Field Recording and Immersive Installations – a Q&A with Julian Konczak

 

Hi Julian, could you introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your background, as well as describe how audiovisual installations came to be such a significant part of your work?

First and foremost I am a film-maker – this has been the basis of my professional life and has included freelance editing in corporate and broadcast to my current job which is teaching TV and Film at a University. I made my first installation piece in 1998 as part of a Masters thesis which was driven by a desire to make work that would extend beyond the confined of a TV or cinema screen and allow the audience to experience something a little more somatic than simply sitting and watching. Although I had come from a visual background – the power of sound always seemed quite magical and alchemical so crafting and mixing soundtracks for film and installation has always been an essentially hands-on experience for me.
 

 

Last April, you exhibited a project titled Resoundscapes, can you tell us about this specific project – what is it about, what is the intention, what was presented and what did the listener experience when attending the exhibition?

The installation idea was really to directly communicate the sense of this continually vibrating and resounding environment in image and sound

The work that formed Resoundscapes was a real turning point in my practice – I have just finished work on a documentary A Polish Journey and over the extended production process (production started 2012 and was selected Sheffield Documentary Festival 2016), I found that the soundtrack was increasingly the most important factor. In fact, for this project I started working with Jeremy Avis on some improvisations before principal photography had started. During post-production the opportunity came up to go on a Field Recording Workshop with Chris Watson in Iceland – I was very familiar with Chris’s work having already built a collection of his CDs. I went on the course with a beginners mind (and, as it turned out, some less suitable kit!). I learnt so much from being on the course – and it was great being with a fellow bunch of sound geeks. The landscape had a profound effect on me – I have, over the years made a number of pieces that focus on landscape, but the energy here is just completely different, I had always associated plants and animals with “life” but here the mineral world seemed itself to be alive. The Icelandic people do believe in Huldu or the nature spirits and after spending time in the country it seems less far-fetched! I stayed on for a few weeks recording more sound and trying to capture the kinetic energy of the land on camera. The installation idea was really to directly communicate the sense of this continually vibrating and resounding environment in image and sound.
 

 

Did all the material for Resoundscapes come from your own field recordings? Can you share what are your main field recording approaches?

The project makes use of a number of people and thank you for the opportunity to name check them! The project would have a completely different scope if I was to record all the sounds myself as it would have involved a lot more extensive field work and equipment. Chris Watson and Bethan Kellough gave to access to some of their ambisonic recordings and Ben Minto very generously shared all of his field recordings from the trip – this was in addition to material I had recorded in 2014 and when I returned in 2016. In fact, opportunities to sound record in 2016 were quite limited as I was on a very short schedule and the quiet of South Iceland in summer is a constant stream of voices shouting about how awesomely quiet it is!
 

Do you go out and record with specific goals in mind or do you capture a variety of material which you then create with and build from?

It really depends on the project, I have recently started work on a new documentary project Tracing Transcendental Tone and the initial fieldwork was directed toward recording Tibetan Buddhist monks and nuns chanting, so in this instance there was a list of things to record. However, from experience, it is always useful to have good atmos and background sound while creating the edit so I spent some time recording dusk hubbub in the Himalayan town of Leh as I know it will work somewhere…
 

What kind of equipment do you go out field recording with?

There is a trade off between portability, quality, and cost

I always like to travel as light as possible so there is a trade off between portability and quality ( and cost ) – my preferred “go to” rig is something that I would happily carry around with me all day and possibly not use – I am often also carrying camera equipment. At the moment I am using DPA 4060s and a Sound Devices Pre Amp and a Tascam recorder – “spaced omnis”. I particularly like the sensitivity and detail with this set up as well as the flexibility – I have used these mics hanging from small plants to capture insect sound and also within a Rycote windshield walking through the traffic and mayhem of Old Delhi!
 

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Do you have any opinions on processing and editing your sounds after they are recorded?

I like to keep things as close to how I heard them in the field

I tend to keep sounds as unprocessed as possible and certainly if there is any work to be done I like to keep things as close to how I heard them in the field. The work on Resoundscapes involved working with how the tonal ranges came together. Sometimes work has to be done to remove noise etc. – I don’t have a general opinion on processed sounds and can really enjoy work created in this way but for me the process of sound recording and microphone placement is about finding something that has a kind of magic or “pop” at the recording stage.
 

What is roughly the proportion of sounds captured VS sounds used in your projects? Do you edit and label everything you record in the field to build personal libraries?

I record a lot more that I would use in a project – I feel that each project is a doorway into a particular soundscape and like to explore each acoustic environment as much as possible. Sometimes I will make recordings simply because they sound interesting and could come in useful – a personal library has become essential to my practice. One of the things that I picked up on from working with Chris was making durational recordings – essentially setting up and leaving equipment for an hour or so whereas my approach had been to record what I could hear and then for minutes rather than hours. I would guess that a significant proportion of my library is now made in this way – this is great for capturing the incidental sound of animals and insects that may have remained hidden if the equipment had been attended – it also removes problems of rustling clothes and breaths in extremely still environments. In this way I don’t get to hear the full extent of the recording until it is played back.
 

