Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Iconicities of Immersion After Voices of the Rainforest

2021; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 22; Issue: 2-3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14442213.2021.1906550

1740-9314

Lisa Stefanoff,

Participatory Visual Research Methods

Noise-cancelling headphones dampen my kids' garden-play yells and fade the rev of motorbikes on the red dirt track across the road.I tune out the final sibilant spinning of the clothes washer and the skeins of summer afternoon desert birdsong, and I listen again to the 11 interlaced tracks of Voice of the Rainforest, the endlessly wonderful Feld-Kaluli/Bosavi day-in-the-lifeworld opus, first published as a Rykodisc CD in 1991, played this time from its 2019 masterfully re-mixed super hi-fidelity 'Concert CD' re-release.The work occupies a shimmering place in my umwelt of perduring affecting presences-intellectual, aesthetic and pivotal.It's a crack in everything, where (to pinch half an image from L. Cohen), the sound of the light gets in.Voices is a forest for remote listening-alongside and listening-through an ethnographic engagement, shaped by the wondrously dynamic Kaluli aesthetic dulugu ganalan (identified by Steve Feld and Bambi Schieffelin for European audiences and glossed in English as 'lift-up-over-sounding').As an edited set of uniquely spatialised recordings, it unfolds as a sonic experience of 'inside night,' 'morning night' and 'real morning' of bird song and dense cicada fog, carrying the listener through a morning of sago making rhythms, muscular tree cutting and brush clearing, into a close-up bamboo harp tune, some tones of the performance audible only to the player.It becomes Bosavi singer and composer Ulahi Gonogo's 'waterfall of song in my head,' and drumming towards a darkening afternoon and a twilight inundation.In its final movement it's a dance of birds and the 'gone reverberations' of dead ancestors, ane mama.The work is a carefully crafted experiment of phenomenological mimesis, an invocation to dwell in lived-place-elsewhere, via your ears.Its production 30 years ago recast 'soundscape' as the emergent form of processual relationality through recording, dialogical interpretation, editing and performance that Steve came to call acoustemology: a listening to (histories of) listening (2015, 2017).Voices' first life saw the project become an unlikely world music chart-buster, and a lightning rod for rainforest conservation action.Alongside the 2019 audio redux, it is now a small book and a 7.1 surround sound film, co-made with Jeremiah Ra Richards.