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The Music

Page 9

by Matthew Herbert


  Bulldozers, seagulls, a multitude of drowned-out voices. Grinding, cracking, torn plastic, mushy paper, rotten food and metal. Glass shards and broken wood. It’s getting quieter.

  An abandoned all-electric wedding car is almost silently idling. The screen of a diagnostics device in a hospital is flickering but not bleeping. A rifle sight repeatedly pressed against a cheekbone in winter.

  Someone in patent red shoes is bending over to pour wine. A stained-oak trophy cupboard is being carefully wiped. The muted flip of soft leather-soled slippers. A young girl is holding up a Diet Pepsi bottle and watching Netflix through it with the sound down. A key ring with various special fobs and a number of brass keys sits in a saucer that’s shuffling slightly across the steel tabletop from the vibration of the dishwasher next door. An eye just pressed to a spy hole in a door. A bare foot on a glass-brick floor above a basement. A large undrunk smoothie poured softly down a sink. A heartbroken tailor with a pair of scissors cutting through skin accidentally. A bottle of blue pills in the bottom of a bag travelling at 4mph. The glass in a shop window full of books below the flat of a chef preparing sushi shudders as a train passes beneath. A woman pushes a trolley on thick carpet and on it a cafetière chinks very faintly against porcelain. A lizard scuttles beneath a sunlounger. The distant rattle of test tubes on trolleys elsewhere. The purr of liquid nitrogen across stones. A man swishing liquor backwards and forwards in his mouth, lips closed. A large telescope pointing up to space shifts on ball bearings hidden in the base as it’s swung round by someone in a swimsuit. One thousand perfume bottles in a factory shuffle forward in a row at the end of a shift. A baby monitor; something is happening in the background now. A pool seen from the top floor of a building by an au pair sending WhatsApp messages. Smash – a football through the glass of a kitchen window. Something hurtling down a gravel drive sped up until all 500 metres of it is condensed into one-and-a-half seconds. A full kettle is boiling unwatched and steaming up the mirrors backstage. Someone else is hurling gym equipment through a windscreen. A car is rampaging through duty free on YouTube. A rifle has been shot through a conservatory at the same time as a bottle of communion wine is thrown through a stained-glass window. A tower of jars of relish in a delicatessen tumbles forwards. A boy scout staggers backwards through a window. An AV system corrupts and starts playing the sound of a trans person destroying a Blu-ray player with a hammer rather than the graduation scene on the Blu-ray disc it should be playing. A musician is throwing pairs of champagne glasses out of the toilet window at a fashion party. A cargo plane full of Chinese pottery hits turbulence. Brown water starts spluttering from a gold tap as someone tries to run a bath. A policeman steps on a phone by accident and cracks the screen. A dentist slips and drills into an inflamed gum. A key snaps off in a lock. A diving mask fills up with salty water. A fountain pen leaks ink onto a striped shirt as someone bends down to wipe their shoes with a tea towel. A whisky tumbler slips. A dishwasher starts spraying water everywhere from a broken hose. A kid throws a cup of diluted juice over a wall of art works. A teenager pukes in his father’s bed.

  An ice cube splits. An ice shelf cracks.

  Bulldozers, seagulls, a multitude of drowned-out voices. Grinding, cracking, torn plastic, mushy paper, rotten food and metal. Glass shards and broken wood.

  A recording of a huge group of cleaners and domestic staff walking together through a city, banging wood and metal, played so loudly out of speakers next to an empty tall glass building that parts of it start to fragment, to shatter into a million tiny pieces.

  It gets louder.

  8.

  Presto

  To digest

  A polio doctor in Pakistan, on a break from work, sits at a small green wooden table with colleagues and picks up a knife and fork. From nowhere we hear the swift, overly hurried and deferential whoosh of a pair of automatic glass doors to a supermarket opening. Early in the morning somewhere a stray cat purrs at a baker’s feet. We hear the slow slide of a peeling, laminated menu across the surface of a dirty linoleum-topped table. The ping of a push bell as a cook, having plated up, is ready for service. By a small stream, someone under a tree is using a clear, hollow, plastic, sharpened toothpick, picking at their teeth in regular high-pitched clicks and ticks. In between, the sound of 328 English Aga lids closing in the gaps. A buttering of overly stiff brown toast at a roadside café is simplified to a few quick sweeps of the knife in a triplet figure. On the last scrape, a frozen leg of mutton falls on the floor of a speeding van with a bang. It is answered by the ritualistic sucking-out of flesh from a cherimoya fruit by a series of angry Republicans. Different brands of ketchup squirt from unbranded plastic bottles at the same time. Someone unwittingly stands on a ripe plum on the floor of a warehouse. A maid drops a duck egg from a cotton-lined woven basket on the dark-

  timbered floor of a holiday cabin near Phuket. As if in answer, we hear a unison dong as different people in different places try to break an egg on the rim of a medium-sized Pyrex bowl, though their contact on the side of the bowl is not hard enough and none of their eggs break. Consequently we just hear the ringing dong sound as their eggs strike different bowls in many kitchens in several different countries exactly at once. Each one is placed in a different position in the stereo image to create a kind of cocoon-like reverberant bell sound. This sound drenched in a long metallic plate reverb.

