KRONOS <<>> VOX
ON THE TIMBRE OF TIME
“Every organized sound forever carries the trace of the moment it was recorded.”
Regardless of its form, until quite recently, music served a function that invited us to construct a meaningful, holistic world based on momentary experiences, encouraging us to collaborate with others at both the center and periphery of that world, forming communities in various localities, and encouraging us to seek and discover the commonalities within these communities. Later, the “system” began to sever the potential of independent networks that sought to find commonalities, and in this process, music was re-structured, coded, and marketed in a way that would allow it to be perceived and understood as a “fast-consuming commodity.”
As speed was imposed on the masses as a mundane necessity, music was transformed into “a medium to be consumed in seconds”, although once it was considered as a discipline with mass appeal that facilitated the free expression of various segments of society on sonic grounds and considered as a tool to enable democratic participation in artistic production. So as a result, it lost its organic connection with the space and its audience/viewer/follower. Yet, just a century ago, music existed more in its own unique places, intertwined with social rituals, taking form specific to various localities and conditions, and being recorded in non-isolated spaces. Naturally, it easily found its place within daily life. The products that emerged within this natural flow, and the ephemera that accompanied them, until recently, invited us to look at “what sound scribbles on time and the unique visual designs that give dimension to what is scribbled.”
"ONCE CREATED, THE SOUND AND ACTION CANNOT BE DESTROYED."
The act of documenting and archiving independent music, especially over the last eighty years, has been defined by embedding numerous artistic disciplines aimed at “enhancing” or “complementing” the production practices. While achieving excellent recording quality was the primary goal until half a century ago, all details regarding the cultural background—where, with whom, how, and why the recording was made—have gradually been deliberately ignored. Information about the creation of the audio material has naturally become anonymized. Those entities that have a habit of consistently keeping the records of the credits of the recordings were thus rendered invisible by the “system.” Because the “system,” having perfected its marketing practices since the beginning of the millennium, has achieved a mode of operation that prioritizes artificial music, profiting from every drop of anonymity in its monopolization campaign. Our hope is that as long as creative peoples or communities exist, this vicious mode of operation seems unlikely to be sustainable. As the “system” attempts to create subsystems that are assumed to be universally accepted in order to ensure its sustainability, independent creative individuals, communities, and networks that prioritize the human context will likely produce counter-systems that will resist to it in a guerrilla manner.
Sarp Keskiner (founder, producer, editor, 2004)
The notation system, which we can define as the writing of music, is thought to have a history of approximately 3500 years. Music was recorded and transmitted through this important invention, but when we consider how, why, and in what contexts this music was performed, we find ourselves as if we are facing a dictionary written in a language we do not know. It took almost until the 13th century to arrive at approximate meanings in our own language from this dictionary.
Just as speech of humankind corresponds to clusters of symbols/letters and their semantics that spread within the atmosphere, music corresponds to senses that spread throughout the human soul. Therefore, unlike language, it does not require dictionaries or translation. We will probably never know when our ancestors, who only used their hands and respiratory systems, began this activity, so it would not be wrong to say that this act belongs to a time before speech. Dance is similar; such acts do not require anything more than the natural equipment that humans possess.
By the end of the 19th century, music had become capable of being recorded and played back using mechanical methods, and this technological advancement brought with it an entirely new system of musical notation. This system not only recorded notes but also made it possible to record the conditions, under which the music was recorded, the person themselves and their environment—in other words, elements that could not be transcribed into musical notation. Almost all of the compilations from the recent past, whose preservation we rarely consider, were made possible thanks to this technology, and music gained a completely different capacity in its struggle against its mother: Time.
However, just half a century later, the aforementioned vicious “system” was created, and this millennia-long journey was transformed into easily produced/consumed byproducts of fleeting whims and imposed cultural identities, making music a matter of quantity rather than quality. Let’s not forget that in the last decade, mobile phones were marketed according to the number of MP3s they could store in their memory.
Of course, it’s difficult to nourish the human soul with ready-made food. That’s why our pursuit of independent groups, their deceased members, recordings sleeping in storage spaces or bedrooms, forgotten in transferred studios, analog equipment, and stale media is not just a romantic whim. In our view, all these auditory resources that have remained/been left outside the “system” are part of humanity’s auditory journey.
In this context, as a grassroots collective; Kronovox Archives has decided to live up to its name and fulfill its responsibilities.
Fergün Urgancıoğlu (partner, producer, editor, 2025)