Presented by The Radiophonic Institute and the Museum Of Sound, The Sound Of The Year Awards is an annual competition celebrating sonic life in its many forms from across the globe. We caught up with French artist Lucus, winner of the Disappearing Sound award, which recognises “A sound unlikely to be heard in the future, but that is worth saving”
Tell us about what’s happening in your recording…
“I had been living for two and a half months in the peruvian Amazon Rainforest. There, I participated in a conservation project, studying eight different species of wild primates with bioacoustics. At the far end of the research center, there is a long suspension wooden bridge and the forest falls on each side. At night, in the complete darkness, I placed my personal recorder, aiming at the obscure canopy. It was very silent – or as silent as the Amazon can be.
“I like how this recording sparkle imagination, people guess a jaguar, a dinosaur, or ghosts. But they are Red Howler monkeys. In this place where dogs and roosters never set foot, every morning at dawn, the howler monkeys magnificent roar shakes the whole forest.”
Your immediate reaction after making it?
“I was mostly worried my recording would clip! I did not expect howlers to come this close, I knew it was a special moment. It was exciting as well. To many this call might sounds frightening, but to me it feels just like home – or a home.
“When I came back to France and spent the first night in my bedroom, it kinda felt like laying in a tupperware. Closed, soundproof. I had grown accustom to sleeping in open spaces, and falling asleep to the calls of bamboo rats, great potoos, the spectacled owl, and to wake up to the roar of howler monkeys. When nothing can help me sleep I put recordings of the rainforest.”
How do you feel listening to it now?
“Listening back to this recording, it describe exactly how I felt chasing them at dawn to capture their vocalizations. In the beginning of the recording, there is a low rumble that could make you think the wind is rising. It comes closer and stronger until you can feel vibrations going through your whole body and you realise it just cannot be it. But this species is one the loudest land mammals in the world, its howl reaching as far as 3.1 miles away. When far, differentiating their call from the wind was a struggle.
“Beyond the borders protected areas, Howler monkeys are sometimes completely mute. Easily traced through sound, they have been poached and hunted as bushmeat, and as a result, they have decided to stop calling. Basically the loudest terrestrial animals silenced themselves, forever.
“This recording made me reflect on how its disappearance would feel. The loss of a unique expression, a dialect withholding the knowledge and memory of the forest, that researchers never completely deciphered. This made me think that perhaps in the near future, only the sensation of hearing their profound call when the wind blows will remain.
What’s your background in recording sound?
“At 15, like many teenagers, I told my dad I wanted to take guitar classes. He answered me that our family had become many things over generations, but never ever had we been musicians. He offered me a guitar, laughed and wished me good luck! It did not continue past my highschool years.
“So I do not have a backround in music. I mastered in Art Direction and graphic design and worked in that field for 10 years. I have been doing field recording in tropical rainforest for some years, and I am enrolling into a master of bioacoustics in September.”
What inspires you?
“The forest inspires me a lot. It is an ecosystem inhabited by living languages, still foreign to our understanding. It is its own orchestra, with a diversity of musicians and songs and indigenous knowledge, all threatened with extinction. Through the study of interspecies communication and bioacoustics, my aim is to initiate new kinds of artstic and scientific conversations between humans and other living beings.”
The best advice you’ve ever been given or would give?
“C’est en faisant n’importe quoi qu’on devient n’importe qui. This is the motto of French star pranker Rémi Gaillard. It translates as ‘It’s by doing anything that one becomes anybody’.”
If you could only ever record one more thing, what would it be?
“I would probably go back to the Biwa Lake in Japan. This is where I fell in love with field recording. In a small town accessible only by train, lost in a midst where the lake and the mountains meet, a bulky metal box with a japanese inscription face the water. If you push its unique button, after greeting you, a woman’s voice sings the ‘Song Of The Lake’. There is nothing else to do than sit and enjoy.”
To find out more about the Sound Of The Year Awards, go to soundoftheyearawards.com
