READER put together for the Oscillation ::: The Weather festival 2025

Weathering

What is a field? How can we peg it out, and how is it reconfiguring itself again and again? The seventh edition of the Oscillation festival takes the weather as a starting point for an exploration of the stakes involved in working with and around field recordings. For the program of the festival, the weather has served as phenomenon, metaphor, and concept. It is condition, mood, and scientific, with components such as humidity, temperature, or pressure. It is made out of seasons, solar systems, and other circularities. It is complex and familiar at once.

For the festival, we wanted to relate these characteristics of the weather to the approaches and practices of field recording, a technique which plays a role in many (sound) artists’ work, and which has undergone big changes in the last two decades. Not only the evolving technical conditions have progressed, but those also have thrown up new ethical questions – or rather, the overwhelming possibility of recording and documenting just about everything and anything has sensitised us to such questions. At the same time, a different and more critical view has been introduced to older and often colonial archiving practices.

Field recording has a history with Q-O2. From 2011 to 2013 we were involved in a European project around the topic, cumulating into the Field Fest, the first festival Q-O2 has held. However, in 2025 other concerns are at stake when artists work with environments and while field recording is rather concrete in its uses and approaches, the approach via the weather will in this iteration of the festival allow to speak to the imagination. It not only connects to natural phenomena such as the life of plants and animals, but also to energies, moods and what lies beyond our understanding – and of course it also reconnects to the larger picture of the actual environment and its state of emergency.

This reader contains a rather loose and associative collection of contributions on aspects of both field recording and the weather stemming from artistic practice, literature, science, philosophy, and activism. It is a subjective choice complementing what can be experienced on-site and on-air during the four days of the festival. It is however also a spoiler: for Q-O2’s publishing house umland, and in collaboration with artist Justin Bennett, we are preparing a publication about field recording, planned to gather insights from this festival and to be published by the end of this year.