RMS : DOWN TO THE FACTS
Oscar Abril Ascaso

RMS is the name of my work in what we could call the field of soundscape. I should like to say, however, that in the course of these years I have always preferred to use the definition "sound document". This is a semantic discrimination between soundscape and document which, along with all the other motivations behind my work, I will try to explain in this article. But first I would like to situate RMS in the context of my other sound projects, a context or mesh which I call oaa soundworks.

oaa Soundworks

In the early nineties, I started to become interested in the nature of our experience in the face of the sound phenomena which coexist with us in contemporary urban society. My knowledge on the matter was - and still is - rather scanty, and my historical background practically non-existent. Yet I feel that this helped me to make headway in this field, free of complexes, perhaps even with a happy ingenuity. So, with no particular public profile, almost anonymously, for the last decade my work has gradually followed a three-fold course of simultaneous action, christened MRP, LTM and RMS. They are three different ways of approaching sound phenomena, but they all share a practical, participatory policy of instrumentalisation taken from the historical legacy of twentieth-century sound art.

MRP (Metareference Projects) is, chronologically, the latest of the three strategies. Created in 1998, MRP is a laboratory for research into the metareferencial possibilities which may occur in certain sound phenomena. My current interest in science museums plays a fundamental role in MRP. To explain the gestation of the MRP LAB I suppose I should mention my visit to the Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie in Paris in the summer of 1998, and specifically to its sound department. I was fascinated by its transparent, playful didacticism. And this is precisely the aim of the MRP LAB: to demonstrate the elementary properties of certain sound phenomena by means of experiments. Like a child's boxed chemistry set, the experiments of the MRP LAB are extremely and intentionally simple. To give one example, MRP nº 2 (metareferencial performance):

"MRP Nº 2 analysed the metareferencial potential of oral discourse, that is, its metadiscursiveness. The performance consisted simply of explaining that the performance was the actual act of explaining itself. This meant that in Metareferencial Performance, explaining the mechanism of the action was one and the same thing as doing it. to this end, the members of the audience explained the content of the action to each other in whispers, like a secret message. The performance ended when all the members of the audience had passed on the communication and the last participant had publicly reported its contents to the rest. The final message was then compared with the original which had begun the transmission process." Since 1995, LTM (Low-Tech Music) has been my catalogue of action music. I have used it to try to resituate the possibilities of action music, in the terms used by the Fluxus artists in the sixties, as a channel of access to the sound phenomena present in our day-to-day experience. LTM is an exercise in reproducing some of these phenomena (the sound of a hairdryer, a slot machine or a bunch of keys falling to the ground) outside the context of their habitual matrix of meaning (the context from which they takes their psycho-sociological meaning) and brought up to date in the framework of a spectacle (before an audience). An example: Low-Tech Music nº 16 (piece for fax):

"The piece consists of sending a fax to a number of previously selected institutions, cultural associations and homes. In normal conditions of use, the acoustic signal of the fax corresponds to reception of a message. On this occasion, the received message corresponds to the desire to make the acoustic signal sound at the chosen addresses. In this way, the message received becomes the programme of the concert which has just been performed, of that familiar tune which characterises the acoustic signal of a fax. I am interested in undermining the semiotic function of the sounds which form the audible map of our everyday lives, stripping them of their conventional utility. I am also interested in using the fax as a sound instrument. Anyway, why deny it, I like the idea of making a sound in a private space without having to be there physically."

Thanks to this simple displacement, the sound phenomenon loses the sign of its meaning to become a mere sound object. In its spectacular recontextualisation, LTM deploys that same suspension of meaning as Schaeffer's concrete sound with its Husserlian origin. However, beyond its manifestation as a performance, the ultimate purpose of LTM is to become a catalogue of sound possibilities at the disposal of its user. In other words, whereas the model for MRP is the science museum, LTM's reference is an operation manual of a technological consumer article. This makes the LTM Manual a catalogue of sound possibilities, with its extreme simplicity, which can be used by anyone. Finally, RMS (Ready-Made Sounds) was the first of my lines of work. I started it in the early nineties, and it took me beyond musical composition and interpretation to an interest in ready-made sound phenomena. Particularly in those within my immediate urban experience. So, with no clear aim in mind, I started to compile the recordings I made. Yet I am convinced that I was moved by the interest of a documenter rather than a collector. So if RMS followed a pattern, it was photography. But documental photography, never pictorial.

Down to the fact

When explaining how RMS came about, there's an anecdote I like to tell. Anecdotes are often more illustrative than the procedure itself, maliciously revealing the play of events as they interpose themselves abruptly in the planned course of things. On one occasion, I recorded the sound of a metro journey between two stops, Catalunya and Fontana, in Barcelona. One I often take. Having made the recording, I went home to listen to the results. But then, while I was listening to it, a funny thing happened. When, as I was listening, I heard the recorded message announcing that the next stop was the one where I usually get off, I automatically got up from the chair where I was sitting at home in my room. Prompted by the acoustic signal, I reacted as though I was in the underground carriage. This absurd act led to a greater interest in how certain sound phenomena not only decorate but actually form part of our everyday experience. Shortly before, I had started to make recordings of my own life experience (the sounds of a family conversation, of the washing machine at home, etc.). During the first years of the decade, my recordings always had an autobiographical connotation, like the photographs in a family album. An emotional link which I explained more fully in an article I wrote about my soundscapes, entitled "El Eco Demoníaco" (L'Or i la Ciutat, issue 2, Mataró, 1993).

