Spectral sonics: Field recordings from an extractive zone

Abstract

In the Lumière Brothers’ 36-s short, Oil Wells of Baku: Close View (1897),¹ we see wooden oil rigs consumed by ravenous flames in the foreground, thick black smoke billowing in the background. At eight frames per second, it is a (silent) spectacle which blurs the start of crude oil extraction with the birth of cinema itself, rendering the advance of the petrochemical age an aesthetic revolution as much as a scientific one (LeMenager 2012). The short inspired the emergence of a distinct “oil canon” within Azerbaijan's film industry, with subsequent features depicting Baku, the capital city and a historical oil town, as a landscape of oilfields, derricks, wells, and obsidian pools of crude oil. Films like The Reign of Oil and Millions, Azerbaijan's first feature (financed by several oil tycoons), prioritized the ocular, encouraging viewers to marvel at the enchanting and entrancing aesthetics of oil and to identify the city as a composite of oil infrastructure, oil aesthetics, and oil culture. Oil emerged as a protocinematic medium, in the words of Susan Schuppli (2015, 435), where its optical effect constituted a “cinematic feature of its very ontology, its molecular structure and behavior,” producing a “slick image.”

This visuality has been a consistent feature across other media as well—from cartography and film to photography, literature, and journalism. Much like the Lumière Brothers, visitors like Charles Marvin focused on the visual attributes, fascinated by enormous quantities of “dense smoke, soot, and sludge” produced as oil moved through the refining process. Early travelogues, much like early films, narrowed descriptions of life in the oilfields of Baku down to “black and greasy” buildings, vast morasses of mud and oil and roads weaving between “jutting rock and drifting sand” (Marvin 1891, [1884], 34). For foreigners particularly, it was all a “splendid spectacle” (35), easy to apprehend and part of a perfectly rational system, congruous with the science of the day. This slickness of depiction extended to early mapping projects of Baku, which tightly wove urbanism, the map and oil together, depicting the city not as geometric configurations of inhabitable space, but as parcels of Crown-owned or private oil lands. A good illustration of this is Baku City Administration's 1913 Plan of Baku, which alongside demarcating land allocated for sale by the annual treasury, primarily concerned parcels of oil land and parcels intended for commercial oil production, leaving out other spheres of life and production (Blau et al. 2018).

However, through their ocularcentrism (Jay 1988),² such narratives and forms have tended to neglect the other sensoriums of oil—namely, the soundscape of petroleum, its extraction, and refinement. This essay and accompanying multimodal piece attempts to expose the “slick image” (Schuppli 2015, 435) as reliant on the literal and metaphorical silencing of oil's aurality and orality. Conceptually, it extends Stefan Helmreich's (2015, xi) call to give sound to life “simulated, microbial, extraterrestrial, cetacean, anthozoan, planetary, submarine, ocean, auditory, or otherwise,” by recognizing that violent, toxic, and life-destroying matter also carries with it distinct waveforms and particles, interpretable to those willing to listen. In the words of Helmreich (xviii), sound “has many apparitions … shot through with definitional uncertainty,” rendering it the perfect medium through which we can apprehend indefinite and often amorphous forms of harm and violence. In both the essay and the multimodal accompaniment, sound is recognized as deeply relational, informing, influencing, and altering connections between humans and more-than-humans.

The essay builds upon the work of several anthropologists who have attended to the multisensorial cues of Anthropocene landscapes—particularly in zones of extraction and capitalist exploitation. Michael Cepek (2018, 132), in his pathbreaking Life in Oil, was quick to notice that the age of fossil fuel was registered as an “age of noise” within traditional Amazonian communities. In his fieldwork with the Cofán people, he noted the extensive vocabulary which developed to describe the effect of petroleum extraction on the Amazonian soundscape, with the Cofán notably using the word jeñañe (to make sound) to refer to processes of starting, driving, and managing the machines. A similar observation has been made by Prash Naidu (2019) in his ethnography of the Mambai in Timor Leste, recognizing the expanded sensory practices of his interlocutors in areas disrupted by extractive megaproject developments. Having been displaced from their sources of livelihood and exposed to toxic, potentially deadly substances, the Mambai utilized certain smells, sounds, sights, and tastes to evidence the fact that something was “not quite right” in their environment, bolstering resistance and political action.

