This 10-part open access audiobook was written and produced by Jacob Smith, who is Professor in the Department of Radio/Television/Film and Director of the Master of Arts Program in Sound Arts and Industries at Northwestern University (and a lovely guy, to boot).
Through the ten episodes of his podcast, Jake sieves the afterlife of selected episodes of a particular American post-war radio adventure serial called Escape (1947-1954), widely considered "a classic of the golden age of American radio." Instead of hearing the show nostalgically as a "relic" of a lost age of modernist media, his project aims to re-listen to the show critically, "with an ecological ear," as "a sonic archive that comes from a time which has crucial relevance for our present era," when the forces which contributed to the current climate catastrophe were concertedly gathering "through the roar of the great acceleration."
He collaborates with several contemporary sound artists who explore ecological themes in their work to this end, utilising selected pieces, both to assist with his sound design, and to contrast the studio-centric sounds of the original radio plays with field recordings and sound art more situated in place, with the object of the making-specific (and political) of locale, in a "concretisation" (Bakhtin) of the vague, abstract, exoticised and generalised location(s) in the Western imaginary, the non-places in which these adventure-story episodes originally occur.
I contributed work to ESC Episode #1, which focused on a close reading/listening to the Escape episode Three Skeleton Key (first broadcast in 1949, starring Vincent Price as a lighthouse keeper). Jake analyses its infrastructural focus on the collapse of global shipping networks, and also the details it inadvertently reveals of mid-century attitudes to the histories of colonialism. As he states, "whatever else it might be, the show is an archive of sensibilities shaped by Western imperialism, colonial and corporate exploitation, racism, and white male heterosexual fantasy. So listening adventurously to Escape will require a postcolonial, as well as an eco-critical ear."
The colonial uncanny in this episode is sonically enacted partly through the orchestration of creeping horror: in this case, the tale of the meandering drift of a ghost ship which eventually runs aground to disgorge a swarm of hungry rats, a vast non-human multitude that overwhelms the island's human population and the beacon of its lighthouse with a dark numinosity, the sound of which, as Jake reveals "was created in the studio by rubbing wet corks on a sheet of glass" to great (and award-winning) effect.
As Jake points out in the episode, "ships rats are often an example of a worst-case-scenario of an invasive species." To get away from the abstract representation of rats as creeping horror in the human imagination, he uses the (concretised) example of the Cargo vessel SS Makambo, which ran aground off Lord Howe island in 1918, striking a reef off the coast, whereby the ship's population of black rats escaped to shore, "causing an immediate and drastic reduction in bird life on the island. Within three years of the rats' arrival, five species of endemic forest birds had become extinct." An earwitness report of a resident of the island relates that "the forests were joyous with the notes of myriad birds, large and small, and of many kinds... two years later the ravages of the rats had made the call of a bird a rarity, such that the quietness of death reigns where all was melody."
I was left alone all afternoon, and then the afternoon of the next day, with these ghost birds, figures of the imagination, suddenly so material, so present, so utterly "there". I recorded them systematically, and made drawings and notes. The 10 minute sound recording of the Porphyrio albus type specimen, excerpted here, sounds like all the other recordings I made that first afternoon in October: ostensibly the sound of "nothing", although in fact it does capture quite a few things: the hum of the air conditioning, a photocopier, and the curators speaking in the next room in German. That's what the everydayness of the museum environment, where the specimen that used to be a bird has been located for approximately 220 years, sounds like.
These sounds are resolutely themselves. They are doing much the job that John Cage once said he wanted of them: they are not pretending to be another sound. At the risk of stating the obvious, there are no sounds of birds in this recording. In this, they also point to what the recording doesn't have the capacity to do and cannot ever capture. It cannot bring a bird back from the dead. No trace of the once-bird's former life is to be heard there, and none of it translates to an expressive sonic encounter for the listener; nor should it, one might argue.
This species' voice was one also part of an everyday. One that was lost from the resister of the air and its expressions, around 1834. We don't know what it sounds like; it has become inaccessible to us, in this recording, as elsewhere. The only recordings we have of it are bound up in media that can't talk to us: the two museum skins, about 10 paintings and drawings largely executed between 1788-1790, and some written eyewitness accounts. As for the bird's everyday life as an integrated part of an island ecosystem, well, we can't hear anything of that either, not even a trace, among these somewhat desiccated archival and museological sources. Some of them, like the anonymous painting above, seem to depict a bird of placid temperament, much like a New Zealand Pukeko or Takahe, one I expect I would have been glad to know. The bird's world is a listening space which has been erased - stolen, if you will - from the world, to be substituted by another listening space, arguably a more impoverished one, the one of photocopiers and air conditioning hums, the space we as listeners and the once-bird now inhabit together, in the recording.
To listen to the birds' absence within these everyday sounds, to convey that absence through a listening to a familiarity which knows nothing of the bird, to re-catalogue that absence, seems to me to be one ethical response to the various dilemmas I find myself increasingly facing as an artist, around representation, sonic or otherwise. In making these re-collections/recordings, I am searching for a form, one that is somewhat experimental or at least exploratory; something that addresses what recording has been within the histories of Western cultural imperialism, and what it might become in an era of mass extinction. What are my other options to this search? To recreate this bird's sounds as clever foley in a studio? To further extended the exhausted project of sonically exoticising nature by traveling to distant places I don't know, and collecting sound libraries of their intriguing sounds? These approaches would still be complicit in the technological drives which caused this extinction in the first place; they would at best deny, and at worst repeat, the violence I saw when I looked down at this bird.
