The Primer: Field Recordings

Illustration by Savage Pencil

“Pictures of a gone world”. The expression, coined by curator Pat Conte to describe the transcriptions of ethnic music from 78rpm discs which comprise his Secret Museum Of Mankind series on the Shanachie label, neatly summarises the appeal of the field recording.

‘Gone’, of course, a haunting reference to attrition, as indigenous cultures around the world are surrounded, absorbed and nullified by the amoeba that is 20th century mass media. But ‘gone’, also, to describe musicians unconstrained by notions of professionalism or competitiveness, performing as though possessed, for an audience of neighbours seeking transport to another state of consciousness.

“Music, like drugs, alters the fabric of time”, a credo familiar to followers of Nottingham’s Time Recordings, applies equally well to the acoustic gems brought home to the armchair traveller via field recordings.

Since the dawn of phonography, the recording industry has exhibited periodic bursts of enthusiasm for exotic sounds. Such interest has usually been tied to the need for additional product as new formats appeared. At the beginning of the century, owners of gramophones could magically reproduce the sounds of farflung locales on shellac discs in their front parlours, as recordists, motivated by the profit in marketing novelty items, lugged cumbersome equipment to Kazakhstan and Matabeleland in search of sonic obscurata (‘aural oddities’). Later, the advent of tape recordings and microgroove vinyl discs in the 1950s, and in America, the consumerist cult of Polynesian exotica, sparked another surge of interest in music from distant lands. The development of compact disc technology has triggered the most recent enlargement of the International bins in high-street megastores.

As often as not, the lion’s share of ethnology-on-disc emanated from countries with extensive colonial holdings. French record companies have always excelled in this regard, and in the last half-century, performances snared by French recordists for labels such as Vogue, Le Chant Du Monde, Philips, Tangent, Silex and Ocora have preserved music that might otherwise have evanesced like so much night air.

In particular, the Ocora label – the recording arm of Radio France – has produced dozens of what might be considered the Faberge eggs of ethnographic long players, with terrific mastering, detailed liner notes and superior graphics. The sonic safaris sponsored by Ocora enabled technicians such as Charles Duvelle and Pierre Toureille to make incredible, three-dimensional recordings; their patience, diplomacy and stamina helped them to tough out inhospitable environments, and their discerning ears located all that was astonishing and quicksilver in other people’s music.