Sonic developments in this essay are charted in a similar manner,³ attending to the ways in which crude oil has shaped the lives of Bakuvians—particularly communities of internally displaced people (IDPs) residing near zones of current and former oil extraction and production. The essay and accompanying multimodal project⁴ highlight the changes to local lexicon, conversation styles, storytelling strategies, and music making wrought by both historical extractivism and a more contemporaneous turn toward green gentrification and postextractivist development. Indeed, of equal interest are disappearing sounds, requiring Bakuvians to hear what is no longer there and develop novel strategies of attunement.⁵ Through shifting away from the usual textual paradigm of the fieldnote and toward field recordings remixed, layered, and entangled with archival recordings, commercial tracks, and incidental captures, there is an attempt to respond to James Clifford's (1986) decades-old question: “but what of the ethnographic ear?” The theory of ethnographic knowledge production at the heart of both essay and multimodal project is one which veers away from detached registration or the hope for perfect semiosis (Erlmann 2020), instead recognizing the importance of echoes, reverberations, hums, noises, interruptions and murmurs—forms of information which are often incomplete and indefinite.

This essay seeks to contextualize a series of field recordings captured in Baku's Balaxanı (Balakhani), Səbail (Sabail), and Qara/Ağ Şəhər (Black/White City) neighborhoods during the summer and autumn of 2019. The text works in tandem with a multimedia website, featuring a map of the capital city populated with “sonic” traces of crude oil. Both the essay and the website attempt to deal with the nature of testimony, historical artifacts, and changing sensoriums as extractivist capitalism shifts into new formations and modalities (Peterson 2021). The audio tracks featured on the website (and discussed in the essay) can be roughly divided into three categories—historical sounds of the petrochemical industry and industrial neighborhoods, field recordings taken from settlements slated for urban renewal, and ghost stories/urban legends recounted by locals (often IDPs). More than mere representation, each track is an immersion into the resource extractivism of 20th-century urbanity and the ecoextractivism of the 21st century. Tuning into the frequencies of Baku's urban metropolis facilitates conversation about sound and its absence—not only what the past may have sounded like, but also the sounds of renewal, demolition, or, perhaps, that of bubbling resistance.

Conventional maps, reliant on traditional cartographic principles of “accuracy, orientation, scale, reference point, and legend” (Powell 2016, 405), have failed to register the strange sonic features of places like the Black City, banishing sound with its lively indeterminacy into the realm of storytelling, entertainment, and the unrecorded every day. It is perhaps this resistance to cartography as usual which creates a bond between sound and spectrality when mapped together. Both are immaterial and spatially nonspecific, defined by a general inability to assume subjecthood and thus a concrete place within community. As Anthony Vidler (1994, 3) suggests, “the uncanny erupts in empty parking lots around abandoned or run-down shopping malls … in the wasted margins and surface appearances of postindustrial culture,” and so causes tangible changes to the urban landscape—much like a strange sound or unexpected noise. In a similar vein, Peter Ackroyd (2001) has argued that the spectral inspires ungovernability within carefully planned and managed spaces. Spectres, and I would argue spectral sounds, are agents of disruption existing “beyond the reach of any plan or survey” (216), strident in their unresponsiveness to policy committees or to centralized planning. This strategic capacity is at the heart of the project, showcasing sound as an instrument of testimony, political claim making, and spatial deterrence.

