An interesting, if at the beginning slightly confusing talk. I was surprised to hear such a long introductory talk about field recording and its ethical values, the reason for this became clearer later on when he was talking about working with people, this need for an ethical approach when working in the environment was discussed at length. He was a foreigner in Japan making sound recordings of people who have lived under intense pressure, from government and media, for many years. While he was very aware of this he didn’t say whether it affected his output. I also became very curious about why he was working with an anthropologist (I didn’t find out) and how much involvement the group of people he was recording had in the project. We didn’t get to hear any of the sound recordings made he made, another surprising thing. But this didn’t really matter as I listened to snippet via the internet, and found it interesting to listen to. I wasn’t surprised to find that Angus Carlyle had come to sound via a law degree and not an academic art background. In my ignorance I imagined that anthropologists recorded sounds from other cultures, musicians recorded sound as music and sound artists record sound as art, it was nice to learn that there is an immense crossover. This was partially gleaned from the internet but Carlyle’s ease in crossing over boundaries was the pointer that made me look for information.
The question I wanted to ask was how he felt sound was connected with Wittgenstein’s concept of private language and Foucoult’s writing on power. BUT I didn’t, because I wasn’t sure that I could phrase the question properly (and I don’t know what Foucoult wrote about power) I have more reading to do.