“do something”: The work of sound artist ake (Preview)

 

A subscriber post on Substack about Chinese sound artist ake.

ake’s biography describes her as “a surrogate weeper, currently working and living in Beijing, conducting site and context specific sound experiments, events, behaviors and installations, also writing poetry, being a musician, organizer and waiter”. Among other activities, ake “accidentally initiated the nomadic space A2 space”, and appears as part of collaborative projects on Zhu Wenbo’s Beijing-based cassette label Zoomin’ Night, as well as Yan Jun’s sub jam cassette box Silence is Shit, but ake (阿科), released in January 2025 as Sub jam 020, is her first solo album.

Working with the material to hand, ake’s work gives a new, subversive meaning to the well-worn term “site-specific”. The eight tracks fit together awkwardly, like a kind of broken jigsaw. They refuse to build up to a unity, but remain fragments, though, as fragments, they are in themselves whole: broken wholes, wholly broken. A majority of the tracks are field recordings, though this is no pastoral. If it has a ‘field’, it is the field of the (urban) social: social action and social inaction as experienced in the corners of everyday life, the boredoms and discontents and acts of quiet rebellion by which one might negotiate one’s way through the world and its systems, what is given to us, what is taken away from us. These are recordings of environments, or recordings that make environments, that intervene in them, that frame and re-frame them, that question or that spark questions. Workers destroying a wall in a Shenzen hotel are heard from a bed, the hammer blows a kind of impromptu drum set, accompanied by scattered fragments of conversation [...] How do we listen to this album? A field recording is supposed to put emphasis on the environment, but these recordings often feel ‘inwards’ as much ‘outward’. It sometimes feels as if the listening is being done as much by the performer as the listener, eavesdropping, confused.