Listening After Nature

A comprehensive and thought-provoking book, it brings together popular, new and possibly radical ideas for readers to consider. Wright is another brilliant example of a practising artist whose passionate interest and work thoroughly informs a clever, heartfelt book. --The Wire Although it is debatable exactly how restorative sound recordings can be in the context of a dying world, Listening After Nature does suggest that a more responsible approach is overdue if we wish to retain a field of any description. The book is a fine attempt at reassembling the existing cultural frameworks embedded in the niche but loaded genre of field recording. --The Quietus A critical reflection, a critical introspection on the practice of field recording, summarized in this one sentence that turns up throughout the whole book: What are we not hearing? --Journal of Sonic Studies I have been waiting for this book. Listening After Nature is a much-needed corrective to the practice and theory of field recording. Mark Peter Wright offers a critical reflexive account that troubles many of the field's assumptions, such as the sonic absence of the recorder, the search for sounds of nature without human presence and the transparency of the microphone. Emphasizing the impossibility of sustaining such an approach in a time after nature, the book holds open the question of what is a field recording, asking what is not heard as much as what is and providing playful and serious possibilities for listening-with practices adequate to a time of climate change and mass extinction. --Marina Peterson, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Texas at Austin, USA, and author of Atmospheric Noise: The Indefinite Urbanism of Los Angeles (2021) Through the low frequencies of history, geography and experimental sonic practices, Listening After Nature lures us to critical audition. In the sonic contact zones of shrimps and stars, foley and documentary, signal and voice, this book shows us how listening is a position of power, and equally, of immense responsibility. It is crucial reading for students and scholars of sound arts, environmental humanities and media philosophy. --Sasha Engelmann, Lecturer in GeoHumanities, Royal Holloway University of London, UK Imagine a dinner party with a majority of so-called field recordists. All of them talking about signal-to-noise ratios, recording techniques, latest microphones or the great time they spent going on expeditions to Asia, Africa, South America or somewhere else where ice caps are melting. To record, mind you, not to fill their cocktails, although the idea of extraction might apply to both. Mark Peter Wright's scholarship is a sort of a much-needed killjoy in what has been a celebratory run for a practice born out of unduly historical and disciplinary privilege(s) that naturalized unproductive oppositions between man, nature, science and ideology. The author reminds us of the ethical responsibilities when/in/while recording the field as the dawn chorus does not always start in the west, distant or as an other. --Rui Chaves, Universidade Federal da Paraiba, Brazil, and co-editor of Making it Heard: A History of Brazilian Sound Art (2019)