Iconicities of Immersion After Voices of the Rainforest (original) (raw)

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. Sitting in a printed bilum pocket, the new CD is the physical prologue of