A woman, bruised, sweating, sitting alone inside a car, stationary, engine not running. She is 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 slowing breathing, calm and desperate.
4.
Accelerando
To struggle
Two white men tipsy on Scotch whisky are driving a golf cart next to a sand dune. The sound fades in very slowly as they approach the microphone attached to the existing first flag. We will also hear the soft rhythm of waves from the sea and the occasional oystercatcher. As this recording reaches its peak and the golf cart is close, we suddenly hear the sound of a tall twenty-two-year-old man living in Yuendumu, his young daughter by his side, angrily kicking a slightly deflated leather football with a wide-sounding thwack. As the tail of the sound we hear all the helium escaping from punctured Disney balloons bought for children around the world. The ball begins to soar through the air.
A sonic bomb explodes in Syria.
Beneath the hum and churn of vibrating feeders on a machine for washing sand we hear nine imported cashmere goats in Afghanistan having their throats slit, one after another in quick succession, all at the same loud volume, all slightly sped up so that the sound goes past quickly. Somebody staples an invoice to an A4 photocopy. Snap – a mousetrap goes off. Crack – an egg from a battery chicken breaks on the floor of a hospital. Click – a hook snaps onto the belt of an engineer on the top floor of a skyscraper in Seattle. Crack – the snap of twenty-four chopsticks pulled apart in Japan. The bang of claws and feathers into metal as a peacock attacks its own reflection in the passenger door of a black car. The sizzle of a cow’s rump being branded with a hot iron. A splitting-off of a huge slab of marble in a quarry. The messy clang of a handful of dead batteries into a steel dustbin. A large tree pulled over by a machine and chains with a series of birds’ nests still in it. The snap of a packet of aspirin along a perforated line. A tractor’s wheel driving over an organic yoghurt pot. A gardener unknowingly sticks a garden fork through a daffodil bulb. A pig electrocuted. We hear it thrash around until it’s dead. A toilet won’t stop flushing.
An empty plastic bottle of Evian on a beach in Ibiza is folded in half with a crumple pitched way down, so it feels like something large is toppling over.
A melodic arc, a long whine of whistles tied to the feet of pigeons in China recorded from a model aeroplane. Fading in, we hear the metallic harmonics of a shopping trolley in a river as water rushes through the wire mesh. Underneath we hear any feedback from microphones on stages right now, mixed extremely quietly. It slowly crossfades into a cello on fire in a cul-de-sac in Marseille, crackling in the heat as the lacquer melts and warps. The buzz of electric lines overhead in a national park recorded from a fibreglass canoe. Beards being trimmed in Iceland. The spitting and spreading of salt from the back of a yellow lorry. All the hairdryers in Taiwan. Distantly, a tired fly bops against the window of a café. It’s been doing this for some time and there are longish gaps as it stops, crawls, bops, stops.
After fifteen seconds or so the fly has some renewed energy and after a few intermittent fuzzy bumps into the glass, we hear a particularly loud one. At the same time we hear, through a microphone buried inside an anthill, the exact moment that a young boy jabs a stick in it. Some broken sheeting on scaffolding hiding a new coffee shop flaps viciously in a strong wind. A bonfire crackles with ivy as the smoke swirls. The furious noise of bees swarming round a beekeeper. An army helicopter appears suddenly over a headland, raising the volume and tempo again. All the sounds of drilling right now.
A dart misses a dartboard hung on a tree and sticks with a thwack into the trunk. A cat’s paw on a crisp packet. An obese boy swings at a clownfish piñata with a stick. A bin bag full of disposable plates splits and spills over a lawn. Crack, a plastic surgeon breaks a patient’s rib. A monkey lunges at bruised mangoes but a chain pulls it back with a sharp yank. A howl of pain from a fox in a trap by a railway bridge, then a snarl. A charity-branded promotional pen snapped.
A butcher in Malaga saws through a collarbone in a long, even motion. Over the top we hear acanthus-tree branches rubbing against each other in the breeze.
A pregnant woman is pouring water into a jug in Flint, Michigan. A handful of small river fish flap loosely but panicked in a plastic cooler. The crack of a water vole in a mole trap. A drip from a tap in an empty bathroom at the Mexican border. A shark bites through a surfboard. An excerpt of a jagged rockfall into a lake. An explosion. More rocks. Another explosion. Gravel rains down on reed roofs. The scoop of wet sand and grit onto the ramparts of a sandcastle. A dolphin bumps its head on the bottom of a wooden boat. A teenager throws a condom into a river in the dark with a pathetic splash. Two cans, one of varnish, one of paint, spill onto a canal path.
In quick succession: bang, a pigeon into a rooftop window on the left. Bang, a starling into a window on the right. Crunch, someone stands on a snail in bare feet. A sack of salmon-flavoured pet food dropped carelessly into the boot of a car. Someone stands on a mine. A vineyard sprayed with pesticide. A primate’s head being shaved. A team of council leaf blowers. A bee buzzes next to your right ear, but you can’t move. A wasp buzzes into your left ear, heading through the ear canal, further towards the eardrum. But now you’re in a dark room that’s not your own, next to someone snoring, and you can hear a mosquito above you. From nowhere we can hear many of the mosquitoes flying right now in Africa at once, millions of them, an orgy of tiny melodic humming and the friction of wings. It goes on for too long, maybe a minute in a crescendo. Then it snaps to silence.
