Defamiliarizing one’s surroundings is one of many tasks well suited to the field recordist: paying acute attention to an environment and revealing the inherent otherness of its sonic character. This approach helps to contextualize the French composer, Jean-Baptiste Geoffroy, who is driven by a desire to render his most intimate milieu – the Loire valley, where he lives and works – into an experience of something altogether “exotic” (his words, not mine). Leaving aside the library-sized secondary literature on the problematics of the term “exotic”, Geoffroy constructs two long tracks out of field recordings with little or no extra sonic material or processing. 

In fact, the composer is adamant about the intentional absence of any form of synthesis whatsoever, which gives Local Exoticism a different technical weight than other releases in the field recording genre. This formal decision (to avoid acts of synthesis) is significant on a few registers At least one of those concerns the quality of directness, or unmediated transfer, of the recorded sounds to the final listening experience. In other words, the birds and water and wind we hear is not one element among many, destined for absorption into a system of equivalent sounds. Instead, the found material is itself the instrument, as it were, refusing to be turned into a collection of mere samples for future rearrangement.   

I cannot say whether Geoffroy’s wish for exoticism is fulfilled throughout, but the time in which one listens to Local Exoticism is striking for the way in which it manages to belong very much to the environment from which it emerges – a seamless continuum from source to signal. Additionally, the field is not only the one we imagine uniting the disparate chirps and displacements of air as they were captured by Geoffroy’s microphone. The field here also names something like a phenomenolgy of listening, one in which microphone and ear are turned into structural analogues of one another. Maybe this, too, is part of the exotic at play, putting our usual habits of hearing into entirely new contexts, whether that is grounded in the acoustic space of a river valley in France, or in the tiny circuitry of a listening device.

Local Exoticism should likely appeal to anyone with a predilection for field recordings, especially those works that invite their audiences into a quiet space of attentive listening. Luc Ferrari’s Presque rien is not too far downstream. To find out more