A Closer Listen
forms of minutiae was founded in 2020 by Pablo Diserens and Mathieu Bonnafous. The label has released twelve albums, with four in 2024, including harkening critters, which we suspect will eventually be known as one of the genre’s definitive projects. With field recording and soundscape work from a who’s who of the scene, including Artificial Memory Trace, Izabela Dłużyk, Ludwig Berger and KMRU, the 3-disc, 4-hour compilation amplifies the voices of endangered critters around the globe, with proceeds going to Friends of the Earth, which fights corporate greed and environmental degradation and supports human rights and equity. In short, forms of minutiae not only raises awareness, but raises funds, living its ethos. We chose all of their 2024 releases for review, their solo artists all appearing on harkening critters.
We’ve arranged a mini-interview with Diserens to talk about the imprint and the future of field recording. Congratulations to forms of minutiae for being our Label of the Year!
1. Congratulations on forms of minutiae being named our Label of the Year! You released four albums this year and we reviewed all four. To start, you’ve just repressed harkening critters. How did this massive effort come about?
Thank you so much, I’m touched! harkening critters is a continuation of our previous field recording compilation possible moistures, but this time with a broader ambition. The intention behind it was to put together a communal gathering of field recordists, artists, and listeners to honor the animal voices and signals of our planet. I have always been enamored with non-human realities and concerned with the health and loss of ecosystems, so it felt essential to use our practice and the label’s platform to help stimulate further awareness of the richness and diversity of fellow earthlings, while collecting funds for Friends of the Earth. The ideas of kinship, community, and synchronicity are also extremely important to me, and I believe that sound and the compilation format can enable that. There is a de-centering of the self, of the artist, which brings the attention to the sounds and subjects themselves, while also celebrating the powers of collectivity. “The more the merrier” feels appropriate in the face of climate urgency. All critters (us included) are in this together, and as listeners and artists my hope is that we can share knowledge, counter apathy, inspire earthly connection, and spark action. harkening critters is an act of transmission that bridges forms of expression, supports the environment, archives animal voices (which are at risk, sadly), and, more importantly perhaps, it’s an act of love.
2. Do you have a favorite critter sound (even if it is not included on the album) and a favorite overall sound?
Tricky question! It’s always difficult for me to create a hierarchy, but the spellbinding chorus of fire-bellied toads (Bombina bombina) is definitely up there. Witnessing this great amphibian conjunction has become a yearly ritual. Every spring, I go to the same pond to listen and record their calls for hours. Their collective humming holds such incredible tonal and magnetizing qualities. It is so enticing and intoxicating that I tend to rapidly dissolve and forgo any semblance of self. What fills me instead is a feeling of planetary belonging. Bombinas are like anuran mermaids luring us into the permeable, until we gently morph into creatures of the ponds. Frogs at large, and their capacities for permeance, have been an immense source of inspiration for me. Listening to their songs has changed my life.
Beyond the critter realm, I’m fascinated by the sounds of ice, especially of glaciers’ thaw and the release of oxygen trapped within them. This air, archived for decades, centuries, or even millennia, effectively time travels unspoiled. The myriad of bubbles making their way back to the present, in whimsical, multi-pitched oscillations and gurgling voices, somewhat equates to listening to earthly memories. For me, these minute visceral sounds can broaden the way we relate to glaciers by positioning listeners within extreme proximity to the ice, enabling a feeling of intimacy and an understanding of a glacier as a body.
(You can listen to one of my recordings of this sound in the Sound of the Year Awards)
3. What is the first time you can recall being interested in sound? When did you discover field recording, and when did you decide that you wanted to be an artist and to run a label?
I started playing music and stitching samples together in my childhood, but my interest in sound really bloomed during my studies in cinema and filmmaking. I came to realize that most of my favorite films minimized music and blabbering dialogues. Instead these films gave more importance to sound, to the point of it becoming an impacting presence and a key component of the narration. These were the first recorded soundscapes I came to appreciate, so much so that sounds became characters capable of transmitting meaning and life — a sort of essence much more vital than most human-spoken exchanges. Examples that come to mind today are films by Chantal Akerman, Yannick Dauby, Joshua Bonnetta, Abbas Kiarostami, Jacquelyn Mills, Yasujirō Ozu, Jonathan Glazer, and Jacques Tati.
I discovered field recording in 2016 while studying electronic and electroacoustic music composition and instantly became enchanted by it. At that time, the angst of our climate crisis was already weighing on me and I was trying to figure out how to help the non-human world. Thus field recording, listening practices, acoustic ecology, and working at the intersection of art and science appeared evident. I was never going to be a scientist, but I wanted to assist, as well as exist, in close relationship with biomes. So, I decided to put sound and creativity in service of the planet with the aim of sparking interspecies kinship. In time, listening completely changed my relationship to the world and its earthlings, which makes me believe that if this existential shift happened to me, then it’s something that can be shared and happen to others. Today, I’m hoping that my practice and the way I engage with environments can create ripples that inspire tenderness for the Earth. That is the essence of forms of minutiae and my work as an artist, a label curator, and a person.
How did you come up with the name for the label?
