EP. 4 w/ Suvani Suri

'I think of the sonic environment that we inhabit as something that carries traces of everything that it might have witnessed.' – Suvani Suri

This is Absorbed Terrain, a series of conversations with researchers and musicians working within the venn-diagram of sound and environment. My name is Mara, and I’m a composer and curator based on Gadigal Land in Sydney, Australia.

Connecting via video call between Sweden and India, Suvani Suri joined me for a conversation to traverse a multitude of questions and research points that have been unravelling throughout her practice.

Suvani is an artist and researcher based in New Delhi working with sound, text, and intermedia assemblages. Her research interests lie in the relational and speculative capacities of listening, voice, aural/oral histories, and the spectral dispositions of sound that can activate critical imaginations.

Throughout this conversation we centre on Suvani’s work with the Linguistic Survey of India, an ambitious colonial project beginning in 1914 with the intent to capture the diversity of languages and dialects in the subcontinent. We take tangents further into Suvani’s practice to discuss polyphony as an impulse for curating, mobilising fictions and imaginations through sound, and the mouth as a site of investigation.

Suvani Suri – The Stellar Rays of the Stars
Score for '​​To see the sun at midnight/ loving against time', a film by Arshad Hakim (2022)

Though unable to physically walk side by side, Suvani has provided a field recording that takes us through her neighbourhood in Delhi, grounding us in place for this conversation.

[Field Recording] Suvani Suri – Ambience evening, moving from in to out and back in

MARA SCHWERDTFEGER Thank you for joining all the way from Delhi, and I'm here in Sweden. And I think we should just ground ourselves a little bit first – I'm curious about how your immediate surroundings are affecting you or influencing you, sonically or otherwise. Maybe it's the place that you grew up, or maybe it's a new place that you're now exploring.

SUVANI SURI Yeah, thanks for inviting me. And I feel like the question of how surroundings sort of affect us in terms of like our sonic world, it’s a question that’s still very much like unfolding for me. And I mean, for instance, I am in Delhi, I grew up in Delhi, and Delhi is a very complex place with many histories, many lives, many pasts, many identities, many movements and migrations. So, in a way, it's not a city that anyone belongs to but it's a city that people are always passing through, and you know, it's a migrant city. So in that sense, it's a kind of a mix and this mix is kind of what I've grown up in. And it's almost as if the polyphony of this mix is something that I think I took as a given, you know, having grown up in it.

So all these different kinds of sonic worlds that are unfolding around you all the time. And I think growing up in Delhi, it's taught me to kind of listen to the layers that are existing around you all the time and how each sonic environment is actually many, many, many, many layers, you know. And as a part of listening, you’re not just listening to something, you're also listening nearby and in between, and you're also listening to what is not being heard. And I don't know, like Delhi in that sense is a strange place also because it is such a dynamic city in terms of how the vibe of the city shifts from one neighbourhood to another. But at the same time, I think like this relationship with Delhi, I'm only being able to articulate it now after having travelled to more cities. Because otherwise what happens is that you take it as a given, right? Suddenly the difference and the contrast and the singularity of a place starts to become a little more visible to you.

MS Definitely, and then you are able to take your way of listening into those new environments and also those new environments back into your home environment as well.

SS Absolutely, absolutely. I think it’s a relationship that’s constantly shifting. It's not fixed, you know.

MS Yeah. So thinking of that polyphony and that environment, are there certain examples of other beings or technologies that have influenced how you listen?

SS Well, I think I wouldn't know how to kind of classify different technologies, because I think a large part of how we listen is technologised listening, is mediatised listening. You know, like we've kind of grown up in a world where sound as a recording and as a playback kind of a situation is, again, like something that's been given to us. Right?

But I think one of my very core interests has been in the history of recording technologies and in my pre-teens, the Walkman was around. I remember this kind of novelty of this device that you can kind of just wear and walk around and almost create your own personal soundscape, right? So it's like you can cut off from the world and you can kind of frame their own world. I think that's definitely been a kind of form of technology that really influenced me, because of how intimate it allowed me to be with what I'm listening to. But at the same time, I think now I'm at a place where headphones are something that I only wear when I have to do like a mix job – because I also design sound to film – and somehow it's very hard for me to isolate myself in that kind of way.I only want to do it when I want to listen very keenly.

But I think the interest in recording technologies is something that is really shaped by listening, because in a way, the fact that sound could not always be recorded, and because of the recording aspect, it became portable, it became tangible, it became manipulative, it became temporal.

And I think those kind of things have really influenced how I think about listening and how time is such an important part of sound and listening, because I think technology does that. It discretises things as well. Maybe that's the thing about technology.

