Instrument of State: Reinstrumenting Recorded Sound and Recomposing Listening

Recording is more than a century old. Electronic music is no longer new. Sampling has long belonged to studio practice and to DJ culture alike. The contemporary shift lies elsewhere: in the material control of sound transformation and in the possibility of treating recorded sound as an instrument. The session examines three conditions of such reinstrumentation. The first concerns control. The second concerns the material. The third concerns listening itself. Each condition is specified through closely analysed examples of sound fabrication: phase-vocoder stretching of a creak, slowing down of a metallic rattle, transposition of a mechanical cycle, phase-shifted looping of a rebound and so on. This session draws on a daily recording practice, on the descriptive database built from it and on the audiovisual performance ‘Instrument d'état’ (Rio de Janeiro, 2026).