I’ve been lucky enough to have had Angus as my supervisor for my dissertation and furthermore preceding this I was really into his books. I felt his writing and work with Cathy Lane really interested me, specifically with field recordings and the interviews they conduct. I found myself for the first time really interested in soundscape ecology and research within it.
Angus had a lecture where he described his career and his early work with Zines, which he said began around 1988-1989, some of the projects were:
Explaining house music, HOUSE 2HOUSE, A Guy Called Gerald, the distance between time and space between ages, and world music,
He developed his writing through this practice, After that period of zine production, the use of constraints is something he imposes on his writing, limiting his work. Automatic translation engines and transcription software, google earth, limits on word length and limits on the number of words.
Field Notes,
He finds field notes as a way of representing the environment he hears, he worked on a project with Simon James, translated by KYRIN Chen 2022, He has a stack of field notes, small black books, with silver Gaffa tapes, he also generates notes on his phone, he sues to remember what is happening.
Field Notes as Voice (the Horror) He vocalises them, he took them too far he says, he started speaking his notes in the spaces that influenced them. The redevelopment of Stratford is an example.
Field notes as themselves, he believes that they can exist of themselves, such as the work for Fieldwork for Future Ecologies, Radical Practice of art. Field notes as the specific piece of their own things,
field notes against Sonic exceptionalism are something Angus kept saying.
As well as this lecture Angus is a professor within Crisap. Something I found out about during my research in my second year and also all the other PhD students that study there. It took me a while to understand what the appeal of academia is and it did eventually click for me, I really dedicated myself to my studies within my second year and found this passion of being a hermit, in a sense, I cut everything else out for a few months and became obsessed with reading, writing and researching for my work. Really was a blissful time. Someone like Angus or his role is a potential opportunity for me.
To travel, bring your knowledge and expertise to projects and come from an artistic sound arts perspective is important, academics within arts and humanities are dedicating their lives to thinking and asking questions, to me that is what I see it as. A group of humans all working together to discover more bout existence and our very way of being and interacting within this physical plane.
The reality of being a professor seems tough, even a lecturer or researcher within higher education. The funding from the government is decreasing, you are working project to project, expected to work overtime and not be paid for it. It really is difficult, similar to the previous article where artists are expected to do what they love, academia is also similar. This is a potential path for me, I do find myself wanting to take time out of university when I graduate to gain some financial stability. But eventually I would like to do an MA, the list I complied from the exercise has helped me massively in figuring out where I could go. Angus also recommend Europe for me when I asked. That is one option.