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The Music

Page 3

by Matthew Herbert


  A queue for a rollercoaster temporarily goes silent. We listen to it for a while, wondering who is there and why they’re not speaking. A tree whose top is impossible to see from on the ground starts to creak and swing precariously in a strong breeze. The beginnings of the movement of wet mud down a hill, the slide inevitable now. A teapot is sitting untouched next to a ticking radiator. A duck struggling to breathe is circling in a murky pond. Rain on the underside of an umbrella. A group of men are huddled in the corner of a rooftop, listening to sporadic gunfire. A thousand miles away, a surgeon in Valparaíso is stitching up a chest while tapping his feet coincidentally in time to a short burst of that same gunfire. In Ukraine there is the gentle rubbing together of warm, oily hands. And a librarian walking slowly down the corridor pushing a trolley of reports about Grassy Narrows over a dark green nylon carpet. Just as they are about to stop … hot water tanks filling up in empty houses, overlaid with bubbles popping at the surface of a pan of warm custard in a campervan. An adult hand sifts through sand with their fingers spread a little apart. A child sits expectantly behind a closed door. A history graduate learning to drive waits at the traffic lights longer than necessary. In the background we can hear people pressing doorbells, buzzers, entryphones, knocking, trying to get an answer but with no luck. We hear them all beneath the idling engine of the driving instructor’s car. A safety catch flicked off. A general’s dog sniffing at a dark red puddle by the pavement. Above it a bee zips between two flowers. A gun cocked. Twelve boys fly down hills on eleven bikes, the freewheels on the rear wheel ticking furiously as they pick up speed. We can’t hear it above the bikes, but underneath is mixed the sound of snow falling on the roof of a Koch Industries-owned cabin. The scrape of ice. A record-industry executive tips a ladle of water onto a sauna hot stone to make a loud hiss. The hiss blends with everyone whose net worth is over a million dollars and is heading for the bathroom right now. A pen top clicked. Supermarket workers, all women over the age of fifty, rubbing the tops of plastic carrier bags together in an attempt to get them open. Suddenly another step. The brittle sound of the supervisor walking towards us again. Step. The scrape of ice. The bang of an empty rubbish bin falling off a truck. A camera bleep. A hairdryer. More than one person somewhere is shaking a drink – vodka, maybe – to make sure it is mixed together properly. A louder step. A louder bang. A firm knock on the door. A child’s first cry. Bright blue water is spilling over the top of a bath someone has forgotten to turn off. Windows are being wound up quickly, manually in an older vehicle. Flip-flops or sandals rushing down an echoey corridor recorded through a wall. It sounds damp. A huge crowd rises to its feet in silence.

  The girl takes off her shoes and slowly ties them, along with some items, together in a bundle.

  Pit mechanics at a race circuit are stirring sugar into their coffee. A soon-to-lose horse whinnies on the starting line of an inconsequential steeplechase. A paediatrician taps a syringe at the same speed that we heard the child’s teeth rattling. A young man is sweating in a car with one finger tapping the steering wheel and another resting on a button strapped to his side. The kettle from earlier has a fault; it won’t turn off and has now boiled itself dry and it’s not stopping. A person sitting on a rock without any shade is wiping sweat from their eyes as they look behind and in front of them in quick succession. We’ve recorded this with a microphone right by the back of their neck. And so we can hear the dry skin as it twists a little in the movement, catching their collar. A lawyer is on a plastic chair listening to the buzz of the lighting above, also sweating. The CEO of a chemical company is straining on the toilet in a fancy restaurant. A child is making a prison out of Lego in the cold. A parent is reading a manual for a baby monitor while the baby is heard crying through the speaker. A car-company executive is drying their swimming shorts at high speed, high volume, in a special machine in the changing rooms of a Japanese hotel swimming pool. An uneven pump is helping a patient in a Gaza hospital to breathe. A series of bubbles from a small plastic pirate’s chest in the bottom of an aquarium in a dentist’s waiting room, recorded with a hydrophone, sped up, accelerating. A teenage boy is watching the first of the twin towers collapsing on an iPad with the sound down while he has his hair cut. A phone is ringing in a damp ditch near a car flipped upside down on its roof. Someone else in uniform is running down a jetty towards you. The jackets of several different people in different locations are flapping violently in the wind as their bodies fall at speed through the air. A coin suddenly falls from one of their pockets and hits the stones a fraction earlier than the sound that comes next.

