Sounding Out! Podcast #47: Finding the Lost Sounds of Kaibah
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In the early 1960s Native American women had few opportunities and rights as citizens. During this politically charged era, a young Navajo woman, Kay Bennett, or “Kaibah”, defied those restrictions by recording and releasing her own albums. Almost fifty years later, we present this conversation with Rachael Nez, a Navajo scholar and filmmaker, whose research explores “Songs from the Navajo Nation” through Kaibah’s records. Kaibah self-published her own albums until she was signed by Canyon records, wrote and published her own books, and traveled the world performing Navajo music everywhere from the Middle East to Europe. Rachael looks at how Kaibah’s music acts as a site for the circulation of Indigenous knowledge, oral history, and resistance.
In this podcast Marcella Ernest speaks with Rachael about the scarcity of materials relating to Kaibah’s history. Although there is no archive of her work, and no coherent trace of her story in one site, she explains how we can piece together a story of Kaibah based on her albums and songs. This dialogue considers the ways in which Indigenous erasure can be recuperated through sound. The project of finding the lost sounds of Kaibah is a fascinating story of how sound can be used to reconstitute indigeneous identity. What social and cultural norms conspire to obfuscate a Navajo woman of such prestige and talent? Finding the lost sounds of Kaibah is a conversation about (re)searching to find a lost sound.
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Marcella Ernest is a Native American (Ojibwe) interdisciplinary video artist and scholar. Her work combines electronic media with sound design with film and photography in a variety of formats; using multi-media installations incorporating large-scale projections and experimental film aesthetics. Currently living in California, Marcella is completing an interdisciplinary Ph.D. in American Studies at the University of New Mexico. Drawing upon a Critical Indigenous Studies framework to explore how “Indianness” and Indigenity are represented in studies of American and Indigenous visual and popular culture, her primary research is an engagement with contemporary Native art to understand how members of colonized groups use a re-mix of experimental video and sound design as a means for cultural and political expressions of resistance.
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Featured image is used with permission by the author.
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The “Tribal Drum” of Radio: Gathering Together the Archive of American Indian Radio–Josh Garrett Davis
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Sounding Out! Podcast #41: Sound Art as Public Art
This April forum, Acts of Sonic Intervention, explores what we over here at Sounding Out! are calling “Sound Studies 2.0”–the movement of the field beyond the initial excitement for and indexing of sound toward new applications and challenges to the status quo.
Today Salomé Voegelin, treats us to a multimedia re-sonification of the keynote she gave at 2014’s Invisible Places, Sounding Cities conference in Viseu, Portugal, “Sound Art as Public Art,” which revivified the idea of the “civic” as a social responsibility enacted through sound and listening. Available for download here as a podcast is an audio recording of the keynote as well as a transcription of its accompanying score. In this final entry of the series, Vogelin shares her insight about how sound can act as intervention, disruption, and resistance.
–AT, Multimedia Editor
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Sound Art as Public Art
Performance Score
Salomé Voegelin
Sit down on a chair
Read: Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art, pp126-127, line 5 to line 5
Play: Clare Gasson, Thought and Hand 53”
Get up, walk a square around your location, singing each side of the square at a different pitch – step back into the middle of the space and grunt loudly.
Stand
Read: Sol leWitt The Location of a Circle, 1974
Sit
Read: Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art pp130-131, line 20 to line 3, 3rd word
Stand
Read: endnoted text [see endnotes below], alternating between life and pre-recorded voice.
Sit
Read: Sonic Possible Worlds, Hearing the Continuum of Sound, pp49-50, line 1 to line 12
Read: Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nature from Course notes from the Collège de France pp68-69, line 32 to line 17, 7th word
Stand
Read: from soundwords.tumblr.com: The waterjet, April 09, 2013, 09:39am
Read: Patrick Farmer Try I Bark from ‘fire turns its back to me…’ to ‘ i have no desire too name’
Sit
Play: The Red Hook High School Cheerleaders by Jeremy Deller, 2 min excerpt
Stand
Read: Sarah Jackson Silent Running from her collection of poems Pelt
Sit
Play: Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Marches 2008, Track 2, 3 min excerpt
Read: Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, pp19-21, line 8 to line 6 (with a slight edit), and p55, line 17 to line 31
Play: Simon-Steen Anderson Pretty Sound (Up and Down) for priano, from LP Pretty Sound, 3 min excerpt
Read: Listening to the Stars from Noch (What Matters Now? What can’t you hear?)
Read: Sonic Possible Worlds pp157-158, line 1 to line 34
Play: Eisuke Yanagisawa Ultrasonicscapes track 10 streetlight 2, 3 min excerpt.
Read: Sonic Possible Worlds pp165-166, line 29-4 + p166-167, line 40 line 6 word 6 and pp 168-169, line 33 to line 2, and p174, line 18 to line 34
Stand
Read: credits while playing Salomé Voegelin: exactly 3 minutes
Endnotes
Life voice [lv]: This is a performance of my sonic possibilities in a public context.
Recorded voice [rv]: Sounds invisible mobility makes accessible, thinkabe and sensible, different and pluralized notions of publicness.
lv: My public performance invites you to consider your own public performance in this same context.
rv: The sonic public is a participatory possibility, whose actuality is not a matter of truth and untruth, but of sonic fictions: personal narrations that realize the invisible and conjure the inaudible, rather than settle on what appears to be there visibly and audibly.
lv: Together we make a civic performance – creating an ephemeral exchange of invisible things that reframe our visible form, relationship and organization.
rv: Listening challenges the designation of private and public. It overhears their distinction and does not follow the functional architecture of place and civic purpose but proposes formless and invisible alternatives.
lv: I am performing my private sonic life-world that meets yours in passing, at moments of coincidence, to create not one appreciable entirety, one actuality, but fragmented possibilities of what our shared space is, or could be.
rv: Sound is not necessarily harmonious, nor definitively antagonistic, but generates the space of an agonistic play: no ideal objective guides or precedes the action that it is.
lv: I sang a square and talked a circle.
rv: The public is not a visual concept, a permanent institution and infrastructure, but a transitory practice.
Iv: made room in the visible space for my invisible possibilities
rv: Sound makes apparent the frames, edges and boundaries of what is considered the actual place, and implodes the singularity and permanence of that perception through an invisible duration.
lv: I made an artistic space,
I made a social space
I made a political space
They reveal the limits of actuality, produce possibilities, and hint at the possibility of impossibilities.
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Salomé Voegelin is a Swiss artist and writer engaged in listening as a socio-political practice of sound. She is the author of Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art (Continuum, 2010) and Sonic Possible Worlds: Hearing the Continuum of Sound (Bloomsbury, 2014). She maintains the blog SoundWords and has curated the exhibition clickanywhere, an online exhibition of spoken and written work. Voegelin is a Reader in Sound Arts at London College of Communication, UAL and has a PhD from Goldsmiths College, London University.
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detritus 1 & 2 and V.F(i)n_1&2 : The Sounds and Images of Postnational Violence in Mexico – Luz Maria Sánchez
Standing Up, for Jose – Mandie O’Connell
Sounding Out! Podcast #23: War of the Worlds Revisited – Aaron Trammell
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