it can only go so far in representing the sounds around us. In a sound recording, however, the complexity and layers of sound and noise I desired were already there; they were built in. I also had the feeling that I was witnessing, sharing, and presenting the material, instead of describing, imitating, or giving an approximation of it.

In making this shift from notated to recorded sound, I changed, too: Listening became the most important part of my practice, more so than virtuosity or a complex written score.³ There is nothing new in this discovery, and a long line of composers, musicians, and artists have already figured this out for themselves. I am making a note of it here because it was personal, something I immediately felt in my body and heart when I finally put everything together. This was the first time in my life that composing music truly made sense to me and sounded like what I had been imagining.

Later still, I would find ways to make hybrids between notated and sampled music, which I continue to make today. I also learned how to spend more time outside of the studio, developing relationships and connections with people and places that I cared for. I began to incorporate community-based ethnographic methods borrowed from anthropology and folklore into my practice, of observing, participating, interviewing, socially engaging, and of course, listening. The resulting albums and performances that I made are between the symbolic and something beyond it, something closer to what feels, to me, intimate and tangible. I have shared these projects here—which go back nearly two decades—of time spent in archives or with communities across Appalachia and the Midwest or rediscovering the stories of my family and ancestors.

Over the years, I have come to know these projects as archival performances, which is a fancy way of saying that I use archival recordings to make new music from them. A more formal definition of an archival performance is any embodied interpretation of an archive.⁴ My idea of interpretation is simple: It is to make something new from something old. It can include many different reimaginings of the archival materials: An arrangement, a cover of an old song, or a reworking of lyrics would all be interpretations. Or it can extend to working with the archival materials more directly: Sampling (cutting out digital fragments of a recording), collaging, and remixing archival recordings are new interpretations of older sounds. My definition of performance is broad, too: Not only does it include playing music or giving a speech or acting in a play, but it can also encompass all manner of everyday and otherwise routine activities, from a conversation to washing the dishes to the simple act of listening. Putting archives and performance together opens the possibility for a new music that stays close to the material, much like a documentary. At the same time, the sounds are heard independently, in new contexts, and in relationship with each other, moving in and out of tension and harmony and alongside my own voice. To borrow a musical term, they are in counterpoint with each other.

There is a long history of musicians and artists who work with sampled and preexisting material, from hip-hop artists today to the tape pieces of Steve Reich to the early twentieth-century visual collages of Kurt Schwitters and sound collages of Charles Ives, all the way back to medieval masses.⁵ The difference here is that I am working with more formal sound archives, and the recordings they contain are often of people who have been historically disadvantaged. This means I need to contend with many ethical, historical, and social issues. In doing so, I have learned that an archival performance is not an invitation to take and use whatever you might like. Instead, there must be what I am calling an archival stewardship, which is a practice of caring for archives that is collaborative and rooted in a community and in which power, permission, history, and authorship are all considered.

This book, then, is about creatively and ethically listening to and interpreting sound archives. It is not necessarily a practical how-to book, however, although I hope it might encourage you to work with archival materials to make something new. Instead, it shares a two-decade journey of self-discovery and tells a personal story of my deepening understanding of people and places through sound. I move through towns and cities and up and out from the archival basement into the open air. In each new place—Berea, Junction City, Chicago, Shawnee, Trappist, and home—I learn something about the people there. I learn something about myself, too, and every new experience is an opportunity to discover my own place in the world.

All along, I learn about the magic of recordings and how each tape, record, or field recording tells a story. Here, it is important to note that I am not only listening to the recordings; I am also listening with the people on them. My friend and mentor Marina Peterson shared this way of listening with me and helped me to shift my understanding from my perspective alone to something that is built on relationships. And even though microphones and sound recordings are not the same as our ears and lived experiences, as Peterson points out, they nevertheless provide an opportunity to listen along with those who are there.⁶ I listen carefully and critically to these recordings; and in recounting their noisy memory, I feel connected with the people and places they reflect.

This leads to several overarching questions: How are archival performances relevant? What purpose do they have? What can they offer beyond nostalgia and sentimentality? For me, an answer begins with turning history into a creative act for the present moment, for right now. I do not have a desire to go back in time or to make things as they were or to get caught in a mindset that says the past is always somehow better. Instead, the past becomes material, a lens, a cautionary tale, a teacher.