What are your favourite sources of sounds?

Certainly my favourite source of sound is the natural world insects, birds, water wind etc. – if I know I’m going somewhere with this soundscape I will take my recording equipment whatever the trip is about! Another favourite is the hubbub of the human voice – increasingly hard to find but I really love its hypnotic quality – I have recordings made in the early 90’s in Morocco of market squares and streets without the scream of TV, phones and cars and find these kinds of sounds have a relaxing watery quality to them.
 

How do you develop the immersive aspect of your installations? What are your strategies to make the listeners feel like they are ‘there’?

My work is audio-visual so my approach is twofold – Resoundscapes is a project that will also be developed from its latest install. I work with multiple screens and multiple sound tracks – for example the project The Interactive Forest in 2015 involved building 3 screens into a walk in cube with speakers in each corner. I am interested in creating environments that enables the audience to explore visually such that attention and peripheral vision can take in multiple viewpoints. With the audio it is really about allowing the accuracy of playback and mixing to communicate a sense of audio presence – for the audience to become less aware that what they are experiencing is mediated.
 

How do you incorporate acoustic ecology in your work?

I think it would be impossible to work in this area and not incorporate ideas around acoustic ecology – the currency R. Murray Schafer’s work in this area has is an inevitable response to the cultural wave of a predominantly visual culture that engenders tolerance to unhealthy amounts of noise and corresponding deafness – not necessarily a physical condition but an inability to hear. Recreating environments that incorporate the healing qualities of the natural soundscape and that enable audiences to listen in to non-mechanised sounds certainly fit in this although I wouldn’t say that I do this consciously.
 

It is said that Resoundscapes guides the audience into ‘’experiencing the “musicality” of the sounds and tones of the natural world’’. What do you mean by musicality? How do you listen for it in nature and how do you transmit it to a non musical (or musical) audience?

This is musicality in it’s broadest sense and I would refer back to the kind of music of silence that John Cage expressed in 4’ 33” as well as the developments Musique Concrete made exploring composition using unconventional sound sources. Fully listening to any environment reveals compositional properties whether they were created deliberately or not. There are narrative, rhythmic and tonal properties in all soundscapes and some we find more rewarding than others – this often depends time and place. It is not exclusive to the soundscape of the natural world, but the structures found in nature often resonate more harmoniously with our psyche. Birdsong is probably the most obvious example of this and even is called “song” – whether we hear melody or not. Listening through the “white noise” of a waterfall will reveal layers of tone and rhythm. Translating this “musicality” depends on a couple of processes and I use both depending on the nature of the sound source – on one side the ideal bird recording is one where microphone placement is chosen to balance the range of “voices” such that the varying pitches and rhythms are recorded and effectively “mixed” – other sounds such as the waterfall mentioned before would require a range of discreet recordings from varying perspectives with the “composition” created in post.
 

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Can you tell us more generally about your creative ideas and artistic statements, and how you communicate them through the multisensory experiences you offer, across various project?

My reference point is always the experience

I am drawn to make work that is principally about an experience and see the multisensory tools as ways to create something that is maybe less tangible than the medium of delivery – something that could be said to be beyond the technologies that comprise the installation or presentation. Narrative structure can be a way into creating this, but my reference point is always the experience – and with that it is always something I have directly experienced, as I believe that work benefits from that kind of authenticity.
 

A project such as Resoundscapes can be quite a challenge to bring up to completion – would you have any valuable pieces of advice to share in order to achieve that?

As I’ve mentioned previously the exhibition this year is the first exhibition stage of the project and I see it’s completion evolving over the next couple of years! In terms of developing the work it did come about accidently, in that I was planning a hiatus from exhibition work but found that the material I had initially shot and recorded really presented exceptional something to me. Travelling and filming costs money and I am grateful for the support that I received both from New Milton Arts Center and Arts Council UK as this enabled me to record enough additional material for it to exist in its current state. In terms of advice, I always kept with the key idea that really came from the experience of being there in the landscape and translating that presence into an installation.
 

What else are you working on at the moment and what can we expect to see and hear from you next?

The documentary Tracing Transcendental Tone is at initial stages and is an exploration of the esoteric power of sound – I have recently been interested in Nada Yoga which is the yoga of sound and the project is a reflection of some of the practical areas I have been studying. In this tradition there is a particular emphasis on sound as the fundamental energy of the universe practicing and developing skills of internal meditative listening. I am particularly interested in moving this documentary forward using immersive tools rather than a solely a conventional single screen production.
 

 

 

 

 

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