  A schoolgirl has her ear to a railway track, listening to the ping and whine of the metal as it shimmers, bends and readies itself for the arrival of the train. She gets up and starts running.

  3.

  Allegro

  To hurt

  Recorded from the inside, we hear the sound of every moving vehicle with four wheels or more headed for, or driving towards Berlin. It is an undulating river of drone and distortion. It starts in the distance, segued out of the previous track, and takes just under thirty-four seconds to reach its full intensity. There are no voices of passengers or drivers, or if there are, they are edited out. There is no music on the car radios and no traffic reports. There are just the sounds of engines, cars, tractors, trucks, roads, vans, motorhomes, ice-cream vans, pickups, sports cars. The occasional siren. We do hear the breathing of the people and everything that rattles or knocks inside the vehicles themselves. The recordings are organised in such a way that at precisely the same time we hear everyone arrive at once. They turn their engines off in perfect sync. In the distance we can just hear frogs at night in Khana like static.

  The piece crossfades into someone else, in a different location, sitting alone inside their car with a brand new suitcase beside them, stationary, engine not running. A crudely bandaged hand rests on the steering wheel. They are at a junction in the road. There are few other cars around, if any. The landscape is flat. There is no wind. The sun is either rising or setting, but while recording, there will be sharp beams of sunshine cutting through the grime of the windscreen and filling the inside with light and shadows as we hear very soft nervous breathing, fast and even.

  Quickly now, a meal dumped in a bin. Plates, glasses, cutlery. A door closes. Timberland boots on a wooden floor. A fire put out in a grate. A coin in an empty plastic charity box. A tabloid newspaper thrown on a sofa. The scrubbing of a stain in a bathroom. The striking of a match. A knocking over of a teacup. A suede-effect cufflink box closes with a muffled snap. The tearing open of a crisp white envelope. A computer shut-down. A switch, any switch. The chopping of wood with a newly sharpened axe. A dog just locked in a cage. A key turn. A blade turning. A handle twisted left. A candle pinched out with wet fingers with a muted phfft. A hot pan plunged into cold water. A front door slammed.

  We can now hear the creak of dry hands on a shiny, well-worn fake-leather steering wheel. Out of the creaking skin, the rattle of some coins in the tray, looped. The beat hasn’t started yet. An empty drinks can briefly rolls round the floor, bashing into other cans that have been aggressively squeezed in half one-handed and thrown there. The clank becomes a vamp. The thonk of tyres on a four-wheel-drive SUV going over cats’ eyes on the road to Greenham Common. This is the bit of the frequency range we usually assign to the bass drum, and here these thonks are edited, regardless of the fluctuations in speed, to a rigid 4/4 time signature. The interference on an AM radio in a caravan in Kinshasa no longer tuned to something provides a very quiet crackle beneath. The cranking of the musical energy pitches up and up until it’s a tiny, high sound. The coins speed up their rattling as if accelerating or idling, but the tempo stays the same around them.

  A single, blast. A long, all-enveloping held note from a car horn rises up artificially from the mix as we hear all the frequencies again. It’s a late-nineties white Volvo estate parked in a driveway in the fog recorded at t
hree in the morning blaring this single held tone. It’s operated by an elderly man in a dressing gown and slippers. A phone keeps vibrating in a hitchhiker’s pocket; she’s sitting next to the driver of her first ride of the day. A Blaupunkt CD player is trying to read a CDR put in a retrofitted head unit in a Alpina E21 but struggling to do so, clicking and clicking and clicking, heard at the same time. The thonk continues; the layers stack up: a stray electric toothbrush has decided to turn itself on in the hold luggage of an Italian film student on a flight to São Paulo. It is amplified so it can be heard here. Above it, the sound of any UPS driver turning left. Now the overwhelming blast of every horn of every broken-down vehicle in India pressed and held at once. This continues for thirty-two seconds, then an abrupt end.