Performing the past also becomes a way to break us from our current thoughts and patterns, to see things in a new way. Paying attention to overlooked and in-between sounds (in both archival recordings and in everyday life) can also shift our perspective away from nostalgia; in those spontaneous and vulnerable moments just before a song or after a conversation, a new space is opened, one that is human, imperfect, uncertain, and rich with significance. Archival performances present opportunities to understand this reframed past, which are fascinated with its history, yes, but are also informed, critical, and often challenging. I am not only sifting through seemingly endless documents and recordings to find compelling stories; I am also seeking out clues to move forward into the future.

And finally, because these performances are always built on relationships, they are doing the work of reaching out and connecting with others. When you approach archival materials earnestly and in conjunction with a community, something unexpected happens; cynicism and detachment fall away and meaning and interdependence become central. Bringing archives and relationships together is an opportunity to consider contexts and viewpoints both within and beyond an archive. An archival recording can point to many things, but it alone cannot fully capture the nuances of a friendship or the bonds of family or the interrelation of people working together toward a common goal. Archival performances, then, are both subjective experiences and a larger practice that might help us relate to others with empathy and curiosity.

I begin the stories of this book in Berea, Kentucky, where I first worked with archival materials situated within a community. Chapter 1 shares how I learned to listen to sound archives while there and how this process involves much more than the recordings themselves. It also tells of my first steps toward archival stewardship, in which working alongside the families and communities related to the recordings becomes an integral part of my practice. The result is something between archival ethnography and an account of my emerging creative process. Chapter 2 is focused on American Winter (2007) and Rawhead and Bloodybones (2015), two composed recording projects that came out of my time at Berea. Here, I recount stories of listening and composing, alongside detailed explanations of each project. I also offer insights into both the contexts of the archival recordings and my responses to them.

Chapter 3 is an exploration of silence through the lenses of family and place. I talk about my father’s hometown, Junction City, Ohio, and share my earliest memories from there. I also write about death and birth, listening to photographs, the loss of memory, and how family can connect us to the land. Finally, I provide insights into the album Silent City (2009), which brings together samples from Berea and my memories of Junction City to create a mythological town.

Chapter 4’s archival material—of the experimental musician and bandleader Sun Ra (1914–93) in Chicago—may at first feel like an outlier in this book. And yet, I share the same curiosity and respectful approach to the recordings as I do with the other archives. Here, I dive into the fascinating sonic world of Sun Ra’s music and provide insights from making the project The Star-Faced One (2013). I also continue to build a steadily growing tool kit of archival listening and performing techniques. Finally, I explore the issues of authorship and power, archival homophones, and ways to ethically interpret and reuse archival materials.

Chapters 5 and 6 illustrate a decade and a half of discovery, friendships, and creative growth in Appalachian Ohio. These chapters begin with my story of visiting the village of Shawnee and its people. I also uncover the early life of my grandfather, who grew up there. Along the way, we meet many of the archival characters and current residents who became integral to the sound recording project Shawnee, Ohio (2019). I write about my process of making the album, how residents became cocreators of the project, and how a special performance in Shawnee affected me.

In chapter 7, I travel back to Kentucky to listen to the archival recordings of the monk, writer, and activist Thomas Merton (1915–68). I recount my years-long process of research and how I gathered and assembled material for the album Words and Silences (2022). I also talk of my own journey: alone and with family, across the nation and at home, and before, during, and after the pandemic. Throughout, I detail how this journey deepened my understanding of the archival material and the contemplative silence of Merton’s words.

And finally, in chapter 8, I return to my parents’ home in Westerville, Ohio, to create a sound and video project called The Workbench (2024). Here, I explore the power of inherited objects from my father, Paul. This archive is not public but personal: a lifetime’s accumulation of things my father repaired and cared for. I became curious about the objects’ sonic traces and whether they had an agency that we might activate and listen to. This final chapter brings me full circle; I return to where I began my life, to relisten to the sounds I was born into and grew up with. And yet, as with all my projects, this was not a purely nostalgic or sentimental endeavor. Instead, I learned that attentive listening to the past—of seemingly trivial details from my father recounting everyday moments—might reveal something to us right now: a way to feel and think deeply about ourselves and others and to work toward making our relationships and the places where we live more meaningful.

As I write this, it has become clear that the projects in this book are a product of the gifts my family, teachers, friends, and students have given to me, so much so that I am sometimes not sure what I have contributed or where I fit within them. For example, all the women in my family have been (or are) quilters. As a child, I remember playing in the fabric store, hiding among bolts of cloth and sorting through spools of colored thread. Or at home, I would open a century-old yellow cabinet with pullout drawers and run my hands over the soft swatches and fragments of fabric patiently waiting to find their place in a quilt. Everyone had their own distinct style, too: My grandmother’s hand-stitched embroidery, my mother’s impressionist collages, and my sisters’ precise geometric patterns reveal and record their interests and aesthetic tastes.

