The Music

by Matthew Herbert

  A cat eats a bird on a porch while someone nearby reads an article about sound in the New York Times.

  A group of hungry ramblers crunch over heather on a hilltop. A dog treads on a broken gin bottle on a beach. An empty cargo plane lands, we just hear a fragment: the exact moment the wheels hit the tarmac. There’s a crackling and bubbling of brand new hot black asphalt settling just after it’s been poured from the back of a paver. A can of Fanta shoved roughly in a rubbish bin on a train. A meagre morsel of tasteless, overcooked, chlorinated chicken stuffed in a mouth. Twelve concrete mixers turn and twelve builders bang the outsides with spades. The last strike is followed by the bang as a Jeep Cherokee hits a badger. Pause: a bee is against the inside of an office window again, trying to get to a flower it can see outside, but it’s tired. A bear’s stomach rumbles; we turn this sound up and up. The badger’s corpse slumps down the metal grille of the car, a wet snort from its nostrils. A child rolls an upside-down snail down a metal slide in a play area. Two sisters in gloves pull a long continuous thread of carpet out of a poodle’s backside after it has spent the last two days eating the fringes of it.

  With a clicky noise and a spark, every pub and bar in London starts up their outside heaters. A whoosh followed by many small plops as the feeder for a salmon farm shoots food laced with pink dye out into the lake. A cutting of rosemary for supper. Someone dumps a broken microwave oven off a bridge into a canal with a splash. In Cuba a plastic basketball hits an abandoned fridge. A leisure sales regional manager is shaking a carton of unfinished rotten milk. A scraping, gouging of the bottom of an oil tanker against rough rocks in a storm, creating a gash, a hole. Reverb is added: it is an impulse response – a recording of the acoustic qualities of the inside of a giant Asda warehouse. A shoplifter runs off with a bottle of Pepsi.

  We hear the amplified sound of a grasshopper as it lands on a just-varnished garden table and is suddenly stuck. Someone slips three corpses into a lake at dusk in quick succession.

  A dry sound over the top: we hear people in Amsterdam pulling on the tear-strips of Amazon packages. The snap of elastic on a pair of blue plastic disposable overshoes. The tightening of cable ties.

  Two chainsaws bang in the back of a brand new pickup truck as the owner drives too quickly over a tree root. Then slowly, someone in the Hague opens a tin of Israeli olives. The stereo DPA mics are so close, and the sound slowed down so much, stretched until it feels like someone is peeling off the top of your head. Beneath it can just about be heard a forest on fire in Indonesia, fierce, crackling, rumbling. A girl carves the name of her lover in a eucalyptus tree in a city park in Melbourne. It’s getting louder.

  There’s a smallish crowd at the game. The long, time-stretched, piercing squeal of a referee’s whistle.

  Maggots squeeze up beneath a worker’s toes, going through the offcuts from Nile perch next to Lake Victoria. A coastguard’s Land Rover drives over a starfish with a splitting noise. An owl strains against the short leather leash attached to a pole at a clifftop castle somewhere. A razor scrapes down a leg in a hotel bath. A gentoo penguin in an aquarium bumps its head on a wall depicting a mural of Antarctica. A daddy longlegs repeatedly bumps into a light bulb on a houseboat, but we just hear it for a few seconds. The dab of a blue paintbrush. A half-eaten polystyrene tub of prawns drops onto the leather seats of the pickup truck. A very light digital distortion is applied to all the sprinklers at Thanet Earth as they turn off; we hear the drip and ticking as everything settles down. Some sheep on Welsh hillsides are pissing in unison. The bubble of aquariums in a shop selling tropical fish. A plastic beer cup rolls down the harbour wall at Pelion in the wind towards the sea. A leak of something toxic into the water table, out of sight.

  A sound designer and engineer have removed all the tin from several rivers in Germany and tied it all together in a row and are now dragging it behind several large trucks along the Avenue de L’indépendance in Yaoundé. A pig’s tail is clipped off in a concrete shed with a metal roof. If you listen carefully, you can hear the clipping sound ping off the ceiling.

