Notes and Reflections from Archival Listening Session and Brainstorm | 2025.05.09

Counting is never innocent. So many of the archival recordings begin with numbers. Prisoners reciting digits, voices keeping time like living metronomes. What appears as a simple exercise is in fact calibration: pulling the speaker into the grid of chronos, the universal, measured time of empire. To be made to count is to be captured, synchronized, placed under the discipline of modernity.

Chronos does not only measure—it flattens. Its logic is progress, a line moving forward, one tempo for all. But in listening, I hear how this flattens other temporalities: the cyclical rhythm of chant, the suspended moment of a note held too long, the fugitive slip of memory that cannot be contained. Chronos erases by imposing order. The tick of the archive’s metronome promises control but extracts presence.

Repetition unsettles the line. A phrase looped refuses to advance; it hovers. A glitch interrupts the steady tick, pulling time sideways. Repetition, rupture, suspension—these gestures feel like small refusals, ways of loosening the hold of chronos. They open other durations: cyclical, lingering, plural. To repeat is not only to echo—it is to resist.

Canon is the architecture of this order. The canon, like the clock, arranges and excludes. It enshrines certain works as timeless monuments, measuring everything else against them. Bach and Beethoven fixed as markers of greatness, while other musics are relegated to the background as data, specimen, folklore. The canon carries the same structure as chronos: a single line, a singular standard, a history of exclusion.

Genre interrupts with other measures. A pantun shifts with each telling. An oral epic stretches or contracts depending on the singer and the moment. Genre lives not in permanence but in performance—elastic, improvisational, embodied. It multiplies rather than narrows. If canon enforces linearity, genre thrives in multiplicity. If canon demands monument, genre lives in recurrence.

The archive is caught between these forces. Ethnological recordings were not collected to enter the canon. They were classified and stored as data. Yet what they contain are genres—songs, chants, laments—that resist being pinned down. Each recording vibrates between two logics: the classificatory frame of the archive and the generative life of the performance.

Listening means inhabiting that friction.
I hear the counting, and I hear the chant that exceeds it. I see the catalog number, and I sense the improvisation that refuses to be reduced. These are not separate but entangled. To listen is to allow the clash of orders—chronos against cyclical time, canon against genre—to resound together without resolution.

Composition must carry this tension. The task is not to free sound from order altogether, nor to erase order with multiplicity. It is to let the two remain in contact, pressing against one another. To let the line of canon fracture into loops, to let counting dissolve into chant, to let the archive sound not as a monument but as a field of unsettled time. ☐