  An elderly butler drops a heavy coloured-crystal wine glass on the polished teak deck of a boat. It is answered by 65,000 traditional Portuguese corks being pulled out of vintage French red-wine bottles at the same time. A full jar of hot marmalade is dropped on a traditional quarry-tiled floor by a sugar-beet farmer in Norfolk, followed immediately by fizzy drinks from a SodaStream in Israel being rapidly siphoned into different-sized bottles. This siphoning moves over the space of five seconds. From the fizz emerges the sound of Sainsbury’s Taste the Difference bacon in a hot frying pan recorded with great care and attention by Peter Cobbin, senior engineer at Abbey Road, using up to twenty-two microphones. We enjoy all the minute variations and detail of its sizzle. As the fat spits with increasing urgency, we become aware of another spitting sound fading underneath – a new batch of bratwurst sausages on the grill at Meister Bock at Cologne Station, but recorded on a phone. Someone has tried to engrave a recording of a pig being killed onto a tortilla and is playing it on a record player. A member of the Cargill family is quietly tearing off a piece of Domino’s pepperoni pizza, a lawyer is eating steamed bread in prison, but we can’t quite hear either. Instead we hear a single, loud, curt gesture: the crushing of garlic under a thick knife in the kitchen of a small motorhome as punctuation. Then scissors snipping the end off a smallish plastic-sealed tube of liver pâté on a beach and a repeated regular stabbing with a fork of the plastic cover to a ready meal by a nurse on a night shift. On the last of the punctures, and exactly in time, a mechanic slips and accidentally bangs a wrench against a large empty copper vat at the Heineken factory in Amsterdam. It makes a big, echoey, metallic clang which we hear dying away beneath the road noise.

  An aeroplane is overhead. An alcoholic kitchen porter at a private function on Kellogg Drive, VA sharpens chef’s knives in quick succession; we hear just a tiny excerpt of each but played at speed. A sugar lump drops on a small metal tray. This sound is heard again, but played out of speakers at high volume into a shipping container. Its echo can be heard in an anonymous cavernous space nearby. An empty can of malt drink is crushed by a Caterpillar-branded boot, sharply cutting off the reverb tail of the previous sound. A near-empty tea urn at a village fête far away is gurgling, ticking underneath. A cherry spat into a chipped white enamel dish with blue edges overlaid. A hand rests on another smaller hand, stirring a pot on a stove with a crude wooden spoon. A huge metal colander is dropped in a stainless-steel sink at the development kitchen of a well-known restaurant. A laptop, its screen opened on a recipe, is dragged across an expensive antique table. A close-u
p of a not-yet-ripe Palestinian lemon’s skin and pith being peeled with a hand-held zester tool; not a big sound, but it’s still there, only noticeable when it stops, a presence afraid of an absence. Grind, grind: a salt mill. A grandmother is crushing golden rice in Dehradun in an iron pestle and mortar that was given as a wedding gift. It crossfades into the sound of an almond-grading machine near Modesto in California. We hear the almonds bounce and trickle quickly through the slatted metal grille. Now we hear the vibrating sound at the end of a conveyor belt inside a giant flour mill, recorded from above. A pause.

  A breakdown: every pot on every stove in the world making popcorn right now, and the kernels are popping. Not dedicated popcorn-making machines and their whirring, clumsy mechanics; just pots on stoves, lids on. The recordings with the noisiest backgrounds are mixed the most quietly so the sound of the pots and popcorn is foregrounded. Consequently there is an accumulation of temporary stillness as people around these pots wait for the kernels to pop. There will be a few recordings with excited chatter from children nearby, but again we want to feel anticipation rather than be distracted by language, so any recordings with audible words on have been turned down in volume until they’re unrecognisable or the talking edited out. Assuming we are listening in on just pots and stoves whose oil is about to reach the right temperature (and eliminating those that have already started popping), this beginning lasts 10,144 milliseconds from no pops to all done. There should be a natural crescendo as we listen to every pot and stove until every corn has popped. Each of the recordings or live microphones stops at the precise moment the last corn has popped on the individual pan it is recording. Because some will be cooked before others, the effect is to feel a natural thinning-out from a dense barrage of popping to infrequent single pops and bursts until we are left with just one kernel to pop inside just one pot.

  We begin again. The crack of 40 per cent of the total stock of Lidl bananas having their necks broken, ready to be peeled, the sounds piled up on top of each other. To help blur it into the next sound, a little tape delay added. The feedback knob on the tape delay is set at around 70 per cent, so the sound keeps moving on and on. It begins to fade out as we hear the slow breaking, opening of a too-ripe Australian avocado skin with a single curve of the knife. A sheep stands while it has a number twenty-one sprayed on its back. A trainee chef picks herbs in a forest. A boxcutter skilfully punctures the plastic seal round a barrel of brominated vegetable oil in a long slicing motion. Then in various kitchens across Europe, finely chopped shallots hit the bottom of hot pans roughly at the same time. Some cookery books are piled on a fire. There’s a rapid stacking of dirty dishes. A windscreen on a food truck in San Francisco shatters. An olive plops into a martini. Now the slow peeling-back of a small Spanish tin of anchovies down the middle of the stereo image is automated so it gets louder and louder as the stereo image turns inward to mono, a diminuendo. A brushing of hair behind an ear near a fire; a sharp knife lingers through an octopus; another olive in another martini. Then back in again in haste with everything colliding on top of itself. A half-empty barrel of balsamic vinegar sloshes around on the shoulder of a woman in Perugia. A washing of fresh, damp parsley from a garden in Provence. Laid over the top, a sifting of genetically modified cornflour, a flicked pan of peanuts, gluey fingers sticking to a packet of crisps, the trembling opening of a couscous packet, the pouring of Karol