A load of cutlery lands in a drawer at the same time; it’s later, darker. An unripe lemon falls off a conveyor belt. A woman drinking lemonade on a bus is reading a magazine article about David Oluwale. A mouse or a rat is hidden in a wall, scurrying up and down in bursts. In the gaps between the rat we hear a car horn in the distance. Someone is indicating something, but it’s not clear yet. All we know is that unedited, it falls exactly in the gaps of the rat journeying down the wall. The running of young children at the gates of a Catholic school in Jakarta. A crab scrabbles, stuck in a plastic bucket with no water. A red-faced woman jogging too fast with headphones on. The car horn fades up. As it gets louder, more horns. A funfair is arriving in town on the back of trucks. A military parade is setting off in the distance. Phones going off next to kettles boiling. All the climbers clipping on ropes and carabiners on the sides of mountains. All the wind heard rushing through spinning spokes, through railings on boats, through computer fans. The sound of all hot air balloons rising. All canoes down rapids, all motorbikes overtaking, all ships setting sail. All the helicopters taking off, recorded from above. All the mopeds pulling out, recorded from underneath. Now the ooze of Canadian tar sands.
Now the muddied sound, recorded from inside, of a hundred male commuters’ hands randomly thudding on a metal handrail at a London station recorded from the inside of the rail itself. One commuter’s hand creates a particularly long bong on the rail that resonates languidly and painfully. The sound is fed back through empty sections of the keystone pipeline with a ribbon microphone and some huge speakers, creating a howl of lugubrious bloom, a purity of tone that baffles and booms and slips and terrifies and tips and excites and punishes and leaps and rewards and scares and grows and grows and grows and rises and leaps and blooms and blooms and overwhelms and at its peak stops dead with a short break followed by a thud: a suddenly headless pigeon has fallen out of a tree and hit the tarmac by your feet next to a front gate on Tankerton Road. The sound is like nothing you have heard: a mixture of feather, and guts, and air, and dust and cedar needles. A whoomph, like a central-heating boiler firing up. But there’s a thwack to it too, as if someone punched a hollow wall with a thick cushion over their hand. There may be other birds still heard in the background, and there’s no sign of the head, but you don’t notice either of these things. You notice how recent the blood is, though. It should have never happened, but it did. And it can be heard here.
2.
Adagio
To wait
A schoolgirl with black hair, dirty shoes and a short scar on her arm is sitting on the end of an unmade bed at dusk with headphones on. We hear the tinniness of the sound for a while as it leaks from her ears, but it’s impossible for us to work out what it is. There is a slight breeze through an open window. An occasional insect, the angry bark of a stray dog.
We crossfade into a different sound – 180,000 hotel mini-bar refrigerators, many of them empty, grimly buzzing in unison. It takes ten minutes for the sound to rise up slowly, as if distilled through a filter that only allows lower frequencies. A man is playing the recording of these fridges from a set of speakers somewhere outside Los Angeles, in a semi-desert area, and we’re hearing it from the perspective of a shotgun microphone held by a woman carried towards the speakers on another woman’s back. The sound of the fridges has been carefully put together according to the star rating of the hotel system, with the lowest-rated hotel fridges heard at the start. The fridge sound is stacked as the hotel rating gets bigger. The five-star hotel fridges are the last ones we hear and are likely to be quieter than many of the others – the world gets quieter the richer you are. We may hear a little dust kicked up along the way, or a light aircraft overhead.
Just as the sound of the fridges becomes overwhelming, intense, it cuts suddenly to the inside of an empty shipping container inside a depot at night in an unknown Chinese port. We think the container is empty but again, slowly rising over twenty-three seconds, we hear the sound of every black prisoner in America breathing in unison. This is played out of a mobile phone left on a bright-green plastic seat.