The idea behind the name, forms of minutiae, is to clearly reflect the main objective of the label, which is to catalog and give a platform to the small, discreet, invisible lives and phenomena of the world. For Mathieu and I, the name had to evoke that in a quasi-documentary fashion while being intriguing and poetic. Furthermore, when we realized that its acronym is f — o — m, which sounds and looks great, while drawing a parallel with foam (a form of the minute itself), we were immediately convinced.
4. What is the soundscape (organic and inorganic) of the area in which you live?
A family of crows fly around the block cawing into the air, a few pigeons coo, subtle sub frequencies from an underground subway gently tickle my room, car engines multiply into waves of gasoline noise, my 20-year old toothless cat meows in loud broken gurgles, fleeting conversations are interrupted by dog barks, cutlery is being played like xylophones on the terraces of cafés and restaurants, an ambulance tears through the world with a siren that flirts with thresholds of pain, a man on a bicycle blows on a whistle and plays an acapella version of “Olé Olé Olé We Are The Champions” in a loop from an old crunchy speaker while wearing a billboard-suit asking for the right to vote as a foreigner. I close my window, the filtered street sounds bleed timidly in my room. I think to myself: I yearn for a different soundscape as a home, it is time to leave the city. Fortunately, one of my major prospects for next year is to move to the countryside close to the Mediterranean Sea.
5. Alëna Korolëva’s premonitions is a warning call, while the biomimickry of Diane Barbé’s musiques tourbes raises the question of sounds that may one day become extinct. What is the role of field recording and soundscape artistry in a world of threatened ecosystems?
I believe that these practices can stimulate a better understanding of the Earth and the way we impact it, as well as greater empathy towards the species and ecologies that exist within it. Field recording has many applications, from scientific studies and educational purposes, to archival intentions and artistic gestures. And many of these share the same message: “listen, there is so much around you”. But what art, music, and education can do, which science alone can not, is trigger people’s imagination and emotions. For example, reading data about a vanishing glacier won’t affect a person the same way the sound of its melting would. Sounds are so intrinsically visceral — they are shortcuts to our minds and bodies, and activate our memory, transport us and create strong, lasting connections. And I’m talking from experience, listening to the world has had a fundamental impact on me and has widened the way I experience life and treat other species. Field recording can bridge science, environmental activism, and art in forms that invite people to connect to the experiential, the non-human, and the information that is being shared, regardless of one’s understanding of the science or sonic methodologies. It can draw us closer to our surrounding ecologies by fostering feelings of interconnectedness, awe, curiosity, fragility, and discovery, and speak directly to our human and planetary condition. Just like Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring inspired incredible change in American environmental policies, and the way people think of the environment, I think that field recording and listening practices have the potential to move people in similar ways. Of course, I am talking about a massive event here, but I believe in ripples, which means that even if a sound moves just one person enough to relate to the world differently and change their way of inhabiting it, it is a win. It has a positive impact, a rewiring of sensitivities, which can percolate into that person’s community and surroundings, and ultimately help their neighboring ecosystems. It’s all about transmission.
6. On a related note, how did you enjoy the digital residency of upstream ensemble (inspired by Rachel Carson) and do you envision another such project in the new year?
The communal nature of upstream ensemble, in collaboration with TBA21–Academy’s ocean comm/uni/ty, was really exciting to me. It enabled a plurality of voices, realities and experiences to come together to acoustically map out the ways water and its ecologies materialize on the planet and how we affect them — similarly to how Rachel Carson’s book The Edge of the Sea maps out the shores of the Eastern Seaboard. There was something special about receiving recorded sounds from people, animals, and places I had never met, and knowing that a good amount of these were the first recording or listening experiences for some of the people involved. It feels important to create spaces in which we can exchange knowledge, ideas, and experiences in a non-hierarchical way. Field recording and listening practices should be available to everybody. And yes, I would absolutely love to do another project like this one, but there are no concrete plans for now. Soon hopefully!
7. Following your two-month residency in Galicia, if time and finances were not obstacles, what would be your ideal place to visit and record?
My first answer was going to be the Alps to listen to their rock ptarmigan population (which I hope to do), but I have another place in mind. I would like to stay for a few weeks by the coasts of the Pacific Northwest to listen and record one sound in particular… Recently, I became acquainted with the astonishing nest hums of plainfin midshipman fish, also aptly known as humming toadfish (to be fair, I’m fascinated by everything toad/frog-like). During their mating season, males nest close to the shores and produce beautiful grunts and growls. But most importantly, they generate an incredibly loud and low droning hum — vibrations so loud they can disrupt conversations and sleep on land. For years humans were puzzled by these sounds emanating from the sea. Personally, I don’t think I have ever heard such a continuous tone coming from an animal. And as someone inspired by drone music, this is the closest animal relative to Éliane Radigue’s work. It’s an impressive sound! It would be a gift to witness it with my own ears and hydrophones, and shed a light on this particular species and their acoustic behavior.
8. What’s coming next for forms of minutiae?
In 2025, the label will focus on sounds of ice with a series of albums by field recordists Marc Namblard, Ludwig Berger, and Yoichi Kamimura, followed by a Borneo album by Gina Lo. There are other projects in the pipeline, and I definitely want to work on more animal and geology compilations in the coming years.
Wed Dec 11 00:01:41 GMT 2024