Spectral sonics: Field recordings from an extractive zone

In the Lumière Brothers’ 36-s short, Oil Wells of Baku: Close View (1897),1 we see wooden oil rigs consumed by ravenous flames in the foreground, thick black smoke billowing in the background. At eight frames per second, it is a (silent) spectacle which blurs the start of crude oil extraction with the birth of cinema itself, rendering the advance of the petrochemical age an aesthetic revolution as much as a scientific one (LeMenager 2012). The short inspired the emergence of a distinct “oil canon” within Azerbaijan's film industry, with subsequent features depicting Baku, the capital city and a historical oil town, as a landscape of oilfields, derricks, wells, and obsidian pools of crude oil. Films like The Reign of Oil and Millions, Azerbaijan's first feature (financed by several oil tycoons), prioritized the ocular, encouraging viewers to marvel at the enchanting and entrancing aesthetics of oil and to identify the city as a composite of oil infrastructure, oil aesthetics, and oil culture. Oil emerged as a protocinematic medium, in the words of Susan Schuppli (2015, 435), where its optical effect constituted a “cinematic feature of its very ontology, its molecular structure and behavior,” producing a “slick image.” This visuality has been a consistent feature across other media as well—from cartography and film to photography, literature, and journalism. Much like the Lumière Brothers, visitors like Charles Marvin focused on the visual attributes, fascinated by enormous quantities of “dense smoke, soot, and sludge” produced as oil moved through the refining process. Early travelogues, much like early films, narrowed descriptions of life in the oilfields of Baku down to “black and greasy” buildings, vast morasses of mud and oil and roads weaving between “jutting rock and drifting sand” (Marvin 1891, [1884], 34). For foreigners particularly, it was all a “splendid spectacle” (35), easy to apprehend and part of a perfectly rational system, congruous with the science of the day. This slickness of depiction extended to early mapping projects of Baku, which tightly wove urbanism, the map and oil together, depicting the city not as geometric configurations of inhabitable space, but as parcels of Crown-owned or private oil lands. A good illustration of this is Baku City Administration's 1913 Plan of Baku, which alongside demarcating land allocated for sale by the annual treasury, primarily concerned parcels of oil land and parcels intended for commercial oil production, leaving out other spheres of life and production (Blau et al. 2018). However, through their ocularcentrism (Jay 1988),2 such narratives and forms have tended to neglect the other sensoriums of oil—namely, the soundscape of petroleum, its extraction, and refinement. This essay and accompanying multimodal piece attempts to expose the “slick image” (Schuppli 2015, 435) as reliant on the literal and metaphorical silencing of oil's aurality and orality. Conceptually, it extends Stefan Helmreich's (2015, xi) call to give sound to life “simulated, microbial, extraterrestrial, cetacean, anthozoan, planetary, submarine, ocean, auditory, or otherwise,” by recognizing that violent, toxic, and life-destroying matter also carries with it distinct waveforms and particles, interpretable to those willing to listen. In the words of Helmreich (xviii), sound “has many apparitions … shot through with definitional uncertainty,” rendering it the perfect medium through which we can apprehend indefinite and often amorphous forms of harm and violence. In both the essay and the multimodal accompaniment, sound is recognized as deeply relational, informing, influencing, and altering connections between humans and more-than-humans. The essay builds upon the work of several anthropologists who have attended to the multisensorial cues of Anthropocene landscapes—particularly in zones of extraction and capitalist exploitation. Michael Cepek (2018, 132), in his pathbreaking Life in Oil, was quick to notice that the age of fossil fuel was registered as an “age of noise” within traditional Amazonian communities. In his fieldwork with the Cofán people, he noted the extensive vocabulary which developed to describe the effect of petroleum extraction on the Amazonian soundscape, with the Cofán notably using the word jeñañe (to make sound) to refer to processes of starting, driving, and managing the machines. A similar observation has been made by Prash Naidu (2019) in his ethnography of the Mambai in Timor Leste, recognizing the expanded sensory practices of his interlocutors in areas disrupted by extractive megaproject developments. Having been displaced from their sources of livelihood and exposed to toxic, potentially deadly substances, the Mambai utilized certain smells, sounds, sights, and tastes to evidence the fact that something was “not quite right” in their environment, bolstering resistance and political action. Sonic developments in this essay are charted in a similar manner,3 attending to the ways in which crude oil has shaped the lives of Bakuvians—particularly communities of internally displaced people (IDPs) residing near zones of current and former oil extraction and production. The essay and accompanying multimodal project4 highlight the changes to local lexicon, conversation styles, storytelling strategies, and music making wrought by both historical extractivism and a more contemporaneous turn toward green gentrification and postextractivist development. Indeed, of equal interest are disappearing sounds, requiring Bakuvians to hear what is no longer there and develop novel strategies of attunement.5 Through shifting away from the usual textual paradigm of the fieldnote and toward field recordings remixed, layered, and entangled with archival recordings, commercial tracks, and incidental captures, there is an attempt to respond to James Clifford's (1986) decades-old question: “but what of the ethnographic ear?” The theory of ethnographic knowledge production at the heart of both essay and multimodal project is one which veers away from detached registration or the hope for perfect semiosis (Erlmann 2020), instead recognizing the importance of echoes, reverberations, hums, noises, interruptions and murmurs—forms of information which are often incomplete and indefinite. This essay seeks to contextualize a series of field recordings