Bulldozers, seagulls, a multitude of drowned-out voices. Grinding, cracking, torn plastic, mushy paper, rotten food and metal. Glass shards and broken wood. It gets louder.
An R2-D2 Star Wars alarm clock going off in the bottom of a metal dustbin. A microphone is deep inside a half-buried drainpipe in a field as a farmer on a quad bike revs a tired diesel engine on a slope. Haphazardly, the side of a compost bin collapses, spilling leftover takeaway curry, half there, half gone onto a pair of nearly new brogues. The alarm stops. Rolls of damp pub carpet are thrown from the back of a moving van into a field. Clouds of black smoke form as idling diesel trucks line up in a holding shed. An uneven raining-down of guano inside a densely populated cave of bats early in the morning. We hear a man slowly running his finger along the top edge of a dusty picture frame depicting an image of a black boy staring in awe at jewels in a display case. A fight outside a pub recorded from inside the pub’s large metal recycling bin is in the background. A bloodied pig bangs its head on a wall. Burgers fall off a barbeque in the left speaker while on the right speaker an apprentice is rodding a culvert, trying to get a nappy that was flushed down the toilet unstuck. He pokes and pokes in a jerky rhythm that we use as a template to give us the rhythm of what follows. The slide of warm lamb’s fat into a blackened bucket. A fruit knife is used to try and scrape off scum round a bath. The blast of air, thick with dirt, slamming into lungs. There are limbs everywhere and alarms and pools of congealed fluids and engines going too fast, and sirens and no human voices. A cracked bottle of Spicebomb aftershave slides down a metal chute. Someone has their ear pressed to a small tube, trying to hear a conversation happening nearby. A wallet with little money in it but full of credit cards drops into a urinal at a concert.
Bulldozers, seagulls, a multitude of drowned-out voices. Grinding, cracking, torn plastic, mushy paper, rotten food and metal. Glass shards and broken wood. It gets louder.
Slurry from a pig farm is pumped through hoses in great arcs through the sky into lakes of shit everywhere in the world at the same time. Your own sewage flowing underground somewhere right now. A lawyer in the boot of a car unwittingly squishes their hand into some rotten fruit. The nibbling of a rat in a wall of a cheap restaurant. The sound of 8 million thuds of 8 million used disposable nappies into bins played out of Bluetooth speakers in different technology companies’ boardrooms. Someone throws an important switch in a coal-fired power station in China. A skateboard whizzes through cat shit. A child kicks an empty plastic bottle on the ground at an impromptu migrant camp near Calais. The grind and crunch as things collapse under the compactor in the hopper of a rubbish truck sped up and looped and sped up again, distorted. An outlet from a bromide plant bursts. A doctor scrapes her leftover kebab into a bin. A broom at speed along the floor of a huge commercial packing shed. The lid of a swing-bin for sharps in a prison’s medical room swings lightly. A huge crack as a cruise ship splits its hull. At the exact same time, hundreds of miles away, a different crack as a tree root breaks through a rotting coffin. A wind of dust is coming, louder. It could be brake dust in a train tunnel, it could be ashes from a crematorium, it could be asbestos, it could be the dust from cluster bombs in Yemen, it could be the ash from someone burning incriminating evidence, it could be crushed cow bones, ground to a powder, it could be the end of an art project, it could be someone airing curtains from an abandoned house, it could be the embers from a lawyer burning the papers for former cases in his garden, it could be decorator’s dust after sanding down stained floorboards. It swells and bites the microphone in tiny spikes. There’s a worm in a rented eco-toilet that slides quietly around beneath. Now we’re in the bins at the White House, rummaging around in the waste. Then an old bird’s nest falls on a person’s head in a loft in a shower of dust and dried grasses as an old already-broken egg hits the floor. A shudder of nylon carpet beneath a bar stool in Katowice. The collapse of a paper sick bag onto a mother’s arms as she tries to rush it from the car to the bin.
Bulldozers, seagulls, a multitude of drowned-out voices. Grinding, cracking, torn plastic, mushy paper, rotten food and metal. Glass shards and broken wood. It gets louder.
Cows plunge through antiseptic baths at huge industrial ranches. Black ink in giant barrels pours into huge printers. A train toilet dumps its load accidentally while at a station. A jug of fermented cheese breaks and spills. Someone shovels fat in a sewer beneath an American diner-themed restaurant in the Philippines. A plastic pirate ship sinks in a thick red pond. Oil spills from everywhere. It is now behind the ears of people swimming, underneath the fingernails of people scrabbling in the mud, in the rapid blinking of the nictitating membranes on an Arctic tern, in the slap of a wave against a rock pool. A freezer is without power and all the body parts are defrosting. A hotel bath towel is mopping up spilt coffee. A teenager is giving birth in a slum.
Two weeks ago a rubbish truck delivered a single, full load of waste to a city dump. It has delivered the load to a specific, separate part of the dump. A child in bare feet has arranged every item, no matter how small, alphabetically and is now, one by one, saying the name of each object in her head, before passing it behind to her mother, who is either keeping it to one side in a box or putting it into a pile beside her.
The dust grows and grows. It’s swirling now, recorded binaurally. It blends into the sound inside a ten-year-old bag of a never-
emptied vacuum cleaner as it sucks up grit and cat hairs. It is now a roar, a rumble. We hear now from inside another vacuum cleaner, this time a handheld one sucking up bits of old food and stray Lego hands from underneath the child seat in a car. Then we’re inside a hand dryer at a one-star hotel. Then we’re inside the air-conditioning piping in the Channel Tunnel. Then we’re inside the heating ducts of a temporary structure hosting a wedding for a TV celebrity. Then we’re inside the chest of an asthmatic boy. Then we’re inside the nearly finished dome at Chernobyl, listening to air being sucked out and recirculated through pipework. Now we’re inside the exit pipe leading from a tumble dryer in a laundrette in Liverpool out of a window on the thirteenth floor. Now we’re inside the throat of a smoker as they inhale on a pipe while watching the news in Gambia. Now we’re inside a pair of bellows operated by an elderly man on his knees in front of a failing fire. Now we’re inside a huge Catholic church organ as it starts to warm up and air passes. Now we’re inside the nose of someone getting CPR. Now we’re in a fan heater as it heats up a disabled person in a garden shed. Now we’re inside a Malaysian Airlines jet engine at take-off. Now we’re inside the fan on a laptop. Now we’re by the ear of a sound engineer as she listens to the sound of wind whistling through the ribcage of a dead animal in the Highlands of Scotland. Now we’re inside the fan of an ice-cream freezer in Israel. Now we’re inside the chest of someone in the back of a lorry struggling to breathe. Now we’re inside the cremation oven that may burn the body of Henry Kissinger. Now we’re at a country fair, inside the pipework of a steam engine once used to run a cotton mill near Rochdale. Now we’re in a van’s ventilation system on the way back from the mines. Now we’re the air leaving a football as it’s kicked. Now we’re in an extractor fan in the first-class toilet at 37,000 feet.
A mechanic is wading through a swamp full of old tyres and faded, floating Monster energy-drinks cans. A duck lands on a pond full of algae. A young woman washes her face from a filthy bowl. A terminally ill man trips over coming out of a laundrette and drops his new gloves in a puddle. Now a microphone placed inside a plughole beneath a communal men’s shower block in Sonapur and one inside the bidet at the Palm Hotel. We listen to both at the same time. A pile of dirty laundry from a shelter is dumped in the back of a van. Piles of rotting brown fabric in greasy paper bags are stacked floor to ceiling and someone is pulling them down with a hook in clumps. Someone else walks into a spider’s web in an old chicken barn and we hear the web crumple around their face. An artist has collected every takeaway cup of coffee or tea she has b
een given in the last ten years and built a house from it and is inside waiting for it to rot; we hear her laughing. Straw full of chicken droppings crackles and burns in an incinerator. A child soldier in Sudan puts a small stone in each ear.
Bulldozers, seagulls, a multitude of drowned-out voices. Grinding, cracking, torn plastic, mushy paper, rotten food and metal. Glass shards and broken wood.
The sound of a spider spinning silk into a web.
It’s getting quieter.
We hear a lock turn. It is a padlock to a small cabinet in a jewellery shop. Then another, to a private bike store. Now a key turns in the door to a stationery cupboard in a stately home. A metal gate to a parking lot swings shut. The twizzle of a combination lock to open a safe containing sensitive government information. An alarm fob beeps. A hidden speaker buzzes as a glass door is opened by hand. Someone types a series of long passwords underneath what follows. A deadbolt is thrown across a large pitch-black wooden door as someone approaches. A car is locked remotely, a hundred latches are hooked, a thousand bolts are thrown, a million alarms are set. A prison guard lays her keys in a tray. A portcullis is lowered, a security pass bleeps as it touches a gate at Facebook headquarters. A large brass key is being cut. A metal detector makes a rising woop noise as a child passes through. Shutters on a shop front in Bond Street are closing rapidly.
A light rain shower. A slosh of a soaked sponge onto the windscreen of a Koenigsegg inside a hangar as someone starts to wipe soap bubbles away. There’s a small creak as the central wiper is swung upwards and away from the glass. At that moment, a handful of diamonds are scattered in a thin-stemmed glass. Back to the slosh and wipe. All the fountains in all the shopping malls spurting on full power. The sound of the diamonds again. A hiss as the top of a glass bottle of imported sparkling water is opened. An elbow from a homeless person hits a car-showroom plate-glass window with a muffled boom. It’s caught with a contact mic and the sound is then taken to a private cinema and played at full volume in surround sound but recorded from the projection booth. It stops rather abruptly as a pair of sunglasses is placed quietly down on a piece of raw Carrara marble. A glass slide is clipped under a microscope in a laboratory. A large, single, square ice cube circulates round the bottom of a whisky tumbler. Again and again. The whisky has all gone. Not realising it is closed, a dog runs into a greenhouse door. A man’s wedding rings accidentally touches a revolving door as he pushes too hard on it. We follow him in through the turn and out the other side. Another boom from the homeless person’s elbow. A maid is chiselling ice with a tool, but we just hear two downward scrapes. Someone else holds up a single-lens reflex camera to their eyes and their glasses touch the rear display screen with a light click. Ice round a different whisky tumbler. Then we are inside a cardboard box as Christmas decorations are piled up on top. They are wrapped in tissue paper, but we still hear the chink as they touch. This chinking gives a pitched tone to play with and it becomes a small melody. Over the rest of the piece of music, the tempo increases very slowly but significantly until by the end it is extreme. Now a person with brown skin is cleaning the side windows on a teak boat in a warm wind. The boat is moving in the choppy waters causing the ladder she is up to creak slightly. There is a child tapping on the glass of a large aquarium with a toy Nerf gun at roughly the same pace as the ladder creak. The taps from this are added into the groove with the Christmas decorations. A glugging of a whole bottle of red wine into a decanter has been turned from an audio file into a sample instrument to allow it to be played in pieces. A new slide slips under a microscope in a different lab. Another watch slips from a pocket onto changing-room tiles. A phone vibrates briefly on a glass office coffee table filled with International Klein Blue powder paint. Water drips off a model’s beard onto a shiny surfboard in a TV studio. A child bumps their forehead gently on a window to a tool shop. Someone else is wiping a second cocktail glass with a towel. The wet rags of a window cleaner in a bucket, the slosh of a new mop, a hot flannel placed on a tray. A woman’s watch, face up, is lightly dragged across a jeweller’s counter. A bangle knocks against the brass and leather of a car door as the driver reaches down to pick up his dropped cigarette lighter. Police lights are spinning furiously; we hear them from the inside – not the siren, the mirrored reflectors hurtling round the light bulbs. An LED is blinking on a security panel and its tiny noise is amplified to the same level as the police lights. A security light pops on.
Bulldozers, seagulls, a multitude of drowned-out voices. Grinding, cracking, torn plastic, mushy paper, rotten food and metal. Glass shards and broken wood. It gets louder.
Someone is running through the sewers in Rome in bare feet. At the same speed, a windshield wiper on a Bell 525 helicopter is on its fastest setting even though the blades aren’t spinning. This is our new tempo. A set of keys rattle on a polished wooden chair on a wooden launch boat tied to a pier. A busker’s coins vibrate in a tin as a blacked-out motorhome goes past. A mother-of-pearl button on a coat rattles against the petrol tank of a motorbike. Cufflinks in a copper ashtray rattle as a ship pulls in to port. Bottles of brandy rattle against each other in the back of the boot of a rusty car travelling at high speed through the desert. The scooping of coins in a currency-exchange kiosk.
Twins are planning a stunt using a touchscreen, in which a pilot leaves a small plane mid-flight with no parachute and then follows it down as it descends rapidly. He would then climb back in and land it safely, but we just hear the tapping of their electronic pen on the screen, air conditioning and distant seagulls in the background.
An overhead fan is moving air about in a guest bedroom. A pair of hands on a woman’s back. Fish swim idly in an aquarium in the same kind of quiet rhythm many thousands of miles away. We hear the ticking of many luxury watches in Switzerland, but filtered so we only hear the higher frequencies and the whole recording is laid in very gently. Two clubs in a golf bag in the back of an SUV are vibrating softly against each other as the car idles outside a fish restaurant. A bank of LCD TVs showing soundless images of a happy white couple in an apartment are buzzing and humming endlessly, but they’re turned right down in the mix until you can barely notice them. A child at boarding school is gently exhaling her breath onto a cold windowpane. A long horn sound can be heard distantly through a closed, polished brass porthole and it loops all the way to the end of the piece.
Gold taps turning, gold teeth grinding, gold lifts rising, gold pens twisting, gold handles turning, gold curtains pulled shut.
It is getting quieter still beneath the horn, even though the sounds are stacking up. In a hotel room above a casino, a seventy-five-year-old man is putting in coloured contact lenses. A model looks at her reflection in an elevator as it moves slickly downwards. A Murano glass vase is cooling in Venice, resting. A student is gently pouring a premixed cocktail into a glass in the back of a limousine while he waits for his sister. A candle wafts lightly in a restaurant bathroom. Someone is silently racking out lines of speed on a smoked-glass table. The shimmer of chandeliers in a train carriage at a station as a freight train goes past. An entire empty building made of glass still hums. In Florida, a bottle of Bling H2O is being carried shakily on a silver tray. On the same tray, a silver bucket full of Kentucky Fried Chicken. The stream of a millionaire’s urine on ice cubes. An iPad is still showing a silent promotional movie at a security trade show, even though everyone has left. A picture taken from a magazine is pressed underneath glass at the framers. An iPhone on a plane is charging on a cashmere blanket as we hear someone trying a variety of white wines. A woman sniffs an unlit lavender-scented candle. Someone else is peeling tape off a just-renovated polished-stone kitchen work surface in one long seamless motion. Someone is admiring their name etched onto an office door by tracing their name with a finger. A Neighbourhood Watch sticker is being stuck against the glass pane in a front door. A vast see-through sculpture in a foyer, free of dust, shudders a little as a digger excavates foundation
s next door. A man is looking through binoculars at a box on a polished mahogany table, but we hear road noise. Someone else trips and drops a whole basket of handcreams on a sheepskin. Someone is changing the water in a vase of flowers. The ice-maker on a large fridge can’t stop itself from grinding and crunching behind the scenes. A clunk as a bottle of perfume drops neatly into the dispensing slot of a vending machine in Milan at midnight. A steam room, teeth in a plastic tray, a pair of spurs and leather boots set down heavily by a kitchen door. The abrupt bang of a gavel. Two people in a shower.
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