Elliott, Acoustic Territories review, pre-publication draft

1

Review: Brandon LaBelle, Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life
(Continuum, 2010)

By Richard Elliott


Two of the problems encountered when dealing with space are knowing where to start
and where to finish. How do we begin to delineate space? How do we bound it? As
numerous philosophers and cultural geographers have found, spatial nominalization and
delimitation, the naming and taming of space, are more geared towards describing place
and places. Where places have names and seemingly fixed borders, space is blurred and
unknowable. Even so, it is always thinkable, always a condition of our being in the
world.

As we move through space or reflect on it, there remains a constant desire to divide it into
other spaces. The French writer Georges Perec caught this desire briefly and beautifully
in his essay Species of Spaces, gradually zooming out from the space of the page on
which he was writing (and his readers reading) to the desk, the room, the house, and so
on until he imagined himself floating in space, looking back at Earth. All the time, of
course, the writer never really left the scene of writing, nor the reader the scene of
reading.

Many French writers and thinkers are mentioned in Brandon LaBelles Acoustic
Territories, though Perec is not among them. LaBelle seems in thrall to a similar
taxonomy of space, however, as he organizes his book via chapters entitled
Underground, Home, Sidewalk, Street, Shopping Mall, and Sky. Given the
spatial range and the number of real and imagined sites visited, its difficult to describe
all the trajectories this book wishes to examine or set in motion. Essentially, though,
LaBelle is concerned with the interrelation of a variety of sonic spaces and with the ways
in which sound is not merely something that occupies space, but rather one of the main
ways in which space is constituted and, in turn, constitutes its occupants.

Numerous theorists of space populate the corridors, freeways, and occasional labyrinths
of LaBelles pages: Henri Lefebvre with his ideas on everyday life, rhythmanalysis, and
the production of space; Michel de Certeau on everyday life and walking in the city;
Gaston Bachelard and his poetics of space; the Situationist International and its notions of
psychogeography and the dtournement of public space. This population of LaBelles
text with so many names and ideas is both a pleasure and a frustration. For a theoryhead,
it is fascinating to follow the connections LaBelle makes and to perhaps add their own.
Those less inclined to such speculative explorations may well be annoyed with this work.

Acoustic Territories is not a book about music as such, though there are passing mentions
of Brian Enos ambient music and Erik Saties furniture music, and interesting musical
juxtapositions, such as a comparison between the contemporaneous work of experimental
composer Pierre Schaefer and bandleader Ray Conniff in the 1950s. Rather, this is a book
about sound, noise, and the acoustic. LaBelles tour takes us from the resonant tunnels of
Elliott, Acoustic Territories review, pre-publication draft

2

the subway, with its buskers and subterranean echoes, up to the noises of the city street,
and out to the sonic politics of the suburbs where neighbors bicker about noise levels and
sound refuses to be domesticated. LaBelle also takes us into the soundspace of the car
and to the Muzak-filled non-places of the shopping mall and airport. Here, as in Joseph
Lanza's Elevator Music, the focus is on the use of sound to modulate mood and stimulate
particular modes of behavior. The Sky chapter, meanwhile, sets its sights on the
transmission of sound through airwaves and networks, with the concomitant
intermingling of local and global spaces.

Its often difficult to get a handle on LaBelles text. This is not so much due to the
theories that the author draws upon as it is his occasional inability to communicate them
and his tendency to follow connections to almost breaking point. The connection between
underground railway systems and underground music scenes, for example, just about
holds together but it is mainly due to fancy linguistic play that further complicates some
already rather convoluted points. LaBelle certainly doesnt have the communicative ease
that David Toop, for example, has brought to his ruminations on noise and silence in his
books Haunted Weather and Sinister Resonance, not does his prose have the readability
or quotability of Certeau. LaBelle shares the complexity of many of the poststructuralist
authors whose theories he draws upon while lacking their poetic flare.

Chapter 2, Home, is a case in point. It is very difficult to follow the connections
between domestic space as imagined so eloquently by Gaston Bachelard, the use of
silence to discipline prisoners (Michel Foucault is brought in to help here), and the
danger of noise as theorized by Michel Serres. The difficulty is compounded, here and
through much of the book, by certain over-used rhetorical tics and occasionally dubious
word grammar. That said, LaBelle just about pulls it off and manages, at the end of the
chapter, to draw a number of strands together to make the compelling argument about
acoustic violence and the ethics of noise.

Chapter 3 provides a smoother read, perhaps due to this part of the book having already
been through the editorial mill in preparation for a previous publication. Or perhaps it is
due to a gradual acclimatization to the authors style such that one allows oneself to be
territorialized, or interpellated, or becalmed by the somewhat condensed style. There may
be a case of recognizing ones own weakness here, for I write as someone whose own
theoretical work has been labelled as condensed and abstract and who, like LaBelle, has a
tendency to back up personal, phenomenological observation with an enormous cast of
over-quoted theorists. Perhaps it just takes one to know one.

Yet I also write as someone who, reading this book in the middle of a sleepless night
while torrential rain splashed against the roof and windows and dripped an uncanny
cacophony onto an upturned bucket in the garden outside, felt that its author was on to
something very important. And one of the most important things that Acoustic Territories
insists upon is that, far from being merely something that takes place in, occupies, or
evokes space, sound is inherently spatial and determines to an often unacknowledged
extent our very sense of locatedness. On this line of thinking, sound and sense become
indistinguishable.
Elliott, Acoustic Territories review, pre-publication draft

3


If LaBelle has not been completely successful at taking the reader with him as he zooms
in and out of his species of spaces, it is quite probable that a smooth negotiation of these
sites is neither possible nor desirable. The agonism performed by this rather strangulated
text is perhaps indicative of the difficulties of bounding space. The fantasy of a smooth
drift between coterminous sites or the possibility to switch from one site to another at the
speed of thought (or at least the speed of telecommunication) remains, for now, the realm
of cyberfiction. The difficulty of dealing with space is reinforced at the end of the book
when it closes seemingly midway through an argument and, against established scholarly
practice, with a quotation. It is as if there is no way to conclude a discussion of space, no
possibility to box or bound it. We can only provisionally pin it down, take a reading or
sounding, and move on.

Originally written for PopMatters (October 2010) published version at
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/review/132055-acoustic-territories-sound-culture-and-everyday-life-by-brandon-labe/