  The click of magnets pulled together, switches making contact.The 14,000 chickens that are about to die in the next minute suddenly cluck quietly in unison. A butterfly flits in a corner against wallpaper in an ex-colonial administration building in Kenya. A filmmaker is making a short film of all the right-wing MPs in the UK mowing their lawns, but recorded from the nearest public road, heard through the open window of the editor’s room. Someone is spraying fake blood onto a mattress. There’s a huge can of rapeseed oil knocked over and it’s glugging its contents everywhere. Someone runs their hands up a rusted flagpole and listens to the paint flaking off. A slug makes its way vertically up the outside of a greenhouse; there’s a contact mic on the other side of the glass to record it. Schoolgirls aged between five and six are sharpening their pencils slowly, as quietly as possible, while we listen to the slug’s slow journey.

  A nest full of new chicks in a hedge at a literary festival strain to be heard over the campers at dawn, and squawk increasingly loudly up to the sky. Twenty to thirty dogs tied up outside supermarkets want their owners back.

  A depleted uranium shell grinds unheard beneath a rock as a taxi drives over it in Iraq. A lorry reverses up to the loading bay of a flower distribution warehouse in Savannah. The milking machine on a cow strains and pulls. A truck carrying pigs to market has overturned, spilling now-dead animals across the highway. We hear the shovel of a single person trying to clean up the carnage. Another person is digging for lugworms on a beach. The buzzing of Barcelona city lights is amplified and spread wide across the image. The flap of the wings of a moth above the pitch in a packed football stadium. The hum of Edinburgh from Calton Hill.

  A bluebottle is flying around in a theatre during a show. A sheep is shorn of its fleece but we are recording it from a kestrel-shaped kite flown at some distance above. A box of apricots with moths in shifts backwards on a forklift truck. A dog is on the back of a bicycle on its way to being neutered. A barnacle ground off the side of a boat. A rough-legged buzzard is pecking at a radio transmitter attached to its leg. In the same rhythm, a family is crunching through leaves on the way to a firework show. The crack of lobster shells in brasseries. A huge carp is straining on a line, spinning the reel. A bat flies into a catch net.

  A string bag full of footballs drops out of an estate car. An industrial vat of glue, bubbling. The peeling-back of the plastic layer on a ready-meal curry.

  An artist has made a work in which they have bought all the animals about to be killed for food tonight in Washington and instead is walking them in a line from a restaurant in Paris to a special golden incinerator located in a field outside Monaco. A musician has asked forty-eight people to stamp on a snail shell made out of pastry for an album about Brexit. A scientist has assembled sixty people on a boat and asked them to blow across the tops of hollow animal bones she has excavated from different Neolithic sites across Europe.

  The daughter reaches up and squeezes her father’s hip as he peers towards the sun, looking for the ball.

  Someone is watching the movie of The Woman in the Dunes in the back of a tour bus and we hear the sound of sand under the actors’ feet on the screen. A haul of dead sharks is tipped overboard a trawling vessel, but it is recorded from fifty metres down. The whirring of the big data servers storing the words of this book somewhere in California heard from the location where employees are supposed to meet in the event of a fire, but where now a cleaner, learning German on headphones, is unwrapping a new packet of cigarettes and gulping vitamin water. A tap from a standpipe is running dry and the bucket placed beneath it to catch the drips has fallen over.

  All the kids’ jungle-themed noisy toys with battery life left in them recorded deep in the world’s landfill sites. They make the occasional warped monkey or lion noise as the pressure changes. While we listen to that, two students are peeling the plastic wrappe
rs off stolen CDs right now. A stream of water hosing down an ambulance. A maths teacher has diarrhoea. A limousine driver in Bolivia emptying his ashtray into a puddle in a quiet car park.