Over the top of these two long recordings, we start to hear layered sounds. An overhead projector on full in an empty boardroom. A bleep of a cash machine. A slow knock. A different room tone – an air conditioner is positioned some distance from our vantage point, but its grey wind and greyer noise can be heard through a small grille in the ceiling of the room. Someone has knocked again on a neighbour’s door with three quick knocks in succession, but there’s no reply and it’s not clear if the person who knocked has left yet or is waiting there. There appears to be no sound from inside. In fact there is someone in the room, and there’s a microphone very near their head. We can tell from their breathing that the person is not asleep. There is an anxiety in the unevenness of the breath and we hear their mouth open a little after the third inhalation. There is a slight crisp brush as their head tilts a little on the stiff cotton of the pillowcase. We carry on hearing that, but underneath there is now the slight rustle of thirty to forty people of mixed ages trying to be still, in a different kind of space, a presence. After thirty seconds or so of this, a rhythm fades in of a chugging air valve on a recently empty beer keg in the basement of the Queen’s Head pub in Downe. Beneath it, the tone of an empty, windowless bathroom. People are staring in silence up at the departures board in a train station. A knock. Many people are ringing a loved one but their call isn’t being answered. A life jacket is thrown towards a dinghy. New recruits at a call centre sit in silence as they wait for the supervisor to arrive. Another knock. We then hear all the different ringing tones from around the world. They are layered and organised so that the person who is holding the longest is the last call that we hear. At the exact point the caller hangs up, a huge metal urn for heating water has been turned on by someone a long way from home. The bubbling is layered up underneath what follows, but it never reaches a peak, we never hear the urn switch off. Instead it fades out slowly over two to three minutes. By the time it has gone, you won’t have noticed. You may hear the sound of your own clothes as you shift your position instead.
The girl slowly turns the handle of a roughly painted wooden door.
A dog is scratching the closed door to a flower shop. A few musicians turn the pages of their newspapers over as they wait for a studio session to start. A cook is filing his nails with an emery board next to a pan full of hot oil in a prison kitchen, but it’s not at temperature yet. A page of scribbled notes is torn from a book. The doors release on a Eurostar train with a tough exhalation of hydraulics. Seventeen washing machines in seventeen women’s refuges have finished their cycle but they haven’t been emptied; we can hear the last of the water draining away. A bath is run but nobody is in it – we just hear a dripping tap. A doorman is gently kicking a brick wall to keep his toes warm. Trainee priests are practising swinging incense at the same pace. Tourists are queuing up to use a bathroom near the Egyptian Pyramids. The watch of a waitress is ticking furiously in Istanbul – a microphone has been set in her sleeve. A teenage boy in black is walking towards his school with a variety of weapons in his bag. The slipping of thick lenses into testing glasses at an opticians. A huge but quiet crowd looks around nervously. Every time someone opens a back door, the wind passes through the ground floor of a hotel in Kampala and the fronds of a plastic palm tree in the lobby rub against themselves. An elderly man is yawning by a fence at night. The snap as someone stands on a twig.
All the hotel TVs on standby in Korea buzz together for a minute. A text message is received at a bus stop. A scientist’s shoulder clicks as she bends over in a yoga class. A traffic warden writes out a parking ticket. A person working on the front desk of a hotel listens to the scratching of the pen of the overweight guest filling in the form and then there’s a tight click as one hundred credit cards are put on ninety-nine countertops. Now a firm yank on a ticket from a machine that gives you a place in a queue at an emb
assy. A traffic jam in a New Jersey tunnel. A spy in a hotel room with headphones on absentmindedly fiddles with a Hot Wheels toy car. A woman on hold to a bailiff quickly presses her phone to her ear in such a way that we hear it click against her earring.
A child on a boat yawns. Another child is sleeping nearby. Another child’s teeth are chattering very slightly behind the first child. A child is standing in the dark at the top of the stairs shaking, their bare feet nudging the same spot on a cold floor. A child is inside an ice-cream freezer, but we just hear the hum of the refrigeration unit. A child is on a bike at traffic lights, playing with their brake lever in time with a child 1,000 miles away on a rooftop picking at moss with a toothpick, in time with a child not so far away shaking a bag of Lego, in time with a child running a metal file along their teeth, in time with a child dragging a stick down the side of an expensive car, in time with a child a long way from all the others brushing dust off their trousers. We hear a child in a hiding place waiting to be found.
While on a phone call, someone is absentmindedly stroking an expensive sculpture in the shape of a giant bench made out of disposable electric toothbrushes, the bristles facing outwards, but it gives the illusion of naturalness from the sound it produces.