After the metro incident, however, I started to change the direction of my recordings. From that moment on, they became more impersonal, based on an auditory experience common to my fellow citizens. So I started to create sound documents of my urban environment (the sound of an amusement arcade, of department stores, a bar, etc.). I also avoided interfering with the contents of the sound documents (apart from the inevitable responsibility of choosing a specific space-time to record) to capture what we could call ready-made sounds. In time, I began to think of defining these works as Ready-Made Sounds, which is the English translation of the title of an article about sound art I had recently published ("Los sonidos encontrados", Alter Músiques Natives catalogue, Barcelona, 1995). An artist friend of mine, Lluis Alabern, advised me against using a term so obviously inspired by Duchamp, as being too impersonal.

That very reason convinced me that I should go ahead. So when, in 1997, I started to produce a weekly radio programme on the independent channel Radio Pica devoted exclusively to publicising my sound documents, I called it Ready-Made Sounds. The aim of the programme was simple: to enable any listener to hear the sound of a beach or a train station without moving from their room. I was also motivated by the desire to produce an interaction between the social orbit of the public (the contents of the sound documents) and the private (the context in which they were heard), which I found appealing. Every week, the programme presented two sound documents, each lasting thirty minutes. The radio was the perfect medium for my purposes but unfortunately the show did not continue on air for very long. However, my next step was clear.

The very same year, I started working on the RMS Room (Ready-Made Sounds Room), a project to prepare spaces for listening to sound documents. Chill-out spaces in electronic music clubs, set aside for auditory relaxation, were an obvious influence. In fact, I had read in an article that in the USA, some electronic music clubs programmed soundscapes in their listening sessions. So I decided to embark on an ongoing project of installing RMS Rooms wherever I could. Since then, the programmes of each RMS Room have always been sound documents recorded in the same geographical context as the space itself. The visitor is therefore invited to stop hearing and start listening to sounds from his or her own everyday life

Experience versus experimentation

The desire to exhibit sound documents from the everyday auditory experience of the listener is undoubtedly a major motivation in my work. What most interests me is what happens in the spectator's surroundings, where one's strategy is inserted. The basis of my concern is this ambience rather than the work itself, which is therefore prevented from becoming an obsession. An RMS is simply a sound document recorded in a pre-established context (a street, a market, a department store, etc.), with a similar duration (twenty to thirty minutes) and with no subsequent manipulation whatsoever. The only filter which the RMS should come up against is the actual technological system used to create it (a domestic tape recorder in the early days, a DAT in more recent years). In other words, the RMS is no contribution to the History of Soundscape. It is not a turning point which will allow me to open a new chapter in the dialectic of contemporary sound art. Because just as I am not interested in formal experimentation with specific sound material, I am not concerned with metadiscursive experimentation with this dialectic. On the contrary, like LTM with action music, RMS addresses what we could call a given historical element, an acquired strategy (the fact that I use such obviously Duchampian terminology to define this work should speak volumes of its intentions). Because, let's face it (if anyone out there has not yet got the idea), my creative skills are of no interest whatsoever. I am not a composer. I am not interested in creative experimentation, nor do I feel the need to re-interpret what I find. What I am interested in are the experiential possibilities which my work can create. This is why the various sound documents I may record are not important in themselves as much as for their effects. For this reason, the compositional complexity of the RMS is derisory, reduced to the simple act of choosing a certain sequence for recording (generally without too much hesitation).

I have to apologise to critics and record labels, but I am afraid my loyalties do not lie with them. It is experience rather than experimentation that I am interested in. The receptor rather than the author. And something tells me that, bearing in mind what goes on in this listener ambience, the degrees of experimentation of a work and the experience it generates are often inversely proportionate. The RMS is an instrument which intensifies our everyday auditory experience, emphasising an ontological periphery. However, it is only correct to point out that what we find there is not a Husserlian suspension of concrete sounds, but the inverse strategy. This strategy of a phenomenological suspension of sound, defended by Schaeffer with his postulates of concrete music, is what exercises LTM. So RMS and LTM are opposing strategies. The RMS strategy involves the survival of these sounds in a relational context which is apprehensible by the listener. RMS is, then, anti-Husserlianism and therefore anti-Schaefferian in its act of presenting an RMS of a café in which the sounds of cups, the cash register and canned music can be recognised, for instance. For this very reason, the RMS is ordinary. Not exotic. It does not present soundscapes which are beyond the routine experience of the potential listener; it presents him with his everydayness and urges him to a heightened awareness of the presence of the sound phenomena which go to make it up. In other words, when played, an RMS transcends its quality of repository of memory (as a document of sounds, linked to a transient historical period, fixed on a technological support) and addresses its present auditory experience and projection as an incentive to transform our perceptive capacity in the future.