I think other beings – I think for me, like sound is also always a spectral kind of an entity. You know, it's not just about what is audible, but also what is not audible, and what is not audible is also within the audible field, in a way. It's in-audible in that sense.

I think of the sonic environment that we inhabit as something that carries traces of everything that it might have witnessed.

You know, so in a way, you feel a little more connected with histories that you may not even be in time with.

MS That's really nice to recognise the importance of time, in that it's both a temporal experience, but holds on to time as well as continuing with it.

Suvani Suri – The Stellar Rays of the Stars
Score for '​​To see the sun at midnight/ loving against time', a film by Arshad Hakim (2022)

MS You mentioned this idea of input and output as you're listening, but you're also creating scores and soundtracks that are in themselves sound environments for media. You use both oral and aural to describe the work that you do. So I was wondering if you could elaborate on those two modes and how they differ, and how they materialise in your work as well.

SS Sure yeah. That’s a very interesting question because I think, like somehow maybe when one is thinking and making, one doesn't distinguish, as you know, there isn't that deliberate distinction, but actually it is a deliberate distinction, because maybe in some way, like I think of aural as that which is registered and I think of oral as that which is produced, and the two are all reshaping each other all the time. And in that sense, for me, the aural and the oral always exist sort of together in relation to one another.

But I think when I'm like thinking about the composition of sonic environments, because, I mean, that's actually something that I really enjoy doing, which is that there's a filmmaker who's working on a film and who is working on these images and these edits, and then suddenly you're brought in to produce a kind of environment for it. It's something that you have to imagine as a living environment, right? And it has to be replete with all its textures and temperatures and, you know, I really enjoy producing that. But in doing that, I think I always am thinking about separating from the image as well. Like, I don't necessarily think about sonifying the image or like having the image be represented in sound, but I think of what can be outside of the image that can speak to the image.

And I think in that sense, the oral becomes a part of the process of composition, because it's also about, kind of like a conversation that is happening between different worlds. And often the world of the sonic can carry certain other information that the visual world may not. Not to create these separations but to sort of create these complexities.

MS I mean, I guess our senses all work together. You know, the cinema screen is so limited in size and scope, but with sound we can assist and expand.

SS Yeah.

MS I wanted to just kind of tap into this one little detail that you just said of, you wanted to represent temperature. And that's something that I've been really curious about recently, of even thinking of temperature as, like an emotional response as well, and even like the wordplay of like, temper and temperature.

Yeah. I was just wondering if maybe you could expand on that idea of how temperature can be sonified or conceptually and emotionally represented as sound?

SS Yeah, yeah. No, absolutely. Yeah, I think I'm very interested in these kinds of nuances of how we sense and what we sense without it being very visible, right? And I think temperature kind of is like that. When you're composing or when you're kind of synthesising sound, I have to think about it in terms of textures for instance. You know, does this feel soft or hard? Does it feel brittle? Does it feel broken? You know, and similarly with temperature, like, I feel like I'm able to synthesise something when I'm able to think of it as, is it hot or cold or? These are ways of relating to the environment which are visual for me because there are certain sensations that it's evoking.

And in that sense, I think the intensity – maybe like intensity is the kind of word that I'm looking at, affective intensities – that works are supposed to carry. And a lot of the times those intensities cannot always be described as happy or sad or, I don't know, like, you know, not just always in terms of moods, but also in terms of something else, which is, also very much a part of our sensory environment. I mean, it's also something that I think I might have to think about a little more.

MS Yeah, of course.

SS But also, you know, the other thing about aural and oral, which you asked, is the fact that it's also a mode of carrying fictions. And I think for me, that's very important in my own work as well – how aurality and how voice and speech and all of this can be used for mobilising imaginations through some kinds of forms of storytelling. So it's some kind of a production of an imagination.

MS Yeah. Your work kind of sits in this position between sound art and audio documentary, and you're working with archives as well. Repatriating voices and looking at telling true stories and histories. I'm curious about how you kind of oscillate between what you're projecting through being an artist and a curator; what you're reimagining by using samples of archives and histories; and then what is also being recreated through that kind of composition as well? And then the ethics of truth telling.

SS Of course, somehow, for me, I think the curatorial is a form of extending my artistic practice. I like working in ways that can foreground relationality and often to do that you're also working with other people. Because somehow, for me, maybe it comes from a kind of tendency to think or like, get drawn to polyphony, I'm not very satisfied with just my work speaking. I feel like I need to think of many voices speaking through me, or I need to speak to many voices to be able to put together something. And I think that is the impulse behind the curatorial kind of leaning that I have. Because the curatorial is also able to bring in this kind of relationality and bring in many, many different kinds of threads and perspectives and be able to bind it into a common concern.

