Peter Cusack, recording sounds at Chernobyl in 2007. All photos courtesy the artist.
He calls it “sonic journalism.” From the Chernobyl site to inside London, Peter Cusack has been turning his ear to the world’s most in...
Peter Cusack, recording sounds at Chernobyl in 2007. All photos courtesy the artist.
He calls it “sonic journalism.” From the Chernobyl site to inside London, Peter Cusack has been turning his ear to the world’s most interesting places. A leading practitioner of sound art at the intersection of ecology and music, Peter Cusack is a uniquely inspiring voice in music making. So we’re keen to welcome Czech-born writer Zuzana Friday Prikrylova to bring her conversation with the artist, for the first time in English here on CDM. We bring with that exclusive sounds for you to hear from the artist. -Ed.
Peter Cusack is a musician and a sound artist with a long music history behind him. He belongs to the English musical avant garde, played improvised music with the Alterations quartet for many years, and collaborated with flutist and journalist Clive Bell, composer Nicolas Collins, and musician and writer David Toop, just to name a few. He also started music label Bead Records in the early 70s, focusing mostly on improvised avantgarde music. He’s a member of CRiSAP (Creative Research in Sound Arts Practice), and was involved in founding the London College of Arts at the London University of Arts, where he teaches Sound Arts & Design.
His sound art works are often focused on ecology, environment, and the relations between the people, places, and sounds. One of his most popular projects is Favourite Sounds of London, which started in 1998 and has since spread worldwide. In his ongoing project Sounds From Dangerous Places, Cusack focused on the impacts of Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine and Wales, oil fields in Azerbaijan, and inflows of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, where controversial dam construction is planned. He moved to Berlin in 2012 to work on his project Berlin Sonic Places, so we interviewed him at the end of May 2012, slightly updated in April 2013 by Peter himself. The Czech version was published in HIS Voice magazine.
Friday: Since your projects collected in the book Sounds From Dangerous Places, you’ve been making something you call “sonic journalism.” Can you clarify and describe this term?
Cusack: It’s the sound equivalent of photo journalism. In other words: getting information from sound recordings of an event or place without too much speech.
Some people call what you do acoustic ecology; your main the range of interest is always connected to the environment and some of the effects and impacts of human activity on nature. Why? Is it just something you personally feel you need to do, or do you hope that with your works coming public, you can help to raise people’s consciousness about what’s going on?
I don’t think that any one person’s work has a major impact, but obviously there’s a lot of attention given to environmental issues and questions now. So I just feel part of that movement. And that’s interesting for me and I find it important. I like my work to have some kind of point. And for me, I’ve always been interested in environment and issues and the politics and the ecology and the economy of the environment, so that’s what I continue to do.
You started Favourite Sounds of London. Now there are many similar sites from all different cities and countries, as well as some other sound maps. Did any similar site already existed, when you started the project in 1998? How do you feel about how widely it spread around the world?
The Favourite Sounds project is slightly different from Sound From Dangerous Places in that I’m interested in the urban soundscaping, in which we, as Western people, live. And I’m also interested in how we interact with our everyday environment. So I started that in London, which is my home city, and to try and find out what other people thought of the soundscape in London or the sounds of London, I asked them what their favourite sound was, but also why.
And that was to jus