A strange metronome sets the pace of life in Baku: the bulldozer. The clangor of debris and rock hitting metal loaders signals the advancement of the largest urban development and remediation project in Baku's recent history—and with it a sense of both disappearing and competing sonics. Since the introduction of a “comprehensive action plan” for the improvement of “ecological conditions” by President Ilham Aliyev in 2006, numerous sites of former oil extraction and petrochemical industry have given way to upscale residential and commercial zones, catering to an increasingly international clientele. The Black City neighborhood,⁶ which houses a large percentage of the capital's internally displaced population, has been partially demolished to make way for a 221-hectare “post-oil” development, marketed as the White City: a capitalist dreamscape of monumental stone-clad buildings, grand avenues, gleaming office blocks, hotels, and a new subway line (Grant 2014).

These new structures have also brought new sounds, replacing the creaking, ringing, and gushing of Baku's former oil industry. Increasingly, one can hear barking designer dogs, the hum of air-conditioning units, English-language adverts, and, in the evenings, silence dictated by 24/7 security presence and CCTV. Unlike the visual markers of postindustrial gentrification and urbanism in Baku, which are often immediate and overt (e.g., publicized evictions and rapid demolitions), sonic markers are more ambiguous, often requiring careful and slow tracking. The recordings on the website were captured over successive months and using an array of different recording devices. At times, sound was captured passively over the span of an entire day, yet only minuscule bits proved useful or relevant. To properly apprehend the violence of the White City's new soundscape, elements like rhythm, speed, and medium, all needed to be considered, reflecting Rob Nixon's (2011, 2) concept of a slow violence which “occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.”

As argued by scholars like Linda Keeffe (2017), Christina Zanfagna and Alex Werth (2021), Christina Zanfagna and Alex Werth (2021)Piyusha Chatterjee and Steven High (2017), and Steven High and David Lewis (2007), processes of gentrification and urban displacement are multisensorial, impacting not only a visual experience of place but also what one can smell, see, taste, touch, and hear. Deindustrialization brings forth a trade-off whereby the removal of sounds considered grating, loud, or irritating also means the removal of lively and dynamic communities. The working-class or industrial way of life is thus “displaced to the periphery” (High and Lewis, 2007, 106), rendering places like the White City bereft of meaningful relations and exchange. If infrastructures of crude oil extraction and refinement act as “sound anchors” or “acoustic identifiers of community,” then their demolition compromises the very “essence of a place at particular moments in history” (Smith et al. 2004, 380). Indeed, even the new residents of the White City regularly complain about the unhomely, or unheimlich, atmosphere of the residential complexes, describing the environment as “çox sakit” (very quiet) and in need of more “canlılıq” (liveliness).

The broken and disrupted relations which pervade sites of postindustrial gentrification have a sonic quality to them. In one of the videos uploaded onto the project website, a Russian guide's tour of the White City is intermixed with warped and modulated police sirens and shop alarms, resulting in a sense of trespass and disquietude. In another section of the site, one can hear the decontextualized noise of demolition merge with gusts of wind and then silence. Through this, the sonic becomes a more-than-natural, more-than-human actant (Fernando 2022), reminding both inhabitants and visitors of the jarring effect of imperialist and capitalist extraction. By transforming the emergent sounds of the White City into unsettling and dissonant forms, the project attempts to problematize the apparent clean break between petro-extractivism and postindustrialism.

The sound compositions highlight the way in which sustainable and post-fossil fuel urbanism is reliant on the further displacement of already displaced communities—IDPs, miscellaneous vendors, unofficial businesses, stray dogs, and newly arrived migrant laborers—achieved partly through noise abatement orders, verbal warnings/threats and the thundering noise of constant construction. Ultimately, despite Aliyev's desire for the country to leave behind its “post-Soviet” status (Diener and Hagen 2013), sound reveals history to be stubborn and sticky.

Unlike the eerie and disturbed soundscape of the White City, the remaining industrial neighborhoods of Baku are alive with noise—particularly the small strip of the Black City hugging Suleyman Vazirov where I conducted most of my fieldwork. At the end of 2023, Azerbaijan was still hosting 658,000⁷ ethnic Azerbaijanis internally displaced due to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, with a large percentage living on former, and at times active, zones of oil extraction and production in both Baku and the industrial city of Sumgait. With most still registered to their former homes in the Karabakh region, brownfield zones and landscapes deemed uninhabitable (due to extensive toxicity and abandoned infrastructure) have provided IDPs with an opportunity to build makeshift homes and communities within the capital. Over the past two decades in particular, these makeshift settlements have assumed a more durable form, becoming lively hubs of exchange, community, and small-scale/self-sufficient entrepreneurialism.