  A pulling-on of tight medical gloves with a snap. A slop of a sponge into a bucket of warm sudsy water. A slap of a chamois leather onto a bumper. The squeak of a sponge against a windscreen as it wipes the blood off. A quick crackle and split of the opening of a black paper air freshener in the shape of a Christmas tree. The ‘on’ switch of a head torch. The slamming down of a bonnet at the side of a remote hillside track. A long hiss of air brakes on a truck carrying corn syrup as it pulls into a gas station. A yanking-on of a hundred handbrakes. The slot of a bulletproof electric window at a checkpoint as it pushes back into place. The bang of a burst tyre in a tyre shop as it’s inflated too far by a young person in Fiji. The snap of a plastic wheel onto a model Hummel. The puff and squirt of the last glug from a plastic bottle of oil into an ambulance’s engine. A child in a back seat is sick into an empty beige Christmas-pudding bowl. A snort of coke off a dashboard. A line-up of 2,020 vehicles from all around the world, having reversed up to a clearing in a forest and turned their in-car hi-fis on to play the same recording of traffic in Paris on Christmas Eve on a loop, but all starting at different times. It is a one-minute loop, and amplified so many times it becomes an indecipherable dirge. After four minutes it fades to almost nothing, just the sound of a woodland at dawn.

  Someone bigger, in a different location, sitting alone inside someone else’s car, stationary, engine running, their phone beside them. They are at a junction in the road. There are few other cars around, if any. The landscape is flat. There is no wind. The sun is either rising or setting, but while recording, there will be sharp beams of sunshine cutting through the clean glass of the windscreen and filling the inside with light and shadows as we hear very sharp, clear breathing, slow and even.

  Again the shiffle-shuffle of hands on fake leather; this elongated but brief chirr forms the basis of a triplet loop across a mechanical 120bpm. The backbone of the beat is a driver stamping in fear and anger on the footwell inside on the downbeat, and a different driver’s wedding ring occasionally glancing on the hard brittle plastic of the gear lever on every off beat. On top of this, with no variation, no let up, no automation, no volume rides, no reverb, no EQ, no delay, no tricks, no stops, just raw recordings, trimmed in three-second batches, volume matched and at their original pitch: a red pencil snapped, the static of a walkie-talkie with little battery left, the bleep of phones running out of battery, the driving muddy rain on an asbestos cement-board roof, the tink, snap and metal tear of a ring-pull, a flick of a green BIC lighter, rosary beads knocking against the windscreen, a small bell from a Santa hat on the back seat as it rolls forward, the tearing-off of a taxi receipt, the manual winding-down of the window of a Trabant used in a radio drama called The Unknown, the rummaging in a thick coin-full wallet for change – a handful of rial, the squeaky wiping of mist from a windscreen by a chauffeur. The driving sand against the back window, the engine suddenly starts overheating. A thin black plastic belt unthreading from jeans. A locking of a bathroom door with gloves on. You start to realise a soft, blowing heater from a truck in Siberia is on underneath this all. Low, but on. The scrape of a credit card trying to clean mud off a car mirror. The heater is turned up a notch. Someone’s stiletto heel on an empty cassette box in the footwell. Another click on the heater. A passenger’s hair is rubbing against the window glass. Click. Teeth on a metal pole. Click to the heater’s almost-hottest setting. A child in Yemen bangs their head on the underside of a school desk in the dark. The credit card snaps. A grinding click of the ashtray on a MINI. The wipers are on full now. The nail of a six-year-old boy down the ridges of an air vent. Shopping rolls out of the boot as the door is lifted. Someone pulls a tissue from the gilded box at the rear. A Caterham’s indicator. A helmet bangs to one side on a roll cage. A pilot taps the lenses of his glasses as he takes aim. The heater clicks up to its full power. Then everyone in a taxi with a tissue box on the rear shelf takes one at the same time, but at that exact moment, a branch of a beech tree snaps off in the wind and drops on the deck of a wooden rowing boat in a storm. The beat stops.

  The first driver in the stationary car with the engine off slumps forward and rests her head on the steering wheel.

