Adam Hulbert: Studies In Xbduction (Loc. 40.3921° N, 7.5445° W) by binauralmedia published on 2016-11-30T09:45:26Z Extract from an unaddressed letter attributed to M. August Mountweazel A colleague had passed on several gigs of field recordings from the Viseu Rural 2.0 archive, as well as the location 40.3921° N, 7.5445° W, which, as it later turned out, designated an area within Viseu Dão-Lafões, part of the Centro Region in Portugal. Field recordings have always fascinated me, as they offer a kind of second-order cybernetics, a ‘listening to listening’; albeit through the values of military and industry accreted into material technology. It made immediate sense to me to start by using these recordings, as after all, field recording is already inherently I schizophonic insofar as they open up plot holes by allowing two soundscapes to exist within a single space. This aside, the recordings proved somewhat immersive, and on playback I immediately experienced a promising wave of chronoportation. II and machines. It seemed as though these shared various patterns of movement, whereby abstract machines and techniques were distributed and utilised across biological and synthetic umwelten. I’ve since been referring to this experience as xbductive: an abduction without a subject. I can now hypothesise that listening is a process that convolves enculturated memory of meaningful relation onto sound events, and that this serves to occlude the operation of shared technologies. In this way, it is the interplay of surfaces to imply depth: a trompe l'oeil technique that is frequently used within cultural contexts for purposes of control. In cases of xbduction through acoustic processes, however, space expresses itself as distributed and schizophonic. My experience of Viseu perhaps failed to articulate a soundscape, but instead, it evoked a distributed sonosphere—or maybe something even less localised: the usually-occluded web of dreams and desires that a place produces by way of being in relation, the influence of a multiplicity of overlayed ontologies sounding into the plot holes of sonification. This was arguably why remote viewing was rejected as a method by the military after so many decades of research; it gave so much more and less than the subject in question. The occult truth of Cage’s ‘let sounds be themselves’, perhaps, is concerned with the unfolding of the convolved listening subject, and the resultant xbduction of the listener. Yours from the field, M. Genre Electroacoustic Music