By sight only, the rich relationality of the extractive zone is not apparent. Elaborate walls bend around makeshift houses. Often made of metal with ornate inscriptions and patterning, they cleave vision into a series of flat surfaces and skinny alleyways—a tactic of compartmentalization which seemingly assures the privacy of those residing inside the walled plots. However, besides privacy, there is also a sense of impenetrability to places like the Black City, exploited by state officials who paint the landscape as “relatively empty” and “waiting for someone to put it to good use.” Indeed, when spoken to, municipal workers frequently denied the existence of IDP communities in the Black City, telling me that most “shacks” were abandoned, used occasionally by squatters or by different businesses to store trash and refuse. Through the process of recording sound, however, a different narrative emerges.

Despite being a visual barrier, the walls are also, inadvertently, a communal ear canal amplifying whispered conversations and dispersing the sound of daily chores. By mid-morning, the vestibular streets of downtown Baku ring with neighborly conversations, door-to-door sales pitches, and the diegetic sounds of DIY businesses—from garage mechanics to impromptu front yard cafes. As one interlocutor, Aylin, stated: “As the day progresses, the louder life gets over here,” recognizing the tightly woven relationship between the quotidian and the choral. Sound for Black City residents like Aylin is synonymous with the communal—a neighborhood shared by the many and contingent on continuous public and civic activity. For the older generation, it brings back memories of working on collective farms (kolkhozes) in Karabakh during the Soviet period, with labor accompanied by song.⁸

The website contains several layered snippets recorded in the Black City—bird chatter, a folk song playing through broken speakers, stray dogs barking, uezzin broadcasts, the offers of a door-to-door salesman, and the low buzz of power lines. These recordings capture the layered and mutually constitutive elements of temporality, place, politics, and sociocultural relationships. The flat surface of the map becomes multilayered and interactive, allowing other narratives to emerge. The tracks attest to the fact that working-class life, in both zones of industrial agriculture and industrial oil production, has always been defined by noisiness and volume. According to Aylin, there is pride in the community when it comes to the decibel range of life in the Black City, seen by some as a strategic way to push back against the narrative of property developers and the Aliyev government. IDPs, so used to being used by the state to promote pro-government policies and initiatives, are actively rejecting their depiction as “meek,” “reserved,” and ultimately “passive.”

One local woman, during an impromptu neighborhood meeting, lamented that, “even before they evict us, they paint us as nonexistent, as if we have no voice, as if we have no say. . . . Next time I see a government agent, I will scream at them, I will scream.” For Hung-Ying Chen (2020, 1306), “sonic care” (cheering, booing, etc.) is one way seemingly dispersive, unorganized crowds forge bonds and exercise solidarity in real time. Contrastingly, silence is equated with a lack of care or the imposition of conditions under which the act of caring is restricted or erased. The Black City, in its enforced silence, is painted as a place emptied of social relationships. Indeed, one government official I spoke to in Baku stressed that the Black City was nothing but a “dump,” a derelict space in which I was only likely to hear “the creak of metal frames … maybe a few barking strays,” or, simply, according to a local Bakuvian living nearby, the “gust of the wind blowing through a wasteland … only home to a shanty town full of foreigners.” Silence solidifies the claim to territory, resulting in an aural terra nullius.