The question of truth is maybe for me, like histories are constructed right? And I think what happens is that rather than trying to chase something that is authentic or true, I think I'm more interested in truths. And truths can exist in many forms, like artistic truths or like philosophical truths can shift, or like can maybe shine light on a certain way of seeing the world.

So for me, I think a lot of these gestures, whether they are archival or curatorial, are about being able to read the world in different ways, or being able to sense the world in different ways outside of the dominant so-called history or outside of what is fact.

And that idea of the truth for me, it's not a ‘wrong’ or ‘correct’. It doesn't have that orientation, but it's an orientation that is more of an intrusion. Because intrusions are also certain kinds of lived truths. So can artistic work and curatorial work release these forms as imaginations and intrusions about the world? I think that is something that I'm more interested in, rather than questions of claim making or like historical accuracy.

MS Yeah. Well, yeah, I guess, a lot of artmaking or, you know, the reason to have exhibitions is to ask questions, and that doesn't necessarily mean that they have to be answered and presented as a fact to the audience. You want the audience to be able to make up their own mind?

SS Absolutely.

MS In a more logistical kind of angle to your curating, how does it work with having multiple sound artists in one exhibition space and dealing with that polyphony to make it clearly communicated to an audience, and not to overwhelm people because I feel like sound is still quite a new sense for people to be experiencing in this sound-art-way.

SS Yeah. No, it's definitely something I've also been thinking through a lot. For instance, the show that we just did in Melbourne, it wasn't all sound artists. I mean, the funny thing about that show is that there were artists working with sound who hadn't worked with sound before, and then the sound artists were not working with sound. So I think there was a bit of a contradiction there.

But I think the logistics, this is actually very interesting for me, because I think there's a challenge that sound poses to the exhibitionary.

Because the tendency in terms of sound curation is always to maybe isolate works, but if the curatorial impulse is actually to connect and to relate, then isolation as a strategy cannot be the only practical strategy.

So, for instance, in this particular show, one of the things we tried doing was there was a kind of salon hang work which had a film playing and it had sound, and then there was another work right next to it, which was a set of paintings which also had a sound component to it, and we let the two leak into one another. Also, because the way that they were placed next to each other, they had a certain relationship to objects and material memory and the imagination of material memory or the imagination of loss, which was kind of manifesting through sound. There were often times when somebody would come in and not be very sure of where the sound was coming from. Sometimes it would appear like it's coming from one of the works or the other, or from elsewhere. And I think that is something I'm very interested in also, that dislocation.

And then at the same time, I think I'm yet to actually curate a show where all works are sound, because I think the challenge of that would also be immense. I think the one project that I did curate, which was a lot to do with a lot of like ways of listening to the city, was a digital publication. So obviously that didn't have to have these kinds of challenges.

I always think about how is one listening? Is it a kind of personal listening experience? Is it a kind of public listening experience? Is it a kind of very intimate space that is being constructed? So like Hayden's work in the show needed its own space. The decision to isolate was very much related to the artistic desire. So, yeah, I think you're kind of negotiating the artist's desires, but also in a larger kind of sense. You're also negotiating what the whole assembly of works is supposed to be doing in order to kind of take these decisions and the practical aspects of how sound is heard in the show.

MS Yeah. It's interesting that you mentioned the digital curatorial project as well, because you're then asking something very different of the audience as well. You're asking them, I guess, almost for more time, because they have to navigate the site. They have to listen through everything, more slowly possibly, rather than being suddenly inserted into a physical space, and they can hear everything at once and then pull to where they want to go.

SS So it's interesting to also think about what we're asking of the audience in terms of how they're going to listen.

And also times when you cannot ask of the audience. There's a lot of unpredictability also, and oftentimes because the demands that you make of the audiences are not always met. And that is also okay. So that is also woven into the assembly in a way.

MS Yeah, there's definitely a point of having to let go of the expectation of the work and how it will continue to exist and communicate, but we do our best to set it up right.

SS Yeah.

MS You've also done works that have really looked at the mouth as almost a micro landscape as well. And these very particular human sensory organs of hearing, like the ears and also of sound making – the mouth – as these environments that we hold ourselves. Could you maybe expand on that conceptualisation, specifically of the mouth as a micro landscape, and how the voice then exists within that landscape?

SS Yeah, the field questions that you are bringing in is actually great, because I think it's also stuff that I'm very much working out right. And I think these questions that you’re asking are actually going to stay on with me for a while. So like my answers might even change, my responses might even change in some time.

