EXCERPT Lawrence Abu Hamdan is an artist focused on the politics of listening, a self-proclaimed ‘private ear’ and director of Earshot, the first agency dedicated to acoustic analysis and open-source investigation in the field of human rights. This conversation was conducted over email between November 2023 and January 2024 in relation to themes of his recently published book Live Audio Essays. Steve Goodman: I’m interested in the relation of something loosely called the ‘audio essay’ to our contemporary epistemological climate, which is referred to as a technologically intensified crisis of representation, a climate of post-truth, and the generalised spin-cycle of a memetic fog of war. It seems to me that some of the most interesting approaches to audio essays respond to this condition of knowledge, this unstable ground, as does the essay film. They do so in divergent ways, but, tellingly, both try to navigate through an interzone between fact and fiction. On the one hand, there is a sometimes-allegorical orientation that tends toward extrapolation, speculation, and fabulation, perhaps setting out from a real location or event, and then layering it up with fictional dimensions and productive untruths in order to reinforce the wider cultural or political resonance of that event or place. On the other hand, one could situate your work within a kind of ‘investigative aesthetics’ and it’s this theme that I’d like our conversation to revolve around. You’ve recently had a book published entitled Live Audio Essays. I read in an interview with you that you regard a ‘live audio essay’ as a spoken monologue. Elsewhere you have noted that you don’t really see yourself as a writer, and yet these transcripts, with their stage directions about where sounds or videos would be played, etc., but also their digressions, also lend themselves very well to the page. You say, ‘I call them essays because they drift and move, and they often hold contradictory positions.’ I wonder if you could reflect on how the essay form, whether spoken ‘live’ or written or recorded, is a useful vehicle for your work as a ‘private ear’. Lawrence Abu Hamdan: The audio essay is the space I use outside of the urgency of the investigative work. The essay form is vital to the practice in that it provides the space and time to develop conceptually some of the political reflections about the acts of listening I have engaged with throughout the course of an investigation. Often cases come down to milliseconds between sounds, the gap between a gunshot and its echo perhaps, or minuscule fragments of the frequency spectrum, the fundamental frequency of a hydraulic door breacher comes to mind. This focus on the sonic minutiae happens for the most part alone, sometimes listening hundreds of times over and over again to be able to decode what is happening in a recorded event. The essay is the space to translate this process into a collective act of listening, pausing and slowly zooming out from the sonic minutiae to unfold these sounds into their full significance through the course of the live event.…