Don’t Listen to This is an attempt to suspend, as much as possible, ideas of genre, category, purpose and art historical context, to achieve a hearing that is the material heard, now, contingently and individually. This suspension does not mean a disregard for the artistic context or intention, nor is it frivolous and lazy. Rather it means appreciating the context and intention through the practice of listening rather than as a description and limitation of hearing.

 

The eyes work as an ordering tool: segregating according to differences and aligning references to build up meaning within the field of vision. Images are dialectical, expressing themselves against each other. They are a chain of differences however mobile. The ear, when it operates not in the service of such a visual organization, does not order things but produces its own ephemeral order. Sound can give an indication of left or right, high or low, etc. but this is not the orientation of objects and of places but of itself. Sonic listening is not dialectical, it works not on differences and similarities but hears cumulatively. It stacks things against each other indiscriminately, hearing whatever is at hand; it can do so because it operates in the dark, unseen.

 

I try to explore listening not as a physiological fact but as an act of engaging with the world. It is in the engagement with the world and myself within it are constituted, and it is the sensorial mode of that engagement that determines my constitution and that of the world. A visual epoche is a stripping back to the core of visuality, a sonic epoche in Schaffer’s terms, is a stripping away from the sonic anything that ties it down to visuality. However this is not reducing, but a freeing it and opening it up to a multitude of audible possibilities. Phenomenological listening as an intersubjective sensory-motor engagement is a reduction in order to get to the essence of the perceived, to critically experience and expand that essence; not to reduce the heard but to get the wealth of the heard through a bracketed listening. Listening as an effort of epoche, in the sense of focusing rather than reducing, without desire to bring its experience back into the context of language as a structural means of ordering, expands and generates the object as a sonic phenomenon; speechless but eternally resounding.