But I think it's the project with the linguistic archives which actually started to make me really think about language in relationship to voice and sound, and also how language in some sense is also produced: it's generated, it's recorded in the case of these archives, but at the same time it's the speaking body which is a part of this entire, like, exercise or this entire world.

And for me, having the mouth kind of became something like almost like a central, like a concern almost, because I feel like it can carry a lot of imaginations and even if one was to think about it as a kind of anatomical space, it is still a resonant chamber. It's the first kind of amplification mode even before, like say mics. You use the shape of your mouth and your throat and all of that to throw your voice.

And in that sense, I think the mouth as a landscape, and as a very complex landscape, which has its own terrains, which has its own histories and almost like intergenerational memories even in the way that it allows for language to be spoken. And different languages actually use different parts of the mouth. So if one were to learn a new language, one would start to learn to tune into or like tap into, or exercise parts of one's mouth that one didn’t even know existed.

So I think these kinds of ideas have been very interesting for me. And me and a friend actually have been having these conversations around this discipline of global geology, which is like a discipline that's focused on the simultaneous emergence and deep histories of language, landscape and body.

A lot of this is also to do with this kind of formulation of how speech and utterances also produce shifts in histories, in landscapes, and that led to this formulation of this idea of Palate Tectonics, which is actually something that I borrowed from DC Barker and that whole kind of speculative realm.

It's sort of looking at the evolution of the body in a way, and how the spine becomes erect and the spine becoming erect turns the mouth into the crash site of the top of the spinal axis and that's where language starts to produce. So there are all these like different kinds of strands, and they kind of land up at the mouth, even like different registers of speech, like not necessarily intelligibility, but also like the scream, for instance, or the whisper or the murmur and the lisp and the slips of the tongue and all of that kind of thing. I think there's also these kind of truths that they carry.

So all of this is sort of what brings me to the anatomical idea of the mouth as the starting point, because it becomes like a site in a way of investigation. And investigation, not in a way like it's not an investigation that is meant to produce a certain kind of accuracy, but more questions and more imaginations and fabrications even.

MS Yeah. Wow. I really like that. You've also tapped into the term tectonics because a piece that I was working on recently uses Auto-Tune and is inspired by kind of the shifts of tectonics, because the person who invented Auto-Tune applied the same technology that he was using as a seismic scientist. So there's this really nice correlation between this audio technology and this earth technology, and circling back to the mouth again from the Earth. I was really trying to think about singing against the rigidity of the autotune. So I would tune the Auto-Tune to say C major, but then I would sing a C-sharp against it. So you get this really, like wavering note to kind of allude to this idea of like that tension that the tectonic plates hold, like they can at one point be in pure harmony with each other, but then they can fracture as well.

SS Fascinating.

Mara Schwerdtfeger – Tectonics
(2023)

MS It's something I want to keep developing and keep thinking about, because I think there's a lot to explore there. So it's really interesting to hear about how you're thinking about the mouth as a landscape as well. It sets up an interesting premise for the way that we present audio work, and also the way that we listen as the voice being like this anthropocentric way of communication. It's almost like a sonic gaze that we can use to talk about environments. And then it's also interesting because you're working with archival recordings as well and these voices.

I'm curious about how you think about the multiplicity of voices, not just through an anthropocentric lens. If there are maybe animal sounds in those archival recordings, for instance?

SS Yeah, the linguistic archives work, I mean, there's been so much material in that. And it's also something that, again, for me, is still very much developing that I haven't yet gone into the non-human voice. But at the same time, in the linguistics work, I think the preoccupation for me is a certain kind of an uncanny listening or like a spectral listening, which is where I think the distinction somehow collapses between the anthropocentric and the non, because it goes into another realm. And I think that realm, and accessing it through like some of these ideas, and how the presence of maybe a human agent can activate certain layers in the non-human world through listening, through speaking, through these encounters is something that I'm very interested in. So in that sense, maybe that is where this kind of comes in.