As I often do in the encounters I have with extinct birds, the specimens normally buried away, hidden deep in cabinets or drawers in museum collections, which comprise the core of these ongoing 're-collection' projects, I discovered that there is a personalised and somewhat intimate nature to the encounter. It is an encounter with a particular being, as much as it is also an encounter with the lost possibilities of the world, which are palpably at your fingertips for a minute; as much as it is also an encounter with the bare, unswerving reality of death, silence and absence. And when I looked into the wide, seemingly startled, glassily false eye of specimen #50.761, it happened again. I did not see an abstraction, some symbol or myth, I saw a once-living being, with its own specific histories. I saw the actual bird; in all its unarguable, horrific, beautiful, sad, yet somehow everyday materiality.
And in this instance, as I often do, I inhabited the objectivity the situation required, its procedural empiricism, the recording, the careful note-taking. It is something like encountering a relic; but science ritualises differently, if equally, to religion. There is something tidily pragmatic about it, seeing a specimen lying quietly in its box, legs tied to each other and their ancient and more modern taxonomical labels, with a short length of white string. This does not elide the fact that it is also an encounter with true horror; an awful muteness, a silence that takes the form of a violent silencing, which seems wide and deafening, but also highly localised and specific.
I also simultaneously inhabited the subjective affect of this recognition of another species: the tears that come from the knowledge that you are holding in your hands a precious, even sacred remnant of a lost thread of the living world, a lost possibility of encounter with a whole set of unique behaviours and experiences which are gone from the possible and will not appear there again, a bird that is the last of its kind, in this case, one of only two known. If this encounter is also one that, as Jake Smith says of his reading of the Escape series, can help us understand our own moment more clearly, that intimacy is part of it; if we also re-read these relics of the colonial past with an ear tuned to the ecological catastrophes of the present, the deaths that are yet to happen. It's one way of understanding the small tragedies and localised ecocides within the grand narrative, the overwhelming gravitas of extinction, a realisation, which, as Jake also points to here, western anglo culture encourages us to press the Esc key on, all too readily.
For me, through these encounters with particular beings, the sitting-quietly with the banal mise-en-scene of their deaths, which is all I can preserve and catalogue in each 10 minute recording I make of them, extinction is increasingly not an abstraction. These recordings of silence often contain small subjective acts of mourning for particular birds lost in the limbo of the afterlives of scientific taxonomy, tears which are never audible in the recordings in question.
Jake writes, of this one's inclusion into his wider schema: "McIntyre goes into museums and makes sound recordings of extinct birds. The eerie silence of these stuffed birds is a powerful way to draw our attention to the irrevocable loss of extinction. McIntyre is the kind of ecologically-minded sound artist whose field recordings I want to put into conversation with Escape's studio based adventures. In another work, McIntyre transcribed written accounts of the call of the extinct huia bird to be played on music boxes. She then played back these ghostly sounds in the bird's original habitat. Recall Bakhtin's example of the abstract spaces of adventure. For a shipwreck, one must have a sea..."
Hats off to Jake Smith for his generosity in contextualising my work in this way. This episode, along with the rest of ESC: Sonic Adventure in the Anthropocene is open access (yay for accessible academic publishing!), and you can stream and download all ten episodes for free at the University of Michigan Press website, which also has an accompanying essay and other documents. You can get them all at this link.
this is what the publishers have to say about the project:
"ESC is a work of experimental audio-based scholarship combining sound studies, radio history, and environmental criticism. This unique project is a fully open access, fully digital suite of audiographic essays, presented as a ten-part podcast series, combining spoken commentary, clips from classic radio dramas, excerpts from films and television shows, news reports, and the work of contemporary sound artists. A brief written essay on the ESC website provides a helpful introduction and context for this project.
ESC takes as its point of departure the CBS Radio adventure series Escape (1947–54). The postwar years saw both a decline in popularity for American radio drama, and the dawn of the Anthropocene era, with human beings emerging as the primary force affecting the earth's systems.
Jacob Smith considers Escape's adventure stories from an ecocritical perspective, analyzing the geographic, sociopolitical, and ecological details of the stories to reveal how they are steeped in social and environmental history.
The work of contemporary sound artists and field recordists underscores the relevance of sound in these narratives and demonstrates audio's potential as a key medium for scholarship. ESC features recordings by some of the most prominent sound artists working in this area, including Daniel Blinkhorn, Peter Cusak, David Dunn, JLIAT, Christina Kubisch, Francisco López, Sally Ann McIntyre, Chris Watson, and Jana Winderen.
ESC makes the urgency of our critical ecological moment audible in a new way. The audio essays articulate what it means to live in an Anthropocene era and posit alternative ways of conceptualizing our historical moment. ESC sharpens our ability to listen and respond to our world with greater ecological awareness.
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