Except we still hear one mosquito.
Someone cuts through a wasp’s nest in a garden with an electric hedge trimmer. Now an explosion in a quarry recorded by a series of 1,549 microphones, each placed one metre back from the other in a straight line from the centre of the blast, radiating away from the central point. We hear each recording, one after the other, with a 0.43-second gap between them. The debris rains down in small dusty pellets. It morphs down the frequency spectrum, filtered until from the low end we hear a nuclear explosion in the Pacific Ocean, recorded underwater.
Someone throws a set of house keys into the sea from a ferry; we hear it as a kind of arc. Fifty-six thousand footballs forcefully kicked.
The thunk of a poison dart in the side of a chimpanzee. The hum of fridges, machines, fans, fluorescent tubes beneath the scratching of mice in laboratories against the plastic walls. A tortoise on the floor tries to free itself from underneath a skiing jacket where it has got trapped upside down. This merges with a furious bug trapped in a beer glass on a picnic bench in summer, which in turn merges with a rhino’s tusk being sawed off. A shepherd bashes the head of a lamb with a sharp rock. The fly-tipping of a fridge. A professor washes her hair vigorously with lavender-scented shampoo; a tree in Borneo collapses. The tumbling of carpet rolls from a lorry. A bodybuilder is sucking up spiders and ladybirds with a vacuum cleaner. A distant car bomb recorded from a mountain. A father is blowing up a balloon for a baby shower.
From inside a Toyota Land Cruiser now, we hear a sandstorm – the pelt of sand against the metal and glass. Commercial European printers are rapidly printing out books about trees. Circular saws are spinning as people lay decking in their gardens. Every fly approaching a bug zapper in a butcher’s shop recorded from directly behind them. An environmental activist is gagged and bound. The crack of a jockey’s whip on a horse in Dubai. The click and snap of ski boots into bindings. A donkey strains on nylon reins in the snow. Someone peeling off a wetsuit. The hiss of the heat tongs as they seal the end of the vas deferens tube in a vasectomy operation.
The football is still in the air; we hear it pass above our heads.
The
squirt of hairspray. The squirt of air freshener. The squirt of red paint on a pine cone in a factory making Christmas decorations. The squirt of an asthma inhaler. The squirt of window cleaner. The squirt of One Direction-branded perfume. The squirt of antibacterial handwash in a law firm. The squirt of pepper spray into the face of a Black Lives Matter protester. The squirt of insulating foam from a can. The squirt of water onto a model’s face on a suntan commercial shoot. The squirt of screenwash onto the windscreen of a tank in the midday heat. The squirt of a conditioner onto a dog’s coat at Crufts. The squirt of a cheap deodorant onto a boy’s armpit. The squirt of canned cheese onto a plate of nachos at a cinema in Malta. The squirt of vinegar onto chips. The squirt of a soda syphon in a BBC sound FX studio. The squirt of a small fire extinguisher in a toy factory. The squirt of butter-flavoured cooking spray onto a Teflon pan. The spray of an insect repellent on a neck. The squirt of shaving foam onto a crotch. The squirt of Roundup weedkiller on a driveway. The squirt of an athlete’s-foot spray into a rugby boot. The squirt of lice treatment onto a chicken coop’s wooden slats. The squirt of de-icer onto the bathroom window of a trailer. The squirt of a known carcinogen onto skin. The squirt of instant shoe polish. The squirt of sugar soap onto a bloodied, tiled floor. The squirt of suntan lotion into the eye of a young child. The squirt of lighter fuel onto a pile of A4 papers. The squirt of air fresheners again. The squirt of aerosol paint by a graffiti artist. The squirt of fake cream onto a stripper’s nipples. Someone pukes vodka into a snowdrift in Vaasa.
The scratch of police dogs in the back of a van blend into the sound of a branch of an ancient oak tree through a council shredder on a residential street. The sound of a garden centre in a hurricane. Everyone giving birth right now. A child’s toy bulldozer makes a piercing bleeping noise. More child’s toys. It becomes an ocean of bleeps and whines and buzzes and fake chainsaw noises. It rises and rises. At its peak, now the rolling of a plastic wine cork for each bottle of wine made in France this year – 7.5 billion approximately – down the steps at the Sacré-Cœur. It is recorded from the bottom as they roll downwards towards the listener, towards fifty microphones set up. Someone has dug up all the plastic things you threw away when you were a child and is firing them at your house from a series of cannons. An anti-aircraft gun spills empty shells onto concrete. A high-pass filter removes all the lower frequencies and then blends them until we just hear the tiny nervous rattling loops of silica gel packets found in the bottom of boxes of new TVs made today. The pouring of kitty litter into a plastic tray. The pouring of water from a kettle on an ants’ nest. The sound Donald Trump’s pen makes in a video as it skims across paper as he signs something. The glug of filthy cooking oil down a drain in the heat. A fox biting down on dyed food from a bin. A walnut cracked, a roadside bomb, a horse touching an electric fence, the slap of a cat flap, knitting machines, bread machines, mixing machines, sewing machines, machines for resetting the pins at bowling alleys, running machines, car-crushing machines, dog food.
The Music Page 4