Voices from another time, for instance, like, I'm very interested in this kind of idea of out-of-time-ness where you're speaking to those who are not in your time. Like the other day I was watching this film called Witches. It's a really interesting docu-fiction which looks at the histories of when is someone called a witch, right? And it actually looks at this idea of postpartum depression and postpartum psychosis. And through the stories of women, who are very much living now, who have come out of postpartum psychosis, it relates it to the witch burnings and the witch trials in the 15th century. Because at some point in the film, there's this scene where a few of these women start to read the testimonies of the witchcraft trials in the 15th century, and in the reading of those testimonies, they start to relate to what is being said by these women who are admitting to, I don't know, seeing the demon, seeing, you know, certain visions and things like that. And, I mean, I think what connects them, and the filmmaker has made a very bold kind of move here, which is also a move that is looking at structures that keep rendering the word of the woman unintelligible. Structures of power, etc.. But the bold move that the filmmaker has also made is to connect this idea of psychosis, which might exist in postpartum conditions, which might exist in other kinds of mental health issues, with the idea of witch trials. And I think the reason I was saying this is because it's actually in the reading of something or in the vocalising of something that a kind of truth starts to appear. For me that is one of the ways that I think the domain of the spectral or the uncanny or, you know, what is beyond the sensible starts to kind of appear.

But also in a very recent project, I've been looking at cephalopods, and the world of cephalopods, and marine creatures, and sort of thinking about listening and language through their worlds. That project for me is a way that one can very sort of literally think of the appearance of the non-anthropocentric. It is something that is definitely continuing for me as an inquiry, because it's also the project where I'm looking at the archives of Lynn Margulis, who was an American microbiologist and who had proposed this idea of endosymbiosis, which is very counter to the Darwinian theories of evolution, for instance. Because in her propositions, the way evolution happens is not necessarily through competition, but through some kind of symbiotic, kind of organisation at a microbial level.

There's a publication series called Shared Ecologies. The first edition of it was called Writing Natures. So as a part of that, Listening Too Early or Too Late?: The Asynchronies Of Cephalopodic Time was created. And I think what draws me to it is, like I was saying, I think the theories of Lynn Margulis actually were not very accepted in her own time. They were not taken seriously. They were often like, refuted or rejected, and it's only much later that I think her work starts to get recognised. And I find her writing really interesting because I think it also is very almost like fantastical, even though she's the microbiologist and coming from a discipline which is so based on taxonomies, like her entire oeuvre work is very, you know, you see these categories and organisations and all of that. But, I mean, I think the way she writes is also, she's also a poet almost in the way she demands a certain thinking around association.

MS Yeah, this poetic scientific writing, and word association, is just so important to be able to understand the world and to create those links and let people into those worlds in different ways through words like that.

SS Absolutely, 100% yeah. She was co-writing a lot of her work with her son, Dorian Sagan. At some point she was married to Carl Sagan, the astronomer. It's really interesting that, like, you know, there's the worlds of the astronomical and then there's the worlds of the microbiological that have kind of intersected at some point.

Suvani Suri – puncture the firsts of
(2019)

MS Going back to the linguistic archives that you've been working with, it's also interesting to think about what has been deemed important to be recorde. In your projects you talk a lot about all those audio artifacts that hold so much important information that were probably deemed originally a nuisance to the recording. So it's also so much about that anthropocentric viewpoint of what's deemed valuable and what's deemed worthy.

SS Yeah, 100%. What’s seemed valuable, worthy, sensible, you know, like what makes sense and how meaning is attributed. Or how a certain order of listenability. Like what do you hear? What do you register and what do you not? And when you don't register something that kind of goes outside of the thresholds or the limits of the structures, then how does it get rendered? As inaudible, but also the ways that it actually gets rendered as something that may even be violent or it may be dangerous, those thresholds actually of sense and sensemaking and the distribution of those thresholds is something that is somehow, I think, sound and listening calls attention to.

MS Yeah, what is not there can tell us so much about that history. And you also speak about the difference between music or sound and noise as a way of kind of revealing maybe the recording conditions or the way that these archives were stored and maybe degraded, or preserved. Is there a difference between sound and noise, for instance, in your mind, or are they equally valuable?

SS So a while back I came across this idea, which I think has really stayed on with me. So etymologically, if you look at the word sound, it actually kind of comes from the Latin, whatever etymological roots for the word safe. We also use it in that sense, right? Like safe and sound, or sounds good. And I think to know that that word ‘sound; kind of comes from this idea of sound, which is pertaining to safety and stability, has somehow, I think, maybe shifted my own taxonomical categorisation of sound, music, noise, etc.. Right? Because I think there is a meta-category of sound. It's a world that we are immersed in forever, or always already. And it's also a word that produces a certain kind of a sense of existence and presence and life.

But I think the idea of music is something that's also more organised. It's more arranged. Where certain orders of sound start to become more visible, hearable in the way that they're organised. So for me, music is a very organised category, and I think noise in some sense becomes that non organised, non arranged. I would say that noise would be some kind of a remainder of what is musical maybe. But at the same time it's not a very mutually exclusive relationship and that's what's also interesting. Like noise is also a part of music and music is also a part of noise. So it's like a Mobius strip kind of relationship.

