Any Place Whatever: Schizophonic Dislocation and the Sound of Space in General

Distinct from the tendency for field recording to be understood as a veridical act of documentation—faithfully recording the sonic specificities of a given place—there exists a complementary tendency towards abstraction, emerging from the ‘schizophonic’ dislocation implicated within phonographic practices. This tendency emphasises the mutability of space in general rather than the identifiable specifics of place. This ‘lack’ of specificity is understood to expose an underlying productivity or generative capacity only accounted for in a more abstract notion of space. This paper focuses on the extent to which field recording practices are heard to occupy a point of tension between the identifiable fixity of the site-specific and the generative mutability of space in general, a point of tension that is audibly manifest in the work of artists such as Francisco López and Asher Thal-Nir.