  Fishermen sitting by a lake not far from Niigata, Japan are slowly reeling in. A Caterpillar digger has been slowly approaching from some distance. It has been sitting underneath all the other sounds since the chickens went silent, and is now coming to the foreground of the stereo image. We hear it moving over uneven ground, closer, louder and then a miserable grind and churn as it pushes over an ancient olive tree. A picture editor is photoshopping nipples out of a make-up advert. A celebrity chef is sniffing a lemon. Suddenly – bang, a seagull into a jet engine. A stabbing of the 500 million straws to be used today into McDonald’s cups. They squeak as they rub against the plastic of the lid. Someone sits down too hard on a crate of Moroccan oranges in the back of a lorry. A small mountain of pea gravel is dumped in a hole. A brown bear stands on a frozen river. It creaks a little beneath her. A fishmonger bursts the swim bladder of a whiting with a pop. A van and trailer full of white sugar overturns by a roundabout near a river. At Lake Coniston, teenagers are skimming stones. A bag of ice cubes now dropped in a child’s seat on the back of a bike to be ridden back to a party. A group of volunteers combs a stony beach for clues to a murder. A hiker in the Alps trips over the sole of an old walking boot on the path. The hiss of a gas leak. The slow tearing of a sachet that holds a tea bag. Different car number plates are hit by 73,984 insects at once. Then a different collection of 73,984 insects come towards the listener from all directions. Crack – a lightning strike on a Hindu temple. A flock of starlings startled by a gunshot. Garden chairs off a ship’s balcony in high seas. A huge drill strikes oil with a bang, gush, spurt – a microphone has been mounted right in the thickest part of the liquid. An overwhelming waterfall of Garnier Fructis shampoo. Farmers swinging by their necks from ropes. Every plant dug up since this chapter started, heaped in a pile. Chewing gum sticking to the sole of a nurse’s sneaker on the Marshall Islands. A mouse with its paws in a plastic tray of poison, unwittingly pushing it against the floor to make a scraping noise. A DIY shelf going up. Half-finished KFC bags thrown out of slammed VW Golfs. A camper spits toothpaste into the bush. An oil executive and lobbyist sign a contract over negronis. Plastic bags flap furiously in strong wind in trees. A crampon hits rock. A small canister of nitrous oxide dropped in a bathroom sink at a party. A factory. A factory. A war. A war. A climber is drilling into a cliff to insert something to hold his rope. The shattered glass of a cider bottle as it hits a dry river bed. A knife stabbed through a kidney. Someone biting into a grape that has too much pesticide residue on it. A rare beetle crossing a road crushed by a motorbike. A plant leaf snipped in a lab. Someone trimming a bush into the shape of a whale. Fifty-three boxes of Prozac shaking, trembling. A lunch break at a factory that makes cheap plastic toys for the covers of children’s magazines. Jet skis recorded from just under the surface of the water. A kid puking over the side of a wheelbarrow. A trained otter in Pakistan dives for fish. The champagne tipping over the cap of a winning racing driver. The grind of sand in an oily cog. The foundations of a new dam going in. Light bulbs pop. A cricket ball through the skylight of an art gallery. An insurance salesman stands on a baby turtle by accident. Grains firing through the metal tubes of a combine harvester, recorded from inside. A disposable barbeque dropped into the sea with a splash and a hiss.

  A Harley-Davidson drives at speed past the football pitch. The ball is still in the air. A tree shivers.