MS I think it was in that digital publication, you spoke about the notifications of technology around us and that constant kind of feedback of sound.

Suvani Suri – Momently
(2021)

MS So it's not to say that noise is necessarily discordant either, but it's just an ever-presence almost.

SS Yeah. There was another piece that I did for Disclaimer where I was looking at the story by J.G. Ballard called The Sound-Sweep and then building on that. Because in that story, the entire field of audible music is considered as a contaminant, and it's rendered into like an ultrasonic kind of a register so that it is not heard. And then the story tells a tale of these characters called sound sweeps who are there to sweep or dust away the remnants and the residues of audible forms of sound from the world.

The Complete Short Stories by JG Ballard. Audiobook excerpt

“The Sound-Sweep, read by Ric Jerrom. Since the introduction a few years earlier of ultrasonic music, the human voice, indeed audible music of any type, had gone completely out of fashion. Ultrasonic music, employing a vastly greater range of octaves, chords and chromatic scales than are audible by the human ear, provided a direct neural link between the sound stream and the auditory lobes, generating an apparently source-less sensation of harmony, rhythm, cadence and melody uncontaminated by the noise and vibration of audible music.”

SS There's also this kind of an imagination where anything hearable becomes a contaminant. So I think the idea of ‘what is noise’ is also something that shifts periodically.

MS Yeah, and shifts within the mind of the listener.

SS Exactly, yeah.

MS It's really interesting how much the non audible is so integral to your work as a sound artist and researcher within archives. What happens when you do come across these gaps within the audio, like maybe it's due to degradation or like a technical artifact that makes something unintelligible? How do you kind of navigate that or lean into that?

SS Generally, I'm quite drawn to the idea of illegibility because it poses a question to what one understands as legible or intelligible. And I think that is probably the reason why, for me, you kind of get drawn into the world of the artifacts in the audio archive. Or the hisses and the crackles and the gaps in some sense, or what one does not understand actually becomes a very potent space. It becomes that kind of a space to begin to read, to want to kind of go into, and where certain kinds of poetics and where certain kinds of readings can emerge from, because it's in a space of not being determined yet. One has to keep reading from. So the quest here or the pursuit there is also to keep the gap open in a way.

I mean, in that sense, I feel like it also has a room for misreadings and it also has room for, you know, certain departures and returns because of how potent it can be. And how it can actually pose a challenge to the legible periphery that it exists in.

In terms of this archive, I mean, for me, the project is not really very recuperative. It's not a restorative project like where I'm trying to kind of think about the return of the voices to where they belong, because I think that is the thing that the voice evades. Like, where does voice belong to? It's beyond some kind of proprietorship logic. And in that sense, I think the linguistic archive, with this ambition of capturing all voices, the impossible of it, is something that obviously draws one into it. And then the impossibility of the large expanse of what it's trying to do, keeps getting refuted in these little, little, little micro gaps and hisses and in every second, in every millisecond of the recording that logic is getting refuted.

MS Yeah, wow. I love the legible periphery. It's such a nice way to think about that. I was wondering if maybe within this research, if there's any specific examples you could give us of how that vocal gesture, those ‘ums’, those ‘ers’ have revealed something about that person's place or time? Or were there any sort of even trends of those between words that you noticed?

SS I often felt like when I'm listening to those records and re-listening to them, I'm often imagining the hesitations. They may not necessarily even be there, because actually, if you listen to some of those recordings, and they are one of the earliest recordings that are being produced at the time, because the linguistic archive is from the early 1900s goes on all the way to 1920s. But I feel like one of the examples that I can maybe give is this one recording, which is a story that is being told, and in the story that is being told, the language is seemingly unfamiliar, but also there are parts of it which start to feel a little like in my familiar realm because of the appearance of certain words. You know, like there is a word drakhat that in the story the word appears and it's a sort of Persian, Hindustani kind of word for the word tree. My ancestors, for instance, they were from the west of Punjab, which is now Pakistan, and the language that is spoken, which is Punjabi, it used to be in the west of Punjab, it is written in the Urdu script. But post partition, what happened was that the script for the language also became different. So what happens is that there is a kind of, like in my own family, when I've seen the older people in my family, they speak it, but they're not writing it anymore. And I, for instance, don't also speak it. So suddenly to hear a word that I have heard in other contexts, maybe as a child or something, produces a kind of short circuit.

It's a word that is spoken in a very, almost like, nonchalant way in this kind of recitation, in the recording. But for me, that entire recording is about that word, and how that word produces an imagination of a tree that is trespassing language or scripts. Or like these lines of control and, you know, things like that.

