Steph Kretowicz: Somewhere I’ve Never Been

Can you tell a story of a place in the same fracturing way it was experienced? Pulling together field recordings from international soundscapes, Somewhere I’ve Never Been follows the author’s account of loss and being alone in a self-started journey through the US, Europe and the Middle East. One part of an expanded narrative on many platforms, and against the grain of dominant visual narratives, the book is told through the sounds of corporate expansion and pop cultural hegemony heard in an ever-uneven era of globalisation and cultural mediation.

Drawn away from the music of loaded family pasts and brittle presents to the sprawling inertia of a US road trip, Kretowicz is hooked by Jason Derulo, Fairuz, Harry Partch, Lipgloss Twins, poorly pronounced Polskibus safety announcements, the crucial influence of Celine Dion; in the end pulled back to the jarring patter and endless shifts of London. Highly personal, and deeply implicating, this selection of research-based creative essays by a music critic-by-trade are tensely complicit with the global audio-space they are extracted from. With only her ever-present dictaphone as a constant, what Kretowicz hears—filtered by her own experience—is confronted by the moving contradictions of visualised space, histories of physical and ‘virtual’ mobility through geographical bubbles and the policed intersections of a world split and bound by movement.