CLOSE ENCOUNTERS is inspired by Allen Hynek’s categorisation of UFO witnesses.
Hynek proposed three steps:
- Visual testimony from a distance of less than 150 metres, on which a degree of detail becomes clear and an angle of movement can be deduced.
- Physical traces of the event: impressions on the landscape, power failures or physiological effects on people.
- The final step involves direct contact with a living entity.
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Close Encounters: SLEMANI SOUNDS
In September 2023 Social Recordings — alongside local historian Chia Sadeeq — wandered the streets of Slemani (Kurdistan, North Iraq) to capture the movements of craftspeople and to record the noises they produce. These craftspeople’s lives and everyday labour create the rhythm of the city — a polyphonic sonic richness.
The project is an ode to the diversity of sound in a contemporary Iraqi city. It is a sound ethnography of a place, made in relation with its people who are simultaneously senders and receivers within a shared resonant space. It takes a pulse of the politics of a place where craft is disappearing due to encroaching capitalism.
How do the producers of these work-specific “soundtracks” listen to the daily soundscape to which they also contribute? How is the sonic output of the city degrading in the face of changing and dissolving working techniques and traditional labour in general?
A first presentation took place during the SPACE 21 festival for experimental music in Slemani, in April 2024. It was also a time to revisit the people who had been documented the previous September, in their habitats or workshops, and to play back the recordings that had been made of them, on location. This shared listening experience of the previous recording was recorded again, to commemorate a common recollection.
For the third chapter of Close Encounters, Out of Sight presents an audio-visual performance and installation, a new one-off edit of Slemani Sounds bringing into dialogue — as an act of feedback — the sounds and images recorded during both visits. Hardi Kurda and Ernst Maréchal give an improvisational concert, intertwining the sounds of the installation with live sounds, complemented by recordings of their previous Slemani/Space 21 duo performances.
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Social Recordings researches the ethics and aesthetics of recording (with) others. How can listening be a relational and critical act? How can forms of open listening enter into dialogue with the unknown? And how do we contribute to the sonic space we share?
Through a process-based practice, Social Recordings produces a body of work that is a hybrid of field recordings, interviews, sonic encounters & ethnographies, improvisations, vocal work, electroacoustic situations, experimental journalism, found and archival sounds. It is often supplemented with photographic and filmic material — the last serving as a support, a silent witness or visual guide, of the sonic.
Exploring dialogical practices like feedbacking and playbacking (on location) as a means of communication, the act of listening triggers a sonic answer, and recordings are given an oscillating status of “transmitter” and “transfer agent”.
The act of listening (or re-listening) is an act of giving (back) to each other and a process of learning from each other’s ways of resonating. As such, collective listening is a necessity for a non-conclusive practice which aims to transcend the individual act of making decisions, by resonating together again.
Practically, whenever possible, Social Recordings aims to return with sounds and images to their origins, in order to “give back” what truly belongs to those who appear in the recordings. By attending these playbacks together, a relationship is constructed between who and what is documented and the recording artist(s).
All recordings are made in a variety of social, pedagogical and artistic contexts, usually in collaboration with others, with artists and non-artists, with adults, teenagers, children, toddlers and babies.
It is an ongoing challenge to ensure that the people initially recorded are the first audiences of their documented selves. By making new recordings in the place where the original recordings are first played, choices are made together— instant processing and mutual editing of what is presented later for an audience.