Suvani Suri – Excerpt from Linguistic Survey of India archive, drakhat

SS You know, you're listening to something from a hundred years back and suddenly like, you feel like there's a part of it which feels like it is very present. And the presence is also a kind of a memory of something. So, I think some kind of a strange disorientation of time happens in that.

It was a colonial project, and it was a project which also had an administrative intent, because the Indian subcontinent is massive and languages and dialects change within kilometers, you know, like even neighbourhoods don't have the same language. So, it was obviously a project where the idea of capturing whole languages, recording was meant to also take on the form of like, maybe being able to learn the tongues of the colonised and then you know, administered in some way. But the impossibility of this intent, I mean, it is something that will always keep slipping out of your grasp.

And that is the thing about recording, right? Like, what is it that cannot also be recorded in some sense. But what the recordings also do is they leave behind certain traces. Many, many, many voices, there are almost like 256 or something voices from different parts of this geographical entity called the Indian subcontinent. These are all voices which are being recorded one by one but when you listen to them as a whole, it also feels like some of them are talking to one another without having met each other. I think there's something quite wild about that as well.

MS Yeah, it's quite amazing. I mean, it shows that there is a universal human existence in some way, but also how different and how specific we can each become as well.

SS Yeah

MS Thinking of this conversation in context of my conversation with Hayden in the last episode, you know, what is captured can sometimes stagnate a language or a culture, but then what isn't captured can also be lost. And then what is captured, is so often through these colonial projects, I'm wondering, are there audio archives that aren't colonial, or is that possible? How do you see the future of creating audio archives?

Yeah, I mean, I'd also love to hear what you feel about this because you've also been doing these podcasts and recordings.

MS Exactly.

SS When is something an archive? Right, like there are personal archives that are never called archives. And then there are certain other documents that are immediately branded as archives. So I think the question of what is an archive, and when is an archive, is a question that's demanded of all of us. And to think archives only in the sense of the colonial archive is also like, it's a move of resignation, I think, because I do think that it also exists outside of the colonial paradigms. I’m very interested in artists and archival practices. You look at Kaghazi Pairahan which is this library of readings and books and publications. You look at the Palestinian Sound Archive. I think a lot of these are also sort of very active constructions of what an archive can be and what it refuses to be.

One of the things that I feel like I do see across the board and this is probably like a huge hypothesis but I’d like to make sense of it, which is that in some sense, the moment an archive starts to claim a truth is when it starts to kind of take on certain colonial tendencies.

But the moment an archive has a certain porous quality about it, or where it's trying to continue to construct itself, is when I think some sort of possibility remains with it.

MS Yeah. It's like, what is the parameter of an archive? Is it once it is recorded? Because as much as like for instance, this series of interviews, it's very much about questioning and it's very much about continuing on the thought, but obviously once something is recorded and published, it is in a sense fixed to a certain point. But is it then also about how we are labeling it or categorising it? And what happens when something is uncategorisable in certain terms maybe that are familiar to the archives?

SS Absolutely. I mean, how do you not do that? But how do you do it in a way which keeps the possibility of reading it in many ways alive? So there's this archivist, researcher Michelle Wong, who used to work at the Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong, and she was working on the archive of this artist Ha Bik Cheun. And once in one of the conversations about it, she mentioned this idea of like how the silverfish in Ha Bik Cheun's archive also are metabolising the archive, you know, in a certain way. And I find that really interesting to, again, come back to like how the dust and the crackles and the silverfish are also entities that are metabolising the archive, reading the archive. It's a kind of thought that goes beyond the relationship of the archive to law and legalistic, kind of framework that it occupies. And I think this comes back to your question about the non-human as well, because the archive is the resting place of many non-human agents as well.

MS So I guess when we're talking about audio archives and that preservation, I'm wondering technically and conceptually what care should be given to audio archives, like how should they be preserved or how should they be accessed as well? And is preserving them, is part of that about reducing access?

SS Yeah. I mean, there is of course the material of the archive and that has to be preserved. And I think, even for somebody like you who is making these interviews in collections of conversations, you would want to preserve them in a certain way. It goes without saying. But preservation is not the same as, like control and access, I guess.

But I think also maybe like how artists kind of have been working, what they bring into the archival condition is actually something beyond control and access. And I think that’s what’s interesting because it goes beyond this kind of like, property, proprietorship kind of idea.

