Field Recording and the Re-enchantment of the World: An Intercultural and Interdisciplinary Approach

Abstract Nonfictional field recording is a genre of music (sound art) which offers glimpse art beyond our late-capitalist age. The ongoing ecocide we, in state abject detachment, are witnessing and abetting calls out for artists to reconnect reengage with the nonhuman world that has been deemed valueless by civilization. Countering disenchantment nature wrought scientism, human-centrism, above all capitalism necessitates dissolving barriers we set up between ourselves environment, task can be only accomplished via religion or art: an art—like recording—which affords reconnecting its audience enchantment ignored surrounding them. In this article, Toshiya Tsunoda’s exemplary Somashikiba (2016)—recorded locations forgotten civilization—will examined interpretive tools adapted from Ueda Shizuteru’s Kyoto School aesthetics Takahashi Mutsuo’s poetics. Ueda’s philosophy way understanding perception eliminates subject-object division. Takahashi’s project recovering spirituality place through poetry model historically politically engaged art. Looking, as these contemporary Japanese thinkers have done, precapitalist, pre-formalist past rediscover (sound) art’s function medium reconfigures listener’s reality, I argue urgency sound such aids re-enchantment future capitalist, humanist “civilization.”