Babbling Brook Calming Water Sounds to Help Sleep and Relax

for babbling brook on occupied Turtle Island, electronics, and print materials (2022)

Babbling Brook Calming Water Sounds to Help Sleep and Relax investigates the colonizing and racializing work of discourses of pastoral nature. The auditory image of the babbling brook is metonymic of a broader colonial “cardinal image” of pastoral nature solidified in the US in the late eighteenth century, which Leo Marx describes as follows:

Although it probably shows a farmhouse or a neat white village, the scene usually is dominated by natural objects: in the foreground a pasture, a twisting brook with cattle grazing nearby, then a clump of elms on a rise in the middle distance and beyond that, way off on the western horizon, a line of dark hills….a chaste, uncomplicated land of rural virtue.

The redemptive valences of this landscape are subtended by two violent ontological cuts: 1) between redeemed (colonized) pastoral and fallen (Savage) wilderness and 2) between virtuous rural and sinful urban (by the mid-nineteenth century, this latter distinction had taken on strongly racist and anti-immigrant contours; by the mid-twentieth century, it had become decidedly anti-black). That is, this landscape can redeem the white colonizer because racialized and colonized bodies have been fixed as sin-driven. In this way, sin/alterity/exteriority can be foisted onto racialized and colonized bodies, whose violent removal from pastoral nature secures the latter as redemptive. The later appearance of the babbling brook within redemptive (i.e. colonized) wilderness is an update rather than a departure from this racializing and colonizing redemption/sin. Mediatized enactments of these landscapes as “relaxing nature sounds” in forms ranging from fixed media audio, mobile apps, and “smart” devices like Google Home have in turn come to play a key role in libidinal economies of US white colonizer domesticity and property. I am grateful for the writings of Denise Ferreira da Silva, Jodi Byrd (Chickasaw), Tiffany Lethabo King, and Calvin Warren, which have provided productive methodological starting points for this conceptualization.

In the piece, the sounds of a (live or mediatized) brook are entwined in two ways with sonic indexes of the violent mechanisms through which a colonizing society produces redemptive Nature through the reading of particular bodies as sinful. First, these sounds are filtered through the electronically-generated/ghostly “mouths” of perpetrators of racializing and colonizing violence, that is, through vowel formants and pitch contours derived from textual archives of the violent production of colonial Nature. (As it occurs in the piece, the (often unsettling) language is not easily comprehensible as such; when the piece is presented, listeners are given the option of reading printed versions of the original sources.) Second, the sounds are acoustically entangled with audio indexical of spatial grammars deployed in varying ways against Indigenous and racialized people. Indexes are selected specifically for each performance location.

This piece is meant as both a critique of and methodological departure from certain foundational principles of US white settler experimental music. Pastoral nature has functioned as an important heuristic model in this field, for instance in influential threshold statements by John Cage. In the premiere performance of 4:33 in a “Romantically chosen” (Kyle Gann) open air venue in “the woods,” the archetypally pastoral sounds of raindrops and wind in trees were foregrounded, while in “Lecture on Nothing,” a reading of colonial agrarian monocultures in “Kansas” becomes a model for Cage’s conceptualization of structure as empty. The present piece departs from experimental music’s embrace of this construction of nature, as well as its broader investments in (racializing and colonizing) ontological cuts between Nature and Society which have been noted by Benjamin Piekut and others. Instead, the present piece positions colonial constructions of nature as the result of specific learned sociogenic (nature-cultural) pathways, in order to increase their contingency and in turn facilitate their dismantling.

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Credits:

Concept: Colin Tucker

Programming: Ethan Hayden