For those still residing in the Black City—a mix of rural communities displaced by the Nagorno-Karabakh war, lower income Bakuvians, and workers from the South—amplifying quotidian noise has become a strategy in combating gentrification.⁹ It is a response to the ear-piercing bulldozers which regularly rip through the neighborhood, interrupting school classes, sleeping schedules, and setting off migraines, anxiety attacks, and car alarm systems.¹⁰ It is also a response to the state's brazen use of sonic violence—the mobilization of grating, even injurious sounds to elicit discomfort. According to Aylin, developers purposefully drill and demolish during hours of rest or community meetings to impose their “authority and dominance over every aspect and decibel range of life.” In many ways, the unequal distribution of noise imposes what Tripta Chandola (2012, 391) refers to as an “informal-illegal-immoral” matrix where a narrative of immorality is systemically and systematically constructed. It devalues the claims and rights of those residing in the Black City to be equally noisy and disruptive, thus rendering their soundscape out-of-place and, at times, even criminalizable.

So, to oppose all of this, I recorded frequently. Stories flowed readily between neighbors and strangers. Unlike drones or cameras, sounds could be gathered discreetly, never interrupting the flow of a story nor emulating the aesthetics of surveillance. Even with demolition chipping away at vital nodes of daily life, people continued to speak. Aylin reminded me of the Azeri tradition of ashik storytelling, where a dastan (a traditional epic) or a shorter original composition is sung by a singer-poet and bard. In contrast to Islamic doctrine, there is no objection to heroines singing publicly. For Aylin, at least, the dastan contained kernels of family history, advice, and lore. She stressed that IDPs singing ashik stories permitted a public history, a transference between generations which required very little in terms of resources and could be spontaneously conducted—in communal gardens, street corners, even bus stops. I often ended up sending the recordings to Aylin so that an aural archive could be created, attesting to the liveliness of the IDP community in the Black City and the presence of rooted tradition within a community depicted as movable, makeshift, and disposable.¹¹

With the spatial erasure of IDP and lower-income communities—through forced evictions, resettlement programs, and the demolition of community hubs—sonic methods promise an assertion of presence. Interjections, echoes, and outcries disrupt the ocularcentrism of traditional maps by indexing a different sort of inhabitation (Macpherson 2015). In Baku, where new developments arise seemingly overnight, petrifying the city in ornamental sandstone and gyprock shell, life rings out in the hollows and gaps. To map thus becomes a way to turn away from the visual landmarks of capital, prestige, and development, turning instead to the soundwaves of life, kinship, and resistance.

Two tracks containing a local ghost story and one track featuring an urban legend have also been uploaded to the website (hyper)linked to the Black/White City, Sabail, and the oilfields of Balakhani. Ostensibly, all three narratives began circulating in the Black City around the latter half of 2018. The stories are anonymous and have been shared primarily through oral storytelling—during everyday conversations, friendly gossip sessions, festivities, and neighborly exchanges. While the stories have traveled among dozens (if not hundreds) of Bakuvians, undergoing subtle shifts and changes, the basic premise remains the same—all three are tales of vengeful haunting, with a ghostly being made of neft (crude oil) defying the parameters set by agents of order and governance. Inspired by the recent emergence of an anthropological hauntology (Good et al. 2022) which attempts to apprehend the “haunting presence of settler colonialism, of profound global inequalities, and of reactionary efforts to silence the past,” the figure of the kabus (ghost) is read as a distinctly radical and disruptive entity, exposing the sociopolitical fabric of Baku for critique and intervention. For Black City interlocutors, in particular, the kabus is a tangible manifestation of the forces of environmental degradation, displacement, and neoliberal capitalism.

While the creation of the ghost stories/urban legends can be considered a sensemaking exercise, allowing inhabitants to comprehend their own subjective experience of extractivism and postindustrialization, the act of sharing through oral storytelling (and exaggerated aurality) constitutes a distinctly political act—one which seeks justice. Indeed, over the past decade, ghost stories and urban legends have often been invoked as a last resort to slow down violent processes of gentrification, displacement, and resettlement. In the Black City alone, locals have taken to cautioning real estate agents and property developers with references to unpredictable spirits, capable of causing psychological or physical harm to those who cross without permission or seek to make a profit. Similarly, threats and curses are routinely directed at the local council agents and police officers tasked with checking infrastructure in order to justify resettlement on the grounds of liability and risk.

