An excerpt from a conversation between Ellie Morgan, Elliot Perkins, Janna Graham and Dont Rhine, September 2009

 

EM: Sound appears to be particularly interesting to you above other sensorial expressions – Is this something to do with the pervading nature of sound which lends itself to activism?

EP: The use of sound in Ultra-red’s work, or at least our public events and workshops, operates on a number of levels. For one, it establishes conditions and spaces of collectivity. Sound and silence are the matrices through which participants in Ultra-red events find their way to each other as groups and begin to produce a collective investment in listening. Nothing is presupposed in this collective contract. We make use of the sounds that come together in the moment.  We take this principle from the history of sound or sound art as much as from the practices that we have learned from Zapatistas and other militant organisers: that is to begin with acts of listening together and in these acts to establish the terms and conditions for future analysis and action. In this process, trust has to be established and everyone who commits her or himself is required to take risks in the act of listening. When this intimacy amongst the group is manifest; hearing the sounds, hearing each other, hearing ourselves, this is the moment when the relationships to the sites, the sound objects, to each other move and change as the group moves towards an analysis. When we use sounds in political processes, we use them to mediate the reflections, desires and discussions between participants. These sounds often have a profound connection to a site or experience outside the physical space in which the audition of sound is taking place. The sound object, a document of a site, experience or moment, is reactivated in collectivity and frequently invites a re-evaluation of the relationship to the site and the sound and to each other as groups move through this process and begin to understand the sound object as a problem to be solved – what questions and responses do the sounds invite? Where do we go to hear these sounds? Who should hear these sounds? Is the sound which initiated an inquiry still relevant? If not, where might it take us? This is the moment when we may begin to posit what the sounds produce in the context of our desires and our desired forms of activism.  
JG:  This is the case with the project that we extend to OUTPOST, which began by groups of people across rural communities in the England’s southwest coming together to answer the question ‘what is the sound of racism?’. Based in recordings made in response to this question, a series of group discussions helped us to build a glossary of terms in the analysis of rural racism that were very different from those used by official bureaucracies, often based in notions of visual identification – such as the term BME (Black Minority Ethnic). While the use of sounds does not foreclose our ability to speak of politics as we know them in the realm of representations – around issues of identity, of architecture, planning and the image, it does heighten sensitivity to the other registers in which politics operate: issues of who is speaking and who is listening?; how are they speaking and listening?; what does it mean when no one is speaking? From feminist and anti-colonial practices we know that beyond attention to the policies, spatial manipulations and acts of exclusion that take place in the realm that is dominated by rhetorics of representation, struggles must also attend to power and thus politics as it circulates in these sensible registers. These micropolitical registers are often difficult to address without a re-focusing of perceptual attention. Beyond addressing issues of power, it is often only through the re-ordering of the sensible and perceptual realms that we begin to move from the habituated dualities (victim/saviour, insider/outsider) of representational politics to a politics that emerges from the complex desires, affects and relationships of political agents.

DR: This space where sound art contributes to political action, where it questions it, offers processes, and de-stablises its silences, this seems like new territory. Even now. Why is that? As Janna mentions, it is not just any sound that produces the new conditions for listening. To understand the kinds of sounds used by Ultra-red we also have to address the question of music. The ubiquity of music in politics, its very structure as a technology of identification, possesses a firm grip on our ears. Everyone knows what she or he likes to listen to, what moves them, what puts them into motion affectively, intellectually, corporeally. The construction of identity (or, to use old school Marxist language, it’s ideological apparatus) through music begins at a very young age. At the same time, few of us can talk about music beyond the regime of personal taste. How does music do what it does, either in terms of harmony, rhythm, or timbre, as well as its codes embedded in history, memory, and the productive forces of culture, all of this remains quite mysterious to a good many of us.

EM: So then the question arises, what is left of what we hear after the familiar and unfamiliar discourses of music? And what of that left-over can be the material of an activist art practice, or an art practice of political organising? Does music hold a monopoly over the sonic arts? Since the Futurists, sound art has occupied a place outside of the concert hall. Visual art and its institutions have had ears and sounds to hear for over a century. And yet there is still a relentless novelty to it all. Music at its limits, at the point it becomes sound art, has long provided a rupture in the practices and institutions of visual art. John Cage, Henry Flynt, Lamont Young and Yoko Ono each in their own way render sound as productive disruption. In each case, a rupture around the procedure of listening wrestles visual art out of its safe terrain of representation and into social process. This disruption is by no means exclusive to sound, but sound and its organisation of listening appears to do something in particular to aesthetic experience, especially where the very possibility of such experience is contained to and tightly wound around the institutions and economics of art. This limitation becomes so habitual, so persistent, that one can begin to wonder what is at risk that the only place for sound in the art world is as entertainment for institutional events, formal variations on the cinematic marriage of image and sound, or a kind of science-fair art which includes almost the entirety of sound art in sculpture's expanded field. There is a whole field of other ways of practicing sound art beyond this that could attend to the organization of listening. It was Cage who once described a composition as producing a new way of hearing, of hearing together. For me, Ultra-red's work begins from there.