MS Yeah, it becomes more about recontextualisation and something that you've brought up a lot and that you do a lot is like this blending of timelines as well, which helps us understand the archives better once they are presented to us in a way that it's contemporary. And even your connection with that word, like it brought it into a contemporary sphere for you to be able to connect with that closer as well.

SS Yeah. I mean, you bring up a very important point, which is the question of the contemporary, because it's only like from the now, from the here and now that they are being accessed, or not.

MS Exactly

SS For sure.

MS I'm curious to hear how you are using sound in your work to navigate both geo- and techno-politics. Those are quite heavy big terms, but I think more simply, it's about, how can we use sound to better our daily life? And there was a project that you put it as like using sound as the prototype, which I really enjoyed.

SS I mean, sound is also a certain mode of thinking, and it can invoke a certain thinking around what is not. Listening can be a way of thinking in terms of foregrounding what may not be visible – patterns, hidden layers, tonalities that often say a lot about the world without bringing themselves into the visible realm. And we were talking about this idea of reading from the contemporary, and I think sound is that. Listening kind of brings you into a certain mode of presence and presensing. Listening to time in a certain way. And I think in those kind of ways, maybe to put it in a very general kind of way, it is a very relational field, and it is that relationality that is a way of thinking beyond borders, lines, limits, right?

And so the kind of question of how geo-politics and how techno-politics gets navigated, it's a question that is, I think, resting within the idea of listening, because you're not listening to one thing at a time.

You're listening to it all together. You're listening to connections, to disconnections even. Sound is a way of thinking about the world because it leaks. It cannot stay within these very defined limits.

MS Yeah, I think that a lot of people have this understanding of sound as very like ephemeral and non-material and so, yeah saying that it leaks is quite a perfect way of describing that understanding as well.

I guess, continuing on that thought, why do you think it is important to record and present sound either as composed soundscapes or as pure archival recordings, like field recordings or these linguistic archives?

SS I'm not sure. I mean, I'm not sure why one does what one does, but I’m reminded of this Egyptian composer that I really admire. His name is Halim El-Dabh, and he was actually working in the 40s with wire recorders and that's also the time when, for instance, the musique concrète idea was being propagated by Pierre Schaeffer. Of how the source of the sound can be divorced from what you're hearing through recording and how recording itself can take on many new meanings and associations. So at the same time, Halim El-Dabh was working in Egypt and one of the things he was doing was recording these ceremonies and rituals, etc., and then going into the studio to manipulate them and to kind of apply certain effects on them and like bring out certain reverberant quality or like apply feedback and all kinds of like stuff. And one of the things that he says is that for me, like manipulation as a way of drawing out some hidden sound from within, what I'm hearing, and I think I'm very interested in that idea.

Like for me, composition is also like a way of processing what's already around. Processing it in a certain way, subjecting it to some other kinds of interactions with other entities to be able to release something from within it, maybe. Literally working with it as a material like, like twisting it and contorting it.

MS What you've just been saying, like I 100% relate to for my own practice as well, and it's almost like you're working with a literal sound, like a field recording, but you're pulling out all the emotional context that sits within it that is your own perspective of it.

SS Yeah.

Halim El-Dabh – Wire Recorder Piece
(1944)

MS Just to close off the conversation, what's been influencing your thinking lately? Or what's moving you forward into the next project.

SS In a larger kind of train of thought, I've also been thinking a lot about associative practices and how collectivities kind of emerge. I've been thinking a lot about what it means to not just produce work, but also to produce situations where people gather, exchange ideas, converse.

And I think obviously all of this is coming from some kind of a preoccupation that I have with sound and listening and conversation. So, like, I really get your impulse of wanting to do these interviews and recordings, you know, and it's in that kind of a terrain that I’ve also been looking at.

[Field Recording] Suvani Suri – Ambience evening, moving from in to out and back in

Suvani Suri – The Stellar Rays of the Stars
Score for '​​To see the sun at midnight/ loving against time', a film by Arshad Hakim (2022)

MS Thank you so much for sitting down for this conversation. It was just so brain stimulating and amazing. So thank you.

SS No, thank you. Thanks for your questions. Yeah, I feel like I can stay with each of her questions for a really long time and kind of continue to unpack it.

MS Absorb Terrain was recorded and edited in Sweden, between Visby on the island of Gotland and Stockholm, with Suvani connecting from New Delhi, India.

Suvani’s projects that were discussed in this episode include The place we do not know is the place we are looking for, an exhibition at West Space in Naarm Melbourne; Norient City Sounds: Delhi an online sound exhibition; Palate Tectonics; Listening Too Early or Too Late? published in Writing Natures, and The Sound Sweep published on Disclaimer.

Listen to episode one
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