Angus Carlyle – Visiting Practitioner

I seldom find any inspiration in the Guest Lecture Series, maybe because I never see myself within that sound culture or from that world. I still think so today, that is why I didn’t go to many of these lectures until it became in person again at the start of Spring Term. Angus’s sharing is an interesting one to discuss, giving how important he is in Crisap and the culture surrounding it. He is the opposite of my practice I feel, I can’t really put it into words, but so many of these people sharing in the series, I feel further and further away from understanding where I stand as an outsider.

But I now find myself wanting to do a project focusing on writing and field recording for my portfolio unit. While the medium is the same, I am trying to reflect on my time spent here at LCC and through putting myself through it and doing these things in my own way, try to make sense of what my degree means to me. I honestly don’t know how much I have learnt from this course is useful to me and my “professional future”, mainly because while sound is usually part of my work, it was never the centre of it. Maybe because I never care about sound the way most people do here on the course, I just don’t find most things I learnt very interesting to me. I think they are too conceptual, they are far away from my reality and I want to be grounded in the day-to-day. Which is also why it is so hard to imagine a future now that I have learnt all these things that I think is elitist and inapplicable to my life at least.

Angus’s work evolves around field studies from a sound practice perspective, finding meanings in his listening and analysing it in depth in search of a narrative or a structure. I don’t know how true this statement or a summarisation is really but let’s just stick with it for now. To me then my critique is: that I am sure how I can arrive at where he is now and have the resource, freedom and energy to think what he is thinking. All these enquiries are interesting but untouchable for me, far far far away from the life that I am living, here in London. Maybe I am too young to understand the importance of these abstract theories, and maybe I am only interested shiny contemporary art, but I just don’t get it right now, which is not a judgement to anything or anyone. Then I have to think even harder, who do I want to be and what do I want to do? How do I get there? It is so difficult to become something you haven’t seen. Being in this course makes it difficult to imagine my own path to become the singer-songwriter I want to be. How do I get there? What do I do now? All of these are confusing me so much and makes me think my choices are wrong and not as important as doing sound studies in a rainforest. It makes me feel invalid. I think being in sound arts even though it gave me freedom to explore what I enjoy and be abstract compare to studying music (which honestly was never an option), it made it very difficult for me to break back into the music industry. I don’t know enough peers I can work with on my projects, no one listens to the music I like in my class, and I don’t understand how I can contextualise myself in the professional sense.

This has derailed the post so far away, which is understandable. All these lectures and practitioners, while I really want them to inspire me and show me how they have gotten where they are now, only make me even more lost. This focus on listening culture here at LCC, really makes me question my own positionality as a singer-songwriter. The word practitioner makes me reflect on the word practice. Everyone in the class is using practice-based research as a buzz word right now, thinking that is the aid to academia. I am not so sure if I understand the word correctly to be honest, what does it really mean to have a sound practice? How is it different from any other “jobs”? How is it so noble that it is not work but a practice? Does it entail something that I am missing? Or are people theorising the “work” of an artist way too hard and decide that our work as an artist definitively has deeper meaning than other occupations and is immediately philosophical and meaningful? I would not be so confident to say I have a practice, I do what I do and I hope it becomes my day-to-day and that is all I wish. And of course in some way this day-to-day becomes my source of income.

I think I thought too hard about things all the time, especially about why I didn’t enjoy the course in the past three years and even more so with this lecture series. I am constantly in fear that my rebellious nature doesn’t interfere with my grades and that is why I am trying to write this down on my blog, hoping that by documenting my distance with these alienating studies and practices I could elaborate my fears and desires moving into the future.