captured in Baku's Balaxanı (Balakhani), Səbail (Sabail), and Qara/Ağ Şəhər (Black/White City) neighborhoods during the summer and autumn of 2019. The text works in tandem with a multimedia website, featuring a map of the capital city populated with “sonic” traces of crude oil. Both the essay and the website attempt to deal with the nature of testimony, historical artifacts, and changing sensoriums as extractivist capitalism shifts into new formations and modalities (Peterson 2021). The audio tracks featured on the website (and discussed in the essay) can be roughly divided into three categories—historical sounds of the petrochemical industry and industrial neighborhoods, field recordings taken from settlements slated for urban renewal, and ghost stories/urban legends recounted by locals (often IDPs). More than mere representation, each track is an immersion into the resource extractivism of 20th-century urbanity and the ecoextractivism of the 21st century. Tuning into the frequencies of Baku's urban metropolis facilitates conversation about sound and its absence—not only what the past may have sounded like, but also the sounds of renewal, demolition, or, perhaps, that of bubbling resistance. Conventional maps, reliant on traditional cartographic principles of “accuracy, orientation, scale, reference point, and legend” (Powell 2016, 405), have failed to register the strange sonic features of places like the Black City, banishing sound with its lively indeterminacy into the realm of storytelling, entertainment, and the unrecorded every day. It is perhaps this resistance to cartography as usual which creates a bond between sound and spectrality when mapped together. Both are immaterial and spatially nonspecific, defined by a general inability to assume subjecthood and thus a concrete place within community. As Anthony Vidler (1994, 3) suggests, “the uncanny erupts in empty parking lots around abandoned or run-down shopping malls … in the wasted margins and surface appearances of postindustrial culture,” and so causes tangible changes to the urban landscape—much like a strange sound or unexpected noise. In a similar vein, Peter Ackroyd (2001) has argued that the spectral inspires ungovernability within carefully planned and managed spaces. Spectres, and I would argue spectral sounds, are agents of disruption existing “beyond the reach of any plan or survey” (216), strident in their unresponsiveness to policy committees or to centralized planning. This strategic capacity is at the heart of the project, showcasing sound as an instrument of testimony, political claim making, and spatial deterrence. A strange metronome sets the pace of life in Baku: the bulldozer. The clangor of debris and rock hitting metal loaders signals the advancement of the largest urban development and remediation project in Baku's recent history—and with it a sense of both disappearing and competing sonics. Since the introduction of a “comprehensive action plan” for the improvement of “ecological conditions” by President Ilham Aliyev in 2006, numerous sites of former oil extraction and petrochemical industry have given way to upscale residential and commercial zones, catering to an increasingly international clientele. The Black City neighborhood,6 which houses a large percentage of the capital's internally displaced population, has been partially demolished to make way for a 221-hectare “post-oil” development, marketed as the White City: a capitalist dreamscape of monumental stone-clad buildings, grand avenues, gleaming office blocks, hotels, and a new subway line (Grant 2014). These new structures have also brought new sounds, replacing the creaking, ringing, and gushing of Baku's former oil industry. Increasingly, one can hear barking designer dogs, the hum of air-conditioning units, English-language adverts, and, in the evenings, silence dictated by 24/7 security presence and CCTV. Unlike the visual markers of postindustrial gentrification and urbanism in Baku, which are often immediate and overt (e.g., publicized evictions and rapid demolitions), sonic markers are more ambiguous, often requiring careful and slow tracking. The recordings on the website were captured over successive months and using an array of different recording devices. At times, sound was captured passively over the span of an entire day, yet only minuscule bits proved useful or relevant. To properly apprehend the violence of the White City's new soundscape, elements like rhythm, speed, and medium, all needed to be considered, reflecting Rob Nixon's (2011, 2) concept of a slow violence which “occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.” As argued by scholars like Linda Keeffe (2017), Christina Zanfagna and Alex Werth (2021), Christina Zanfagna and Alex Werth (2021)Piyusha Chatterjee and Steven High (2017), and Steven High and David Lewis (2007), processes of gentrification and urban displacement are multisensorial, impacting not only a visual experience of place but also what one can smell, see, taste, touch, and hear. Deindustrialization brings forth a trade-off whereby the removal of sounds considered grating, loud, or irritating also means the removal of lively and dynamic communities. The working-class or industrial way of life is thus “displaced to the periphery” (High and Lewis, 2007, 106), rendering places like the White City bereft of meaningful relations and exchange. If infrastructures of crude oil extraction and refinement act as “sound anchors” or “acoustic identifiers of community,” then their demolition compromises the very “essence of a place at particular moments in history” (Smith et al. 2004, 380). Indeed, even the new residents of the White City regularly complain about the unhomely, or unheimlich, atmosphere of the residential complexes, describing the environment as “çox sakit” (very quiet) and in need of more “canlılıq” (liveliness). The broken and disrupted relations which pervade sites of postindustrial gentrification have a sonic quality to them. In one of the videos uploaded onto the project website, a Russian guide's tour of the White City is intermixed with warped and modulated police sirens and shop alarms, resulting in a sense of trespass and disquietude. In another section of the site, one can hear the decontextualized noise of demolition merge with gusts of wind and then silence. 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