Field recording

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Recording music where it is performed rather than where a company wants to sell it — carrying the apparatus to the singer instead of the singer to a studio. In the 1930s this was a physical undertaking: the disc cutter John and Alan Lomax took into Louisiana in 1933 was an instantaneous aluminium-disc recorder, and the assembly they hauled weighed on the order of three hundred and fifty pounds, powered by heavy batteries and carried in the boot of a car. The method's intellectual claim is that a commercial catalogue is a biased sample and that what is not sellable is not therefore unimportant, so the collector should go to prisons, farms, churches and porches. Its ethical problem is inseparable from that claim and has been argued about ever since: the collector chooses what is recorded and how it is described, holds the resulting copyright or deposit rights, and frequently gains a career from material given by people who did not. Both the value and the problem are visible in the same collections, which is why field recording belongs in this Journey as a practice with consequences rather than as a neutral act of preservation.

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