Soundscape and Power

In Balcony in the Forest, Julien Gracq composes a soundscape as a series of spatial events and material affects. He snatches it from “the smoke and the suburbs of Charleville” and “the jerry-built cabins of raw brick and concrete” to better situate it in a technological lineage that passes through all the operations of metallurgy. If the soundscape is fundamentally connected to war, it is not only because the explosive lead and broken iron punctuate its lived or imagined duration, but also because the methods of describing the soundscape and the military means of its destruction have metallurgy in common.