RADICAL MURMUR

A Sonic Exploration in Three Parts

The urban environment is generally captured in images and words. Researchers have a vast arsenal of visual means at their disposal to analyse and represent urban spaces and buildings, from photography to maps, floor plans, cross sections, elevations and drawings. Social scientists describe space and the interactions that take place within it. However, the sonic dimension – how an environment sounds – is usually left out of consideration.

TRASHLINIE is the heading under which we, a sound artist/radio maker and an architectural historian/publicist, have been making podcasts and audio projects since 2019. With TRASHLINIE we are interested in evoking a sense of space through sound. Interviews are typically conducted on location; this means that street noise and spontaneous encounters are included in the montage. The soundscape of any street can reveal a lot about the acoustic dimensions and atmosphere of a place, and even abstract and gradually unfolding processes like gentrification, segregation or ecological degradation can be audible, or at least have an effect on the sound profile of a place.

There is no fixed TRASHLINIE ‘modus operandi’ that has come about very deliberately. Rather, we found a shared curiosity in soundscapes at the intersection of our different areas of interest. The project RADICAL MURMUR has been a vehicle for us to deepen our own understanding of what we intuitively already found so interesting about working with ambient background hums, unintelligible murmurs, the sound of cars honking, snippets of conversations from people passing by, echos reverberating between buildings, the steady and slightly unsettling drone of a distant pile driver hammering away, and so on. Is this an aesthetic preoccupation, a kind of fetishization of raw noise as a marker of ‘street cred’, or do we really believe that sound, no matter how ugly or amorphous, contains information that is not transferable in words and images?

RADICAL MURMUR consists of three episodes. In this triptych, we meet a diverse and international cast of thinkers, artists and composers who, in very different ways, are thinking about the implications of making sound, recording sound and listening to sound. The fact that we group them together in this triptych does not mean that there is a clear interrelatedness or shared intellectual canopy. In editing, we tried to do justice to the tone, nuances and ambiguities of their individual practices. The interviews are also interspersed with excerpts from sound works or read-out passages from texts, to add to the overall ‘sound image’ of their work. Yet there are topics that keep recurring, that were, as it were, threaded through the conversations, such as the relationship between sound and power, the unrefined journalistic potential of sound, the minor space for sound in the European philosophical tradition, and the erosion of polyphony and sonic pluralism because of ecological degradation, consumerism or state violence.

In addition to Collateral, we would like to thank the two other collaborative partners who made RADICAL MURMUR possible, namely rekto:verso and Gonzo (circus). Regardless of whether the end result is satisfactory – you will have to listen to judge that – it speaks well for these media that they supported a project with the unpitchable premise of a three-hour ‘exploration of sound’. We would also like to thank the interviewees for sharing with us the richness and multiplicity of their work. The interviewees are, in alphabetical order: Justin Bennett, Evelien van den Broek, Peter Cusack, Mint Park, Davide Tidoni and Salomé Voegelin.

TRASHLINIE is Sjoerd Leijten and Roel Griffioen. RADICAL MURMUR was made in collaboration with rekto:verso, Gonzo (circus) and Collateral.