A sharper sound breaks this new spell: a bag of frozen peas being thrown into a freezer. Now the ineffectual scraping of ice off the inside of a window with a passport. A collection of microphones set in seawater listening to the freezing over of winter but sped up like time-lapse. A bell as a bridge lowers in a snowstorm. Now ice being shovelled in one gesture in the Sydney fish market into a polystyrene fish box. Then the pumps in native oyster purification tanks inside a warehouse bubbling away. Another shovel of ice. More peas. Asma al-Assad is running a bath. A small brittle knock is heard if you listen carefully as she puts down a scented candle on the edge – the glass of the bottom of the candle touching the enamelled, metal bath. A shovel of salt. Someone is rolling up a prayer mat. A pedestrian crossing bleeps at night to indicate it’s safe to cross. A maître d’ is standing in an empty restaurant waiting for customers and looking down the road. A tour bus in Peru is being filled up with Chevron Diesel, a mic is placed in the fuel tank so we hear the fuel cascade in on top of us. We think it should sound like a waterfall, but it’s an overbearing sound, reverberant inside the confines of the tank. We think we can smell it just because of the clarity in the mid-range of the recording. A shovel of American grain. A man with excellent teeth and hair is standing in a relatively fast-flowing river holding an empty net and a bent rod at the same time; we’re hearing the net drag a little in the water. An unattended pot of grey water and bones is on a rolling boil on a portable gas stove somewhere hot. The file is edited so that we use the transient created by a small drop of liquid leaping from the pot and scald-hissing on the stove as the point at which we cut to the next sound. Ice shovelled. A queue has formed by a temporary cabin. A shovel of ice again. An approaching storm in Alaska recorded from inside a slowly filling community hall. Another bag of peas. An elderly woman with dark skin but pale hands is blowing on hot tea. A shovel of salt. The sound of running someone else’s wound under water, hoping it isn’t serious. A frozen packet of prawns thrown on the peas. Someone else is having a shower next door, but it’s not clear from the sound whether the person has got under the flow of water yet. A shovel of ice into an ice bucket. The sewers beneath Fleet Street are moving freely down near Blackfriars Bridge. If the sound recording is long enough, you will also hear the blip of a gas-warning monitor hung around someone’s neck. A huge reverb taken from a Catholic cathedral is added to this bleep, as if the sound nearly lasts forever. Another scoop of ice. Asma pulls down a blind over a window. Salt. A murder of crows in trees at dusk. Grain. Someone is applying makeup to a corpse to make it appear less pale. Ice. An original, antique, ornate Tuscan fountain now located far from Italy spits water erratically. An unaccompanied dog is licking an ice cream that has been dropped by a rubbish bin and is now rapidly melting. The first child on the boat is asleep now, but there are murmurings of adults over their breath. It’s now low tide in the UK and we hear the delicate sound of trickling water and the ooze of mud sucking and drying. Actors are turning the pages of scripts as they wait for an audition. Someone is rolling a joint in a railway station quietly in the background.
The schoolgirl is anxiously washing her face as she looks in a cracked mirror.
A seat belt in the back of a minibus clicks into place. The dragging of chairs into a circle at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in Catford. A different seat-belt click. Someone is being tattooed right now with a corporate logo. Seat belt. The pulling down of a loft ladder. Seat belt. Any Austrian empty ski lift running today going down a hill ready to find someone to bring up to the top. A seat belt. Someone is hunched over a body waiting for an ambulance. Seat belt. A child in the back of a car on their own, licking their fingers anxiously. Seat belt. The chorus at the Royal Opera House whispering in the wings, about to come on. Seat belt. A far-right politician chewing gum. Seat belt. The small sound of scrolling downwards on a computer-mouse tracking ball, but the arrow icon is frozen on the screen. All the domestic ovens in France that are on right now. A seat belt set in the distant reverb of a cave. The light tapping of change inside a trouser pocket. Feet shuffle in a queue for Stonehenge. A policewoman on foot patrol catches the nylon straps of her bulletproof vest as she hooks her thumbs in. A meditation class stirs at the end of a session. A tiger is stepping through a forest; each paw placement we can hear is synced to a breath of a DJ waking up in a strange room abroad, unsure of where they are.
The turning of a pharmaceutical lobbyist’s hard drive backing up a laptop.
