Review by Neil Verma and Jacob Smith

Review by Neil Verma and Jacob Smith

Amy Skjerseth’s Catching Flies and Catching Memories podcast comes across at first as an audio-enhanced scholarly talk, or a DVD commentary track that has broken free of its source text. Of all the examples of audiography in this special issue, Skjerseth’s is the one that most fully includes a traditional form of academic narration. Her piece shows that sonic citation need not prevent audiography from having an engaging tone, or from moving nimbly – fly-like? – from audio examples to critique, all the while expanding and deepening the work of Laura U. Marks and others through a theory of haptic audio-visuality that emerges from Ono’s practice. This is one of several film-centric pieces in the special issue that show the pedagogic possibility of the method of audiovisual analysis that Michel Chion calls “masking,” as in masking the image of a film sequence “to hear the sound as it is, and not as the image transforms and disguises it” (Chion 2019, 187). Focusing our attention on Ono’s remarkable vocal performance allows Skjerseth to draw out the complex relationships it navigates among onscreen bodies, and to think about the haptic qualities of the soundtrack.

And that soundtrack is not always alone. The form of the audiographic essay itself begins to have particular aptness about five minutes in to the piece, when Skjerseth arrives at her insight that the asynchrony of Ono’s soundtrack departs from established Fluxus practices of documentation of the ephemeral and immediate “here and now.” Even as Skjerseth’s narration makes the point that Ono uses temporal layering through sound to solicit listener’s multisensory “memory banks,” her own audiography begins doing the same thing, letting the tape of Fly’s temporality literally underscore the space of her own narration, a trail of highly energized signals walking across the “skin” of the audio that we cannot swat away as mere noise. The result is a double temporality, an argument that registers intellectually and haptically at once. In her review, Jean Ma writes “[Skjerseth’s] colorful descriptions, juxtaposed with the sounds of Ono’s voice, cue the listener to the physical intensities and tonal ambiguities of those sounds. They demonstrate how these sounds carve out an open channel between seeing, hearing, and touching, provoking tactile sensations and visceral reactions for the listener.” This is not only true for Ono’s listener, but for Skjerseth’s. The highly stylized vocals by Ono, Cathy Berberian or Tanya Tagaq exhibited in this piece are never mere exhibits or illustrations, are they? In this work, the temporal co-presence of primary source and secondary analysis yield mutual tangibility.

Works Cited

Chion, Michel. 2019. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. New York: Columbia University Press.