  On concrete by the Humber Bank Wall, a fisherman is pulling the skin off a Dover sole, peeling it back in a single, simple gesture as the skin is torn from the flesh. A camera crew is filming it. The producer steps back, startled by the incoming swoop of a herring gull, loses their footing and topples backwards over the wall and into the water. As we hear the splash, a bee pushes its sting into an ear. This is loud now. A mosquito lands on sleeping flesh. The sound is unnaturally high. The snap of a crocodile’s jaw onto a head. The pecking of a hooked beak on a ribcage. The crackle of a fire spreading through eaves. Brutal rain on temporary plastic roofs. Frozen water creaking sharply underneath a line of men in boots. The amputation of a leg. The crisping of flesh under intense heat. The thwack of a tree branch on a power line. A lightning strike in reply. We’re accelerating now. The rapid digging of a mole beneath a neoclassical statue. The tapping of woodworm. The scrabble of wasps in the plasterwork by beams of an old farmhouse. The sound of a bridge shifting and cracking. All the pens, paper and stationery in the offices of a car manufacturer shaking during an earthquake. The scalding of boiling water on skin. A brief sound of the collapse and crumble of lava down the side of a volcano. A cascade of bird shit. The yank of a typhoon ripping a roof off. The pelt of hailstones against wooden boards. The splash of thick black oil down a trouser leg. The cracking of an antler through a pelvis. The scrape of a rake across the concrete floor of an industrial duck shed. An elongation now, an excerpt of the time-lapse sound of an ivy bush growing around a shopping trolley sped up by a factor of one hundred and played at Café OTO as the opening act. The sound of mould growing inside a fridge. Acid rain falling. Toxic fog on an in-breath. Sand in your ears. Snow and salt and slush crashing through a hotel window. If bacteria makes a noise, it’s heard here, amplified, distorted. Ice spreading rapidly across a slip road. A wild boar loose on a cricket pitch. Waves hitting a living-room window. The stamp of an elephant on a car bonnet. A house dropping off the edge of an eroding cliff. The scuttle of a scorpion across the floor of a holiday apartment. A rat’s tail slipping through dust beneath a sink you once stood at. A spider leaps down at the microphone from a hidden web. A pit bull bites through a foot. A rusty nail in a knee. A frostbitten toe coming away from the foot. A glutinous splintering and cracking of sodden timber at the same time as we hear a large whoosh as doors give way in homes and floodwater rushes in. A tornado slices through a town. A snake hisses as it appears from the side of a fake log. A nettle plant stings as it is picked, amplified. A splinter of rusty metal from a farmer’s gate pierces a hand. A huge chunk of snow and ice calves away from an iceberg. A river bursts its banks. A flame licks around straw. A sharp splinter into a heel. The multiplication of an incurable cancer. A worm slips unheard through your gut. A heart skips, stutters. The rustle of branched thorns as an embossed golf ball disappears into thick bushes.

  The deflated football hits a tree, drops to the ground and comes to a rest, the branches settle themselves. The daughter runs towards it, picks it up and heads across the pitch towards the highway.

  A forest is listening out for you, waiting to hear you coming.

  5.

  Largo

  To stop

  An in-breath of someone you love towards the end of their life

  Followed by the silence before you jump into a cold lake

  Then an out-breath of that person you love

  Then the silence before a jury announces their verdict

  Then an in-breath

  Then the silence of a baby just before it starts breathing again after a seemingly endless pause

  An out-breath

  The silence of a painter just before the brush touches the paper

  An in-breath

  The silence before a long-desired kiss

  An out-breath

  The silence before the vicar says amen

  An in-breath

  The silence just before a kettle starts heating up after the switch has been flicked on

  An out-breath

  The silence just before the needle of a syringe breaks the skin

  An in-breath

  The silence inside a large plane on a runway before taking off on a night flight

  An out-breath

  The silence before a prayer at a family dinner

  An in-breath

  The silence before the light turns
green

  An out-breath

  The silent lull during a long, violent argument before the other person says something

  An in-breath

  The silence of a TV presenter alone in a dressing room focusing themselves before walking out to present a live show

  An out-breath

  The silence at the end of an opera before a standing ovation

  An in-breath

  The silence just before a firework explodes

  An out-breath

  The silence before a surgeon makes a cut into flesh

  An in-breath

  The silence on an old DVD recording before Simon Cowell says yes

  An out-breath

  The silence in a troop carrier on its way towards a battle

  An in-breath

  The silence of a golf ball after it lands in a bunker

  An out-breath

  The silence just before a group of strangers face death together

  An in-breath

  The silence in a divorce court before the judge enters

  An out-breath

  The silence before you decide to buy something you know you can’t afford