Listening After Nature - by Mark Peter Wright (Paperback)

About the Book

"Listening After Nature questions the reality of auditory natures. It argues that the line between wilderness and industrial culture is dull, and the natural world is presently a critical construct that entangles humans, animals, sites and technologies. Bringing new insights to the field of environmental sound arts in areas such as field recording, acoustic ecology and soundscape studies, Wright examines contemporary and archival audio works and calls for a 'post-natural' approach to sound. The book propels sounds arts discourse into critical relationship with the environmental humanities and contemporary approaches dealing with the consequences of Anthropogenic change. Critical and imaginative, this is a book that forges urgent debate between sound, ethics, aesthetics and ecology"--

Book Synopsis

Listening After Nature examines the constructions and erasures that haunt field recording practice and discourse. Analyzing archival and contemporary soundworks through a combination of post-colonial, ecological and sound studies scholarship, Mark Peter Wright recodes the Field; troubles conceptions of Nature; expands site-specificity; and unearths hidden technocultures. What exists beyond the signal? How is agency performed and negotiated between humans and nonhumans? What exactly is a field recording and what are its pedagogical potentials?

These questions are operated by a methodology of listening that incorporates the spaces of audition, as well as Wright's own practice-based reflections. In doing so, Listening After Nature posits a range of novel interventions. One example is the "Noisy-Nonself," a conceptual figuration with which to comprehend the presence of reticent recordists. "Contact Zones and Elsewhere Fields" offers another unique contribution by reimagining the relationship between the field and studio. In the final chapter, Wright explores the microphone by tracing its critical and creative connections to natural resource extraction and contemporary practice.

Listening After Nature auditions water and waste, infrastructures and animals, technologies and recordists, data and stars. It grapples with the thresholds of sensory perception and anchors itself to the question: what am I not hearing? In doing so, it challenges Western universalisms that code the field whilst offering vibrant practice-based possibilities.

Review Quotes

"A comprehensive and thought-provoking book, it brings together popular, new and possibly radical ideas for readers to consider. Wright is another brilliant example of a practising artist whose passionate interest and work thoroughly informs a clever, heartfelt book."" --The Wire

"Although it is debatable exactly how restorative sound recordings can be in the context of a dying world, Listening After Nature does suggest that a more responsible approach is overdue if we wish to retain a field of any description. The book is a fine attempt at reassembling the existing cultural frameworks embedded in the niche but loaded genre of field recording." --The Quietus

"A critical reflection, a critical introspection on the practice of field recording, summarized in this one sentence that turns up throughout the whole book: "What are we not hearing?"" --Journal of Sonic Studies

"I have been waiting for this book. Listening After Nature is a much-needed corrective to the practice and theory of field recording. Mark Peter Wright offers a critical reflexive account that troubles many of the field's assumptions, such as the sonic absence of the recorder, the search for sounds of nature without human presence and the transparency of the microphone. Emphasizing the impossibility of sustaining such an approach in a time "after nature," the book holds open the question of "what is a field recording," asking what is not heard as much as what is and providing playful and serious possibilities for "listening-with" practices adequate to a time of climate change and mass extinction." --Marina Peterson, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Texas at Austin, USA, and author of Atmospheric Noise: The Indefinite Urbanism of Los Angeles (2021)

"Through the low frequencies of history, geography and experimental sonic practices, Listening After Nature lures us to critical audition. In the sonic contact zones of shrimps and stars, foley and documentary, signal and voice, this book shows us how listening is a position of power, and equally, of immense responsibility. It is crucial reading for students and scholars of sound arts, environmental humanities and media philosophy." --Sasha Engelmann, Lecturer in GeoHumanities, Royal Holloway University of London, UK

"Imagine a dinner party with a majority of so-called field recordists. All of them talking about signal-to-noise ratios, recording techniques, latest microphones or the great time they spent going on expeditions to Asia, Africa, South America or somewhere else where ice caps are melting. To record, mind you, not to fill their cocktails, although the idea of ´extraction´ might apply to both. Mark Peter Wright's scholarship is a sort of a much-needed killjoy in what has been a celebratory run for a practice born out of unduly historical and disciplinary privilege(s) that naturalized unproductive oppositions between man, nature, science and ideology. The author reminds us of the ethical responsibilities when/in/while recording the field as the dawn chorus does not always start in the west, distant or as an other." --Rui Chaves, Universidade Federal da Paraíba, Brazil, and co-editor of Making it Heard: A History of Brazilian Sound Art (2019)

About the Author

Mark Peter Wright is Reader in Critical Sound Practice at the University of the Arts, London, UK, where he is also a member of CRiSAP (Creative Research into Sound Arts Practice). His practice intersects sound arts, ecology, and experimental pedagogy across exhibition, performance, and publishing.