Joseph Young
Sonic Hauntings in a Big House
IRELAND FARPOINT RECORDINGS FP096 LP (2024)
Joseph Young is as much an academic research scholar as he is a sound artist, if his impressive CV of exhibitions and performances is anything to go by. It seems he’s very inspired by a sense of place, but wants to go further than those site-specific European sound artists who might settle for making a tape recording of the ambience in a shopping mall or the atmosphere inside a concrete blockhouse. Young has ideas about history, memory, and how they manifest in the landscape and the built environment. Plus he claims inspiration from the process of “deep listening”, the Pauline Oliveros mode of philosophy, which allowed her and her acolytes to produce improvisations founded on mutual respect – besides attuning their spirits and their minds to the rhythms of nature.
Young’s project here has, inevitably, led him to a “hauntology” thing, and his binaural microphones and field recording techniques are being used in service of this “big house” theme. These 17th and 18th century mansions are a significant part of Ireland’s history, representing a very visible indicator of the wealth of the landed gentry and aristocrats, and both the houses and their owners came under attack during the revolution of the early 19th century. This social-political dimension might not be Young’s primary concern though, as the album is more about sounds found inside the house, and its ornamental gardens, punctuated with the voices of historians and archivists reading out factoids of information, and ambient sounds which – in title at least – hint at eerie or supernatural goings-on.
Credit to Young for putting time into his research; four years digging into the history of one specific house, reading the archives (probably mostly to do with farming and rental income, if I know my archival history), and putting together what he calls the “soundtrail” of the gardens, a location that happened to include a water clock, whose mechanisms you can hear whirring into life at the very end of side two. Young makes no distinction between audio and text; the readings from the archive are as important to him as whatever ghosts or memories he can wring from the walls of the house, and in like manner he doesn’t draw lines between factual history and his own imagination. His fantasy versions of the original owners of the house are just as vivid as if he’d created a hologram image from a composite of actual ancestral portraits. There’s also some implied subtexts about “power and privilege”, which to my thinking might have benefitted from a little more contextual explanation; “The Potato” track doesn’t quite capture the full story of the Irish potato famine (if that’s indeed the intention), which in any case was a 19th-century event and hence a little late for his chosen theme, and simply emphasising the word “potato” through use of digital echo is not a particularly nuanced way of expressing it. He uses that echo trick elsewhere on the spoken texts, and to me it feels like a cheat; like an essay where the key words are underlined or put in bold just in case the reader misses the point.
Even so, the textual and audio richness is fully supported by photos on the cover and inner, plus the text piece written by Salome Voegelin inserted as a pamphlet (inevitably, it has at least one Mark Fisher reference); and it’s quite possible that what I today regard as rather scanty information encoded in the recordings will, in future listens, come to be revealed as a genius for ellipsis and concision. Plus, full marks for bringing archival material into a sound-art recording in a truly serious and scholarly manner. The chief disappointing aspect for me is the rather tame and unadventurous ambient drones that intersperse the other materials. Admittedly, they do help set the mood. From 29 Nov 2024.