Wind is blowing over the top of an abandoned Budweiser beer bottle on a beach near Aberdeen. This sound is sampled and turned into an eerie organ-like sound, played low and wide, its dense harmonies filling the lower end of the sound field until very nearly the end of the piece. A crackle of incense as it catches light. A bird swoops and lands on a traffic light turning orange in Tahrir Square. A geology graduate sucks milk through a straw on her lunch break until she reaches the bottom of the cup. A strong wind across unplanted fields inland. A TV newsreader shuffles their papers. Fumbling in the dark for a light switch. Bang – a hammer suddenly hits a nail in a shed by a railway track in the Punjab. In one speaker, a bug on a tree, in the other, the sound of a called hotel lift coming down from many storeys above. In the middle of the stereo image, the sound of someone sharpening a bayonet carefully, meticulously. Bang, the hammer again. Back to the lift, cicada, blade, elongated, stretched, the mix value on a reverb is moving from dry to wet, increasing the scale and width of the image; the whole thing sounds like it’s slowing down, a pitch-shifter is moving down the scale in parallel, the sound glutinous and whole. Someone in uniform is sitting in the shade in an empty golf cart. Bang bang – hammering nails into cheap wood over a window somewhere in America. We hear the warning lights of all the cars sitting by the side of a road, broken down right now, recorded from the inside on a handheld recorder. Bang. A woman is playing with the seal of a Ziploc bag with her last few possessions inside. Bang. Men zipping up waterproof coats. Bang. Women praying in silence around a hospital bed. Bang. A stray dog panting. Bang. Someone is brushing a child’s hair too slowly. Bang bang bang. All the office cleaners in the world’s financial districts where it is early morning right now vacuuming the carpets. Someone else in uniform is sitting in the shade in a different empty golf cart 1,000 miles away. Bang. A power cut in Iraq. Bang. Someone has buried a sensitive mic in some fresh dough and we are listening to the dough rise in real time in the Azores in the heat. This could take many minutes, so we leave it running underneath the other sounds. We may hear some muffled, indistinguishable voices nearby from this mic buried inside the bread. Someone who helped make a pair of your shoes is in a queue to see a nurse. Someone else is in a bird hide, rummaging in nylon pockets. Someone else is cleaning an
AK-47.
The girl hides behind a door, breathing quickly but quietly.
The patter of rain on a bald white man’s head in Boston. A handful of gravel thrown at the window of a convenience store. There’s the flapping of torn flags in the wind outside an abandoned Tunisian hotel. A doctor’s coat is swinging wildly as they rush for shelter. Somewhere in the mix a shovel of ice again. A teenager is itching or scratching their recent chest hair. Seat belt. The buzz of batteries charging. Bang. Pumping up the tyres of a wheelchair at the same speed as someone digging a grave in the desert. Ice. With a microphone held incredibly close, we hear a young boy trying to read a map in the dark. Seat belt. A frantic woman is hurriedly pouring gurgling water into an overheated car radiator at a garage next to a highway. Ice. A thief is counting his money in a toilet cubicle in a McDonald’s drive-through. Seatbelt. The ticking of a just-boiled, still-full kettle in an electrician’s Portakabin. A plastic England flag attached to a car’s wing mirror whips against itself as the car snakes onto a ferry. Chinese concrete settling, hardening. The click of another seat belt. A pig’s-fat candle spluttering. Bang. Someone is holding someone else’s hand in the back of an ambulance, but it’s the siren we hear. Bang, an animal headbutts a cage. A woman who cooks gyoza at Kameido in Tokyo is listening on headphones to a YouTube video about treatment for burns. A photographer is loading a film into a Nikon F4 camera in Malawi. A girl is trying to keep herself warm on her first porn shoot. The safety catch is released from several guns in several places right now in real time. An out-of-work actor is having an AIDS test. Another person is alone in a van, the doors are closed and it’s stationary with its engine off. A new printer cartridge is loading, the head whizzing back and forth. An immaculate general is flicking his lighter secretly in his pocket during a formal ceremony as people spin round him, refilling glasses with water from one-litre plastic bottles. Thousands of miles away, actors are rehearsing a play about the General’s homeland and we hear the theatre lights clicking and buzzing. A mortar primed. A supervisor, stiff and uncompromising, comes towards us one step at a time. An electric gate to a private house in Hollywood opens. A crane winches a steel beam for an as-yet-unbuilt floor on a high-rise. Step. An empty, idling Range Rover and horsebox outside a post office. Step. A bully picking bits of twig out of his hair. Step. An artillery shell loaded. Step. A crowd of tourists hurry towards an exit. Step. A knock at the door. Step. The manager is coming closer towards you now. Step. A schoolboy in Pakistan putting on his blazer and tie. Step. An overworked cooling fan whirring furiously on an abandoned Dell laptop in Tripoli. Step. A damp chestnut log spits in a fire in Powys. Step. A model-maker pinching two parts of a Messerschmitt’s wing together until the glue dries. But the main thing we hear is his dog eating the man’s leftovers in the background from an upturned tin helmet. Step. A hostage lying on the floor not wanting to get up. Step. The bleep of a photographer’s camera locking focus on another body on the beach. Step. A combination safe being opened, recorded from the inside. Step. He’s nearly here. Step. A roomful of children about to take exams but the clock hasn’t been started yet. We hear their shoes knock lightly against the metal legs of their chairs. Step. A knot for a rope being tightened. Step. A boy pulls a gun from a backpack. Step. The scrape of pen to paper as a minister in London scribbles a doodle while on a phone call to someone in Saudi Arabia. Step. Stubble chafes against rope. The spring inside a long lever scrunches up in preparation for a release.
The Music Page 2