Watching my family make these objects left a mark on me; I loved witnessing the creative process, and I felt comfortable among the quilts’ humble, practical uses, without any pressure to be masterpieces or great works of art. I am certain this process of making found its way into my own. Gathering and taking pleasure in material felt natural to me; and in hindsight, making the leap to understanding archival recordings as found sounds to then listen to, organize, pattern, combine, and thoughtfully arrange together now seems obvious. The sampled recordings are like those small pieces of cloth, and I add my own music as I go along, to sew and join them together.

I hope that you can take delight in the depths of beauty and connectedness that can be found in these archival recordings. I hope you find gifts here, too, and that you make use of them and pass them to others so that they continue to grow and thrive in their exchange.

CHAPTER ONE

Berea, Kentucky: Learning to Listen

The Past Is Present

In the early spring of 2006, I packed up my car and drove to Kentucky. I had been invited to Berea College on a fellowship to listen to its Appalachian Sound Archives and make something new from them. Even though Berea was only a few hours from my home in Columbus, Ohio, it felt like a distant and uncertain world away.

I was surprised to be going. I was not an expert in folklore or Appalachian studies, nor did I have a fully thought-out plan of research. Instead, I proposed to be there as a composer and artist, simply offering to listen to Berea’s collections and to create a sound collage of historic recordings alongside newly written music. I was certain a project like this would be controversial in a formal archive. And yet, when I heard that my proposal had been accepted, I was grateful and excited. In my work as a composer, I had been using samples, field recordings, and found sounds for years. But this was a new opportunity to do so with permission and in collaboration with historians, archivists, musicians, and community members.

When I pulled off the highway and onto a small country road north of Berea, I remember feeling a sense of relief. The landscape was welcoming, and the trees and plants were coming alive weeks earlier than in Ohio. I drove past the Boone Tavern and turned left on Prospect Street. I found the apartment I would be staying in and met the caretaker there. When she handed me the keys, she said, You know, the writer James Still once stayed here. An author I greatly admired, Still wrote many books focused on Appalachia and lived in Kentucky. I was impressed that the caretaker shared this knowledge. It was the first of many signs of the history and culture present in Berea, which I continued to feel as I walked, listened, and became familiar with the town.

The apartment was quiet, spare. It had a table, chair, lamp, bed, and couch and not much else. Trees surrounded the building, and at the corner of the property, there was a gate; beyond that was a path that led to student-run gardens in an adjacent field. I remember thinking that it felt like the first day of summer camp: nervous, fidgety, lonely. That night, it rained. I ate veggie burgers and chips and drank beer from small half bottles. I slept restlessly, listening to the quiet patterns of water hitting the roof. In the middle of the night, I awoke and scribbled on a piece of paper: Only this, only all. I can’t say exactly what the note meant. But I suspect it was a feeling of anticipation, of appreciation, of calming myself, and of a deep knowledge that connection and meaning can be found anywhere if I only opened myself to it.

This was an entirely new experience, one outside of my comfort zone. In many ways it felt like the opposite of what one should do to be a composer. I had been told again and again that the only way to succeed was to move to a big city and join its cultural scene. But something felt subversively pleasurable in coming to this rural and quiet place. I already felt it affecting me, offering a space to be curious and receptive to the town and its people.

Berea College is situated about forty miles south of Lexington, Kentucky. It has a long history of racial integration and free tuition for its students. My work was to take place at Hutchins Library, where the Berea Sound Archives were held. One of the archives’ strengths is the variety of their collections and styles of music, which span a century. Many of the thirty or so collections refer to the people who sought out and recorded musicians across Appalachia, such as John Harrod, Leonard Roberts, Bruce Greene, and Barbara Kunkle. Other collections focus on self-made recordings and documentation of professional or amateur musicians, such as Nora Carpenter or Asa Martin. Still others focus on radio, public events, or festivals like the Celebration of Traditional Music that takes place every year in Berea. Within these collections, different genres are represented: ballads and banjo music, fiddle tunes and folk tales, radio gospel programs and lined-out hymns.

Most importantly, however, is the way these collections have been gathered and whom they represent. There is no single, authoritative voice, no top-down structure. Instead, the recordings are assembled from below, featuring everyday people—across race, age, class, and gender—who might otherwise be marginalized or overlooked. The result is an intricate gathering of individual voices, each with a story to tell. The stories