This recording was made at a mostly empty parking lot outside Mülheim an der Ruhr on a warm summer afternoon. Distant traffic can be heard on one side, and birds in the trees behind the parking lot can be heard on the other.
The recording was done during the first of two sound-related artistic research residency stays in Mülheim an der Ruhr in the summer of 2013, organised by my friend Jan Schacher.1
For many years, I have had a strong affinity with this recording without necessarily knowing why. I was alone when recording, as Jan was busy elsewhere. As a place, the parking lot seemed ignorable, but the sounding atmosphere caught my attention, and the recording session became a profound experience.
Sometimes, when this happens, the experience might remain personal and private, significant to me but inaccessible to others. When I assess my field recordings later on, I do my best to consider them with a critical “outsider” ear. What does the recording become when I set the memory of my initial experience apart? This potential loss of meaning in translation from recordist to listener has been discussed by among others Salomé Vogelin.2
This recording is not at all spectacular, but it is the ordinary and everyday qualities that I keep returning to, finding that it remains worth lending my ears to. The place suggested by this recording could be anywhere and anytime, and still, or precisely for that reason, it is, to my ears, beautiful. The world reveals itself as beautiful, in all of its normality.
Many years later, reading the book “Resonance. A sociology of our relationship to the world” by Hartmut Rosa, I find him quoting Merly-Ponty in a footnote. Merly-Ponty discusses the relationship between painter and painting, and how the painting speaks back to the painter:
Inevitably the roles between him [the painter] and the visible are reversed. That is why so many painters have said that things look at them. As André Marchand says, after Klee: ‘In a forest, I have felt many times over that it was not I who looked at the forest. Some days I felt that the trees were looking at me, were speaking to me. … I was there, listening… I think that the painter must be penetrated by the universe and not want to penetrate it. … I expect to be inwardly submerged, buried. Perhaps I paint to break out.’ We speak of ‘inspiration,’ and the word should be taken literally. There really is inspiration and expiration of Being, action and passion so slightly discernible that it becomes impossible to distinguish between what sees and what is seen, what paints and what is painted. It can be said that a human is born at the instant when something that was only virtually visible, inside the mother’s body, becomes at one and the same time visible for itself and for us. The painter’s vision is a continued birth.3
I recognise what I encountered in Mülheim to be a similar experience of resonance: The parking lot was speaking to me, and I listened to what it had to say.
(Please use headphones when listening.)
1 Schacher, Jan, Cathy van Eck, Kirsten Reese, and Trond Lossius. ‘Sonozones. Sound Art Investigations in Public Places’. Journal for Artistic Research, no. 6 (2014). https://www.jar-online.net/exposition/abstract/sonozones.
2 Voegelin, Salomé. ‘New Field Recordists Put Themselves in the Sonic Frame’. The Wire: Adventures in Modern Music, 2014. https://www.thewire.co.uk/about/contributors/salome-voegelin/collateral-damagesalome-voegelin.
3 Rosa, Hartmut. Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World. Cambridge; Medford: Polity, 2019. Page 479.