To my mind, what we could call the factor of minimum historical and geographical distance between the place the sound document is recorded and the place it is played publicly is decisive. To rule out any possibility of experience, we should have recourse to what we could call a zero distance (geographical) factor - that is, a strategy of playing the sound document in the same context that it was recorded (for instance, using a department store as the venue for the reproduction of a sound document recorded in that same store the day before). This is the policy of the Non-Distance Ready-Made Sounds of the MRP LAB, in which I experiment with cancelling out all sonic experience. The slightest deviation between the place of recording and the place of exhibition in the RMS Room, this small displacement, this shift, opens up a crevice which becomes a fertile space for experience.

Idiocy produces experience

Here we have to ask ourselves what mechanism would enable the hypothetical listener to become involved in hearing a recording which has no apparent interest (as I have already explained, entire sequences of sound contexts which he or she hears every day, with no mystery or additives). My answer to this question is idiocy. If this is an idiotic project it is because it calls for an idiotic attitude on the part of the listener. The idiotic attitude of the newborn baby, fascinated by the phenomena around him, a passion for the concrete. In Deleuze's reflection, collected by Jean-Clet Martin, idiocy is giving oneself up to what is concrete, the capacity to pay attention to what is obvious. And if the concrete arouses the idiot in us it is because its multiplicity overwhelms us at every instant. The concrete is a multiplicity of concretions. It is compact and thick, a condensation which, to go back to the Latin root, concretio, undergoes a concentration. Idiocy, the impossibility of understanding the reason for certain concretions, is, then, a passion for the concrete without which there would be no concept.

The concept needs idiocy for its realisation, it needs to come up against the difficulties which face an idiot who is fascinated by the singularity of a thing or an event. Having difficulties, or rather being in difficulties, is the position of the philosopher when he is up to his neck in the details of the concrete. The concrete is the condition of possibility of philosophy and therefore of the concepts it is induced to create. So, while the concept needs idiocy to exist, experience also, as I see it, needs idiocy to come about. The idiot's act of giving himself up to the concrete represents the limits of experience as proposed by the RMS. The idiocy to pay attention to this maze of sonic singularities swarming around, like plant life, in a space-time context.

The exhibition of the RMS addresses the idea of the acoustic event as a concentration of sonic singularities, not as a spectre of a composition (produced by the design of a deified musician or a musical God). Such experience, born of an idiotic, erratic listening, can therefore never be sublime or transcendental. It can never be a Romantic experience in the face of overwhelming nature. Idiocy produces experience. But rather than making a metaphor of the event's being, the experience produced by this idiotic attitude returns it to its empirical framework. This is how a RMS works: we recognise the context of the recording but the sonic singularities it contains are unknown to us until we hear and identify them, one by one, as they appear.

Against the object

Of course, the kind of recognition that takes place when we listen to an RMS is not the same as occurs with things that appear empirically in our phenomenological context. In the kingdom of visibility, participles reign. Things exist. In the field of sound, conversely, gerunds happen. The sound that is "sounding". The RMS Room therefore has no place for the criterion of visibility. The RMS Room, which proposes to modify our perceptive horizon, calls for total darkness, for the impossibility of visualising anything. In a way, it brings the listener closer to the city of his sightless fellow citizens, to the existence of a world which seems to cease to exist when we can see. As we know, the impossibility of seeing translates, in the world of the sightless, as touching as a synonym of seeing. Yet listening is, somehow, a tactile experience, the experience of vibrations which caress the eardrum. And it takes movement to make a caress what it is, it takes the conjugation of a gerund.

When we begin to pay heed to this tactile experience offered to us by the world's sounds, we begin to see reality through different eyes. The final question which concerns us here is, ultimately, what is the point of it all? Does it broaden our horizons, aspire to an anthropological mutation, do away with the hierarchy of lower or higher acoustic moments, is it a post-Marxist triumph over the bourgeois banalisation of the everyday? But let us not get lost in the superstructure. Let's look at the facts. Like all oaa soundworks, RMS feeds on a desire to lay waste to accepted ideas of the development of contemporary music, to popularise them. In other words, to uproot creative breaches of the metadiscursive confusion in which some would preserve them, to instrumentalise them collectively. This requires such approaches to be brought into operation, they must cease to be the established heritage of an erudite élite. Curiously, there are indications that seem to suggest changes in an expanding public's capacity to accept this kind of sound proposal.

From my point of view, the popularisation of electronic music in recent years has helped to foster a feeling of familiarity with the systematic appropriation and use of sound materials from various sources, in which the sampler revolution has played an important part. The echoes of Russolo's art of noise and Schaeffer's concrete music can now be heard among the masses. It seems to me that the groundwork has been done, creating favourable conditions for the approach of that ontological periphery which are the sounds of the world. But if we want to go out and meet it, we first have to question the primacy of our visual perceptions as a channel of access to what is empirically given. This is the context in which we have to envisage the RMS as a project. A project which is intended to join forces with various existing policies against an object, which seems to have become so commercialised as to have exhausted the possibilities of generating any experience at all.

Papers