In addition to warning, the spectral also functions as a testimonial force, countering claims of purity and renewal in areas where municipal and state-wide corruption has often meant cursory clean-ups and incomplete remediation schemes. Examples include the construction of Kristal Abşeron (Bayıl), a luxury residential unit, on land still contaminated with radium (and brought to the surface by decades of oil drilling), as well as the heavy metal compounds present in the White City's drinking water supply, exposed through citizen science initiatives. Ghost stories thus shift into genres of lamentation and complaint, which attest to material histories otherwise at risk of effacement by modernization. The kabus, made of noxious oil and capable of seeping through the protective cocoon of private property and domesticity, assumes the role of a social agent granted the power to cross “ontological boundaries,” becoming “an uncanny, non-mediated presence” (Tappe et al. 2016, 3). The kabus crosses time, space, and securitized infrastructure to deliver knowledge otherwise repressed or obfuscated. Indeed, Gordon ([1997] 2008, xvi), in her work Ghostly Matters, argues that “haunting is one way in which abusive systems of power make themselves known,” with the appearance of a specter or ghosts a way to produce “a something-to-be-done.” The kabus thus provides a way to inhabit sights otherwise deemed hostile or untenantable and to process the trauma of extractivism, imperialism, and other violent forces.

As pointed out by Derrida (1994, xix), to “speak at length about ghosts, inheritance, and generations, generations of ghost” is to speak “in the name of justice”. The multimodal project conceives of ghost stories and urban legends as forms through which justice is sought. For IDPs, oral storytelling is a legitimate strategy of knowledge-sharing and protest against the government's expectation of a silent and orderly process of displacement.¹² For interlocutors like Aylin, the kabus is both düşmən (enemy) and müttəfiq (ally), representing the petroleum industry and the IDPs themselves—particularly as they are erased from the landscape of the Black City and moved to the outskirts of the capital. By placing ghosts and the sonic on the map, there is an attempt to spatially locate otherwise immaterial facets of community resistance while also altering traditional cartographic principles. Both the spectral and the sonic rupture the visual through transitoriness and the invocation of a polyphony of self and place. This is particularly important in the context of Azerbaijan, where mapmaking has been essential to projects of resource extraction, territorial demarcation, and the forced displacement of poor and working-class communities. Instead of visualizing untapped veins of oil or prospective sites for offshore drilling, spectral-sonic maps present sites of complex time and history, where dynamic processes of urban, environmental, and social change are depicted concurrently. Such maps not only present “alternative views [and experiences] of the world,” particularly from the perspective of marginal or obscured characters, but also “views of alternative worlds” (Viveiros de Castro 2013).

Modernity has radically altered the very topography of life. On a map, it has materialized in easily recognizable forms—as waste pool, monocrop plantation, oil pipeline, industrial irrigation canal, monstrous shipping port, and the like. Neat, identical, unending rows, lines, and cuts on the landscape. It has an undeniable visual quality to it, acknowledged by the likes of Mike Davis (2024), Martín Arboleda (2020), and Imre Szeman (2013). Yet, modernity, in all its violent articulations, is also aural and oral in nature—radically altering what we hear and, as a result, the stories we tell. Our ears become an essential tracker as both extractivism and late capitalism mutate into forms uncanny and unprecedented, occupying new spaces, timescales, and frequencies. Such attunement provides the very means to account for, even remix, forces which encroach in increasingly intimate and somatic ways. In Baku, turning toward the discordant and loud is simply unavoidable.¹³ It seemingly drowns out everything else and obliterates the senses. While the offensive sounds of nodding donkeys, alarm systems, and industrial drills hardly seem liberatory, they often carry fugitive sonic artifacts—from cries of protest, the noise of inhabitation, to inherited song. Within what can be, at best, considered background noise, at worst noise pollution, listeners may overhear those who oppose, contest, and resist the regimes of capital, modernity, and consumption. In all the loudness, there is mending, in all the frenzy, there is unity.