  An uneven idling – some kind of military tank made in a different country from the one where the tank is actually located and recorded. A shower turning on to disguise a noise we’re not supposed to hear. The sound of policemen, one from each of the ex-Soviet states, tapping on car windows at the same time but played unedited at their original tempo. The touch of the wedding ring on the gear lever once more, and with that the stamping beat starts again but it’s pitched up a semitone. The heater is still on full. A leather glove scrunches on a plastic steering wheel. A choke snaps back on an MGB. The flick of a finger as everyone in Munich turns the heaters on in their cars at the same time. Instead of the heaters, though, we hear a deathly chorus of all the air conditioning in Saudi. A door-slam of a Humvee, mixed underneath everything else; it repeats twelve times. Then from nowhere, breaking the beat again, uncompromisingly massive in the rich deadness of its sound, a rock smashes into the side of a bus. Three bullets through a car boot in quick succession; the blade on the left wiper needs changing. A single screech of a tyre that never stops. The crumple zone crumpling. The slice of a metal frame through a leg. The head again on a steering wheel. A shoe hits the back of a chair. A safety belt clicking into place. Everything in the boot shudders backwards. The impact of a head on the outside of a car door. That sound again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Again. Bits of glass from a window into a face. The head again. Tins of tuna from a bag of supermarket shopping are rolling around on the floor and bumping into each other – we think everything has stopped, but now a concrete block on a bonnet. An empty lorry into the back of an empty coach. A motorbike into a garden wall. Two vans into three trees. A car through the window of a tool shop. A lorry drives over a cyclist. A truck grinding down the side of a music-school wall. A mountain bike into another bike, a tangle of spokes. A car clips a ferry door at disembarkation. A limo driver opens a door onto a pizza moped. An oil tanker into the pillar of a bridge with a vast cracking sound. A broken bike wheel whizzing in a field. A car, going nowhere, is spinning around on its roof. A motorbike is on its side, moving still, scraping down the asphalt. A car driving at speed over an arm. A young head through a window. An even younger head hitting the roof. A handbag spilling its contents onto a dashboard. A wheelchair coming loose from its moorings in the back and hurling through the side-

  window glass with a National Trust sticker attached. A Luther Vandross cassette tape splintering inside a car stereo as it is crushed. The plastic of a child seat ramming against a portable DVD screen. A wheel over a hand that is wearing gold rings. A tooth through a lip. Steel against concrete. An eye out of its socket. A pair of Labradors crushed against a black metal dog guard. A maths student walks across a busy road looking down at their phone. Several simultaneous muffled screams inside Saydnaya prison. A scratched audiobook version of 1984 on CD is out of its case and rolling down an empty side pocket. A phone charger hacks lightly but quickly against the side of an ashtray full of gum. A slam of a motorbike and sidecar into a busy bus stop. A clang of steel into aluminium. T
he sludge of a wheel as it drops into a soft verge. A slop of blood onto blacked-out glass. A bike’s front wheel bending sharply in two as it hits a pothole. A monster truck bursts in to flames. A blacktail deer onto the bonnet. A bang of a taxi into a pedestrian’s legs. Pieces of metal scaffolding fall sideways off a transporter onto a convertible and tear its fabric in a swift rip. A wrecking ball through a living room. A head on the outside of a car door again. Again. Again. Again. A dead sound. Again. A hand coming away from an arm. A thighbone snapping. A fingernail pulled from a finger. Teeth grinding, then banging onto a wooden San Remo steering wheel, pushing them all out through the bottom of a jaw at once. A cocktail shaker. A fox’s tail caught on a chrome bumper at night. A cry of pain surges in unison from inside two children’s hospital wards a thousand miles apart. A series of cane toads under Australian wheels, skidding wildly at the same time. An in-car fire extinguisher explodes. A heavy book of out-of-date maps slides under the passenger seat and hits a small metal toolbox there. The clip of a wing mirror against a kebab-shop sign. An Amazon delivery van up an embankment into a stop sign with a ripping sound. A series of red bricks off a footbridge onto an unlit road. A £1m two-seater sports car into a guard rail at considerable speed. A plastic bumper ripped off in one hit. A tobacco tin pings against the brake pedal. Two wheels on the right-hand side of a coach on a narrow mountain road in South America leaving the road but still spinning. A beer bottle put down harshly by a driver before picking up keys. A short extract of sixteen cars sliding down separate hills backwards in the snow. The twang of metal as a safety railing snaps. A whoomph as petrol catches light. Twelve different sidelights on twelve different rocks. The whoosh of an empty rental car as it leaves a cliff at speed recorded from underneath the car with a Lomo shotgun mic. The high-pitched squeal of a brake pad looking for grip on a ceramic disc. The creak of a motor-caravan frame buckling. The crunk of the whole weight of a pickup truck onto the front springs. Some glass bottles dance loosely through the air. A splintering of bones. The rubbing of hair down textured plastic side-fill. The internal organs hitting a ribcage, recorded from the inside. The snapping-off of an indicator stalk and then the stump piercing a chest. A spare can of fuel flying overhead against the underside of a sunroof. A library book clips into a tree. The drip of blood from a nose onto an unopened sandwich pack. An ear into the rear-view mirror. A pelvis cracking. An unknown body coming the other way through glass. The rubbing of denim on tarmac in a skid and the grinding of metal studs on jeans on the tarmac. A collapsing of Ray-Bans into the cheekbone. The engine bolts shearing inside an engine. A series of wellington boots against a suitcase. The crushing of a radiator and the steam as it escapes. The pulling of cables from fuses. The pop of cheese and onion crisps beneath the weight of a body. The flutter of parking receipts meeting empty sweet tins in the background. A head against a door. A young head against a door. A younger head against a door. A door split. A door cracked. A door ripped off. Keys loudly jangling. Mints rattle in tins. Luggage falling out of racks onto backs below. A tree snapping underneath from the weight of a coach as it swings overhead. The tumble of bodies and chairs inside. The oil slopping about inside the engine. The squeezing, shattering of orange-plastic indicator lenses. The sound of a cigarette being put out on a tongue. Stiff tyres on runways. A Chinese truck head-on into an American truck. A train into a car that has stalled on a crossing. A VW Camper driving at speed over a body lying in the road in Johannesburg, recorded from inside the van. A Russian train’s warning horn. A biting through the tongue. Hair pulled from the scalp. The unwitting chewing on gristle in a bar at an airport. A baseball bat to the kidneys. Someone opens champagne at a wake. The grinding of teeth again. The cut of a razor through skin and muscle. A smoke-ring blown by a doctor on a tea break at 2a.m. A beard being roughly shaved off. An estate agent coughs. A scraping of matted hair. Millions of clicks of epinephrine auto-injectors. Rubber-gloved hands clapping quickly and quietly, trying to keep warm. A boulder on a neck. A limb tied to a car, dragging. A wig thrown on a fire. In the south, a crudely sealed clear-plastic tub of teeth, shaking. In the east, many people running down the outside stairs of housing estates and projects two at a time. In the north, the sharp poke of a dentist’s endodontic tool into an infected gum. In the west, a fingernail being clipped too short as water is poured into a copper pot in the background. The dab of bad makeup. The short zip of a trouser fly, done by someone other than the wearer. A navel being pierced. An ear being stretched. A pair of hands, gripping a throat too tightly. A bull’s horn through a hip. A heart into a polystyrene box of ice. A tumour placed in a steel bowl. A used bullet placed onto a glass counter. A squirt of air freshener. The locking of a small metal door. A bag thrown roughly at your feet. The clip of a crash helmet. A broken beer bottle jabbing in a face. A chainsaw through a leg. The air rushing out of a punctured tyre, elongated, stretched, examined, filtered, smeared, fragmented. The bursting of an eyeball. A pouring of milk into porcelain cups. The unzipping of a child’s unused overnight bag. A text message from a phone on vibrate heard on a stainless-steel table. A single school bell placed in a huge reverberant space, a canyon or a vast cave. Shards of icicles drop onto rocks, all the low frequencies removed. Small stones pinging against windows sped up, pitched up, layered and overlapping. Tinfoil over a turkey. The rattle of partially built Windham weapons on a trolley in their factory. Someone at a wedding in Afghanistan is about to make a toast by tapping their knife on a glass. An ACADEMI executive is about to make a toast by tapping their fork on a glass. A car drives through a hedge at a car showroom. A tunnel collapses. An excerpt of an earthquake. A dam breaks. A waiter trips over a dog and drops a tray full of glasses and dirty cutlery. A Christian dives into a swimming pool on the top floor of a hotel. An elderly woman blinks in Niyeri. Knuckles into eye sockets. A blade through an organ in Dili. A shovel into earth. A single suck from a ventilator in a special-care unit for premature babies. An old man chokes. A pain-relief tablet drops into a glass of water. A nurse snaps a syringe into a holder attached to a metal stand on wheels while barrel bombs can be heard landing in the background. A blast of warm wind near the airport in Diego Garcia. A soft bell goes as someone opens a door. A car skids and swerves round a corner at some distance away from the microphone, but it becomes clear that it is travelling at considerable speed and is quickly getting closer. The snipping-off of the top of someone’s ear. Nine hundred men shouting and running towards you.

 

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