Souvenirs by amorphous semiconductors

Some recordings I made during my time in Spain. Taken on an iPhone 5, mostly while walking.

The typical way to commemorate travels is with photographs that you post to Facebook and can look back on to remember your time there. But there are more senses that actual go into travel. In order to explore these other senses, I decide to produce an album of field recordings that I could upload to Bandcamp, which I would then share to Facebook. The following comments and references might help explain/expand the motivations behind these recordings.

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Exploring the Souvenir

"I love these mechanical sounds in an almost voluptuous way, as if, in the Photograph, they were the very thing-and the only thing -to which my desire clings, their abrupt click breaking through the mortiferous layer of the Pose. For me the noise of Time is not sad: I love bells, clocks, watches- and I recall that at first photographic implements were related to techniques of cabinetmaking and the machinery of precision: cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood.” - Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, p. 15

“The souvenir replica is an allusion and not a model; it comes after the fact and remains both partial to and more expansive than the fact. It will not function without the supplementary narrative discourse that both attaches it to its origins and creates a myth with regard to those origins.” – Susan Stewart, On Longing, p. 136

Roland Barthes connects sight, sound, and time, linking the camera’s “click” (in which the subject of the photograph may cease posing and continue living) to the creation of other mechanisms like clocks (which tick instead of “click”). The sight provided by the camera and photograph measures time in its own way, differently than the clock would. Inverting Barthes's relationship between sound and sight, I present this album of field recordings as an alternative to the typical tourist (photo) album of images, which commemorate time in a place. I combine Barthes’s exploration of documentation's relationship to time with Susan Stewart’s study of the souvenir. Whereas cameras might be "clocks for seeing," these recordings are clocks for hearing. In the case of travel photography/field recordings, each "souvenir" records time in a place in a different manner.

To Stewart, the “souvenir is by definition always incomplete” (136). Through its incompleteness, it metonymically relates “as object to event/experience,” yet this same incompleteness makes the souvenir an occasion for the narration of the event/experience to which the souvenir relates. By acting as “a representation in another medium,” the souvenir invites another medium (narrative in this case) to accompany it and (partially) complete the representation of the event/experience. Building upon this, might a souvenir in a different media allow a different “supplementary narrative discourse”?

Stewart’s own exploration of the souvenir focuses on sight. Souvenirs provide “views,” such as those on postcards (138). Stewart invokes the postcard as an instance in which “the souvenir moves history into private time.” A postcard view of the Statue of Liberty or the Mezquita de Córdoba is inscribed by the (private) handwriting of the person who visited that (historic) site/sight. But both “history” and “private time” exceed the sense experience of sight. This is why many souvenirs do not just provide views of landmarks; these include seashells, candies, or the flowers I pressed in between pages of books I was reading while in Spain (each of which evokes touch, taste, and smell respectively). But each of these also provides some (however small) visual experience of their respective place, so I choose to present my souvenir album as an audio recording because it limits the visual sense that usually dominates the souvenir. By focusing on the sound of Spain, these souvenirs allow a different “narrative discourse” that can represent the cold I received while traveling (my sniffles during “Line for the Prado”), the diverse languages and music that populate Spain (“Córdoba”), or the eerie silence of the Museo de Cádiz (“Luz Dudosa” and “Naturaleza Muerte” – two names taken from the museum plaques there).

the recording project(s) of adam fales

also performs under the name "Maybe one more TBA"

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