A Soft Hiss Of This World

“Φύσις δε kρύπτεσθαι φιλεΐ” – Heraclitus

A white book and a transparent flexi-disc.

A Soft Hiss of This World is about disappearance in many respects, such as the loss of language as a result of the Anthropocene, through the absence of certain states and processes that occur naturally in the environment, like the different states of water, snow and ice. The sounds of snow, ice and snowflakes are the core and the sound material of this research project.

The book brings together three texts.

The text by Tim Ingold opens the book and introduces the reader to the main subjects of the research: language, landscape, sound and listening. It is an easy read that aims to immerse us in the Finnish landscape and in the act of listening to its sounds and silences.

Carmen Pardo’s text first unfolds the way in which gazing at and listening to the snow constitute the experience of a disappearance, of a concentration in the void or nothingness in which A Soft Hiss of This World participates. Secondly, in dialogue with Roland Barthes, it questions the kind of listening involved in recording different states of snow. From that listening, the text finally proposes the exercise of recording as an experience that implies a multiple temporality, reminding us that, in fact, we always inhabit a heterogeneity of times.

The third text is by Mikel R. Nieto and is divided into four parts:

The first part, “This is nothing”, contains Nieto’s texts and thoughts on the key points of the research, such as silence, listening, landscape, language, disappearance and absence, the archive, hyperobjects and the Anthropocene.

The second part, “Diaries (2009 – 2019)”, brings together a selection of photographs and the most outstanding moments of the research in a brief, direct and poetic format, noting the corresponding places and dates.

The third part is a code that reflects the loss of most of the sound recordings made during the research: more than 600 hours of recordings. This code is the only thing that could be recovered from all those recordings, apart from the one sound recording published in physical format, as a transparent flexi-disc.

The fourth part is the result of silencing each and every word of John Cage’s Lecture on Nothing, leaving only the punctuation marks (commas, periods and separators) and the last sentence of Cage’s text.

The only recording recovered has been published physically as a transparent flexi-disc. Every time it is played, the needle slowly wears away the vinyl itself, making the sound of the recording disappear. Each listening therefore destroys the sound.