Archival Recordings: Ian Nagoski

In this episode, we turn our attention to field recordings not as neutral documents, but as fragile, political, and deeply human traces of history — sounds shaped by migration, displacement, technology, and power. We’re interested in what it means to listen to the past, and how archives themselves can become sites of encounter, interpretation, and responsibility.

Our guest today is Ian Nagoski, music researcher, and the founder of Canary Records, a platform dedicated to preserving and recontextualizing early 20th-century recordings made by migrant communities in the United States. Rather than approaching these materials as curiosities or folkloric artifacts, Nagoski treats them as living documents: sonic evidence of cultural negotiation, hybridity, longing, and survival.

Much of his work challenges the conventional boundaries between field recordings and commercial records, asking whether discs produced for immigrant audiences might function as accidental ethnographies — recordings that capture social worlds otherwise absent from official histories. By treating the archive itself as a field site, Nagoski practices a form of listening that foregrounds absence, mislabelling, and fragmentation, while critically engaging with the colonial and industrial frameworks that shaped early recording practices.

In this conversation, we explore listening as a historical method, the ethics of archival recovery, and the politics of reissuing music born out of migration. We ask what early recordings can teach us about identity, belonging, and memory — and what responsibilities contemporary listeners and archivists carry when bringing these sounds back into circulation.