Space & Culture

Everywhere in Bahia, one turns to hear the sound of approaching ’sound systems’ mounted on cars and trucks which troll the streets announcing events, promotions, sales or rallying voters in elections. Black boxes of a DJ system, sometimes covered to protect from rain or dirt are mounted on roofs or racks. The music they play might be recorded, or their might be an announcer in the passenger seat. Sound carries and in this case literally travels. In early October 2006, newspapers such as A Tarde fretted about noise pollution and note that Salvador, capital of Bahia, is Brazil’s worst city for the din.

What are the sound systems called? Is there a verb? Are there studies of these?

In many less formal neighbourhoods, self-appointed purveyors of sound flood the area with better defined music from home stereo systems. Eclectic mixes of contemporary local, Bahian, and global pop throbs out of pane-less windows and families’ roof-top terraces: Madonna and Margareth (sp?), a Wedding March… One can get grooving as a rehearsing band alternates between trying to get repeated verses right and extended, improvised sets which are improbable in their slickly played riffs.

It is the custom to eulogize the Bahian sound of the 1960s, which became the internationally best-selling Brazilian music including Gilberto Gil and others. Some locals have tired of the populistic, decadence of present industrialized music production in Bahia. Salvador’s more avant guarde bands offer something globalized - musical performances in the mould of heavy rock.

Punk Broadcasting
In some communities in Brazil one hears the more modest speakers of ‘community radio’ systems mounted on telephone poles amidst the tangles of power, phone and other wiring. These are reminiscent of music systems some might recall from outdoor skating rinks in small town Canada. The sound isn’t perfect but its rhythmic enough to skate to. They formed the sonorous skein of many of my memories of skating in Kars Ontario.

These municipal systems play less loudly than their auto-mobilized competition, but their fuzzy and distorted, over-amped sound cuts through the ambient musical mix of the street. This soundscape includes advertising trucks, parked sound systems and cafes. The loudspeakers of ‘community radio’, are probably offering recordings of ‘blocos’ at carnival time. ‘Blocos’, the cordoned sub-parties related to particular sound systems (as they would be called in the UK), stages and what would be called ‘floats’ in the vocabulary of North American parades, are the organizational structure of carnival parades and events.

What hours do these play every day? What is the motivation to have them? What’s in it for those who mount this sound on a daily basis?

The broadcast of these recordings appears like a form of local patriotism to particular Blocos, DJs and bands. This music is not the copyright tunes of the music industry ‘majors’, corporate radio and pop music tunes. These are recordings of open-air events of the background shouts of crowds, the enthusiasm of crowds, the contingencies of musical performance and equipment malfunctions. Its neither music, nor voice, nor noise but an ensemble of these.

The sound of these municipal sound systems has some characteristic of whispering - most of the spectrum of sound frequencies is missing and their static is like the rush of air which is the carrying medium of the whisper. Whispering is virtual in that it is neither singing nor talking but rather signing and talking that is not meant to be heard beyond the intimacy of one’s own skull or the involutions of another person’s ear. The point of whispering is that it is hard for others to hear and hearing a whisper requires that the listener devote their attention to the speaker and concentrate on the sound to reassemble both pitch and discourse. Even if one doesn’t attend to the whisper, many will have experienced how the whisper elicits from their bodies an almost involuntary and even annoying ejaculation ‘Eh?!’

Distortion is introduced from the moment of performance in refrains shouted by tired, breaking voices into microphones and amplifiers pushed beyond their intended specifications. Cassette tape recording technology introduces a further flattening of the sound spectrum, even with a direct ‘line’ connection; municipal PA amplifiers and outdoor loudspeakers highlight the static and fuzz of the treble while the bass drops out. The end result is an auditory experience in which static and infidelities to make this music markedly distinct from the timbre and sonorousness of studio-recorded music that has become the mundane norm. Like the anti-musical ethos of 1980s punk, one might call this Brazilian form the ‘punk broadcasting’ of a music of distortion.

Do the people who sit in doorways and wait out the hot days listen? That is hard to say. Perhaps if we ask locally, we might discover that people are not proud of these systems, but if so, why operate them? Often they are indicators of communities where individuals do not own audio equipment personally. But an economic explanation is insufficient. Who selects this content and what is the motivation for installing these systems which appear to be free of advertising or promotional announcements? Why play this particular music?

The Whisper of Urban Memory
In its turn, the tinny, fuzzy sound distorts the atmosphere of the local square and street. It torques the moment with a reminder of the last carnival and premonition of the next bash. It’s a type of refrain or ‘counter-memory’, one that projects a future. Everything in its inadequacy to the recorded, past event is a reminder, a returning to presence of the past, an invocation to remember and fill-in the gaps in the reproduction, to hear past the carrying-medium of static. Perhaps we are even listening to the sound of a town in Bahia remembering? Might we coin a phrase and call this the whisper of ‘urban memory’?

The experience of a present absence (the past event made insistently present) demands reflection. The unbidden forming up of a future is a paradox which attracts thought. When we hear and have the past recalled to us in the present, and the effect of this virtuality is to evoke an imagined future are we not in a moment that could properly be called ‘untimely’? In this moment the present is a merely the ‘traverse’ between past (’>') and future (’<'), the centre of a chiasm ('X') at which we cannot tarry. Presumeably, if untimely, then we must be in a timeless milieu - a space of the unfolded past-present-future event. It is also an experience of living tradition in which sound is a kind of connecting surface, medium or 'flesh' which allows the future to pass seamlessly out of the past.

As the whisper is amusical-music and speech, so the chiasmic event of urban memory is an untimely, unfolded space-time. Waiting, listening to neighbourhood sound systems provides a good example of what Foucault called ‘counter-memory’, which might be defined as not only forgetfulness of ‘proper’, archived history of dead memory, but exactly as the experience of ‘remembering the future’. Foucault turns this into an ethical injunction: turning memory around to face forward is not a form of remembering, but a call to thought, to think again. This reversal or turning around has the mirror-structure of Merleau-Ponty’s chiasm, carrying the murmurs of the past to the future. Waiting, as those who sit in the doorways do, is therefore also remembering and also is a form of thinking. If this seems entombed in small town fatefullness, it also carries the potent injunction to think again if only because it prompts the question - what are you waiting for? What is happening? This is pregnant with answers, a multitude of perspectives and a clamor voices which respond. Thinking is a mode of action (as Foucault puts it in The Order of Things), and as such is necessarily social - sociological.

To respond is to affirm the ethical quality of this experience I called urban memory. To respond is to contribute, to begin to take responsibility for the future. The lo-fi ‘punk broadcasting’ of neighbourhood, ‘community radio’ sound systems, whispers the unofficial, local ‘urban memory’ of events and affirm a collective future. Around their reduction of music, they orchestrate a chiasmic relation in which the past makes a thought-provoking cross-over. In as much as we are ‘hailed’ by this attention-grabbing line of flight, we too are drawn into the socialness of thinking-as-waiting, even if only as visitors to this future.

This entry was posted Thursday, October 19th, 2006 at 1:04 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.