Listening is an inherently empathetic act, requiring receptivity to the intentions of others and the natural world. Composer Pauline Oliveros wrote frequently about what it means to listen throughout her career, which spanned over half a century and encompassed electronic works, compositions for magnetic tape, improvisation, and exercises in focus and reflection designed to deepen everyday engagement with sound. She considered sound not only to be the audible vibrations of the air around us, but the totality of many vibrational energies throughout the universe. To listen is to be aware of one’s self in that collective whole.
Since her death in 2016, Oliveros’ ideas about what she called “Deep Listening” (which she described as “a practice that is intended to heighten and expand consciousness of sound in as many dimensions of awareness and attentional dynamics as humanly possible”) have become increasingly popular. In her 2019 book How To Do Nothing, Jenny Odell returns several times to Oliveros’ Deep Listening techniques as a salve to the increasingly chaotic flow of information in the Internet age. A 2016 article in The New Yorker brought her Sonic Meditations to a wide audience, saying they “make a timely case for listening as a form of activism.” Events have been staged throughout the country, from Houston to St. Paul to Washington, DC, celebrating her sonic legacy.
The salience of Deep Listening resides in its contrast to mainstream culture’s riptide trajectory towards distraction and saturation, towards siloed media and political environments. It also stands in opposition to the numbing listening habits encouraged by streaming, which positions music as a utilitarian tool for productivity, something to be ignored while your concentration rests elsewhere. Oliveros provided a secular alternative to the increasingly commodified mindfulness movement that paradoxically co-opts the posturing of meditative practice in the service of productivity and capital. Deep Listening exists as its own end, without a pretense of functionality.
Oliveros coined the term Deep Listening in 1989 to describe her collected improvisations with trombonist Stuart Dempster and vocalist Panaiotis, it would go on to become the name of the album released that same year on the under-appreciated avant-garde classical label New Albion. Important Records, which has spent nearly a decade producing impressive new editions of an array of Oliveros’ recordings, has collected the entirety of that seminal album in a new double LP, augmented by related material from a follow-up of sorts, 1991’s The Ready Made Boomerang, credited to the Deep Listening Band. The release is a remarkable realization of her ideas and demonstrates the sensitivity of the musicians to their physical environment, as well her profoundly expressive accordion playing and singing.
Both Deep Listening and The Ready Made Boomerang were recorded in a massive underground cistern in Washington State that Dempster had discovered some years before. The space, which once held two million gallons of water, has a 45-second reverberation time, and the recordings are defined by a surreal smearing of tones. Like much of Oliveros’ and Dempster’s work around this time, most of these improvisations are focused around extended drones, with Dempster’s trombone and didjeridu providing the backbone. Far from evoking any sort of stasis, these tones swell and resonate actively throughout the space, and the effect is hallucinatory. Melodic lines intertwine as they ripple and decay, and momentarily raised voices seemingly emerge from within the insistent, omnipresent root. “The cistern space, in effect, is an instrument being played simultaneously by all three composers,” Oliveros stated in the album’s original liner notes.
With the exception of “Nike,” which consists of the reverberant clang of metal on metal segueing into extemporaneous vocalizations and discordant trombone interjections, this collection is largely consonant, reveling in the resonances produced by the careful tuning of the instruments to just intonation. It would be inaccurate to describe music produced with such intensity as strictly pleasant, but there is a quality about it that feels centered and calming in a strange, otherworldly way. Pieces like “Lear” and “Ione” are meditative without falling into the trappings of new age music; instead, they enact core tenets of meditative practice—reflection, attentiveness, an openness to one’s surroundings—in a musical framework. Each musician is listening intently and reacting in kind not only to each other but to the space around them. The cistern stands in for the world, the entire universe, as they listen to its contours.
In a contemporary context, Deep Listening still sounds revolutionary. While drone, minimalism, and ambient music have proliferated in the intervening decades, few albums in those fields are as rich texturally and harmonically or have such a clarity of vision. The album remains vital largely because it embodies Oliveros’ ideas, which have themselves resurfaced as a corrective to the sinister undercurrents of social and technological advancement. If art is a way to grapple with philosophical and societal hardships, Deep Listening may resound with just as much, if not more, clarity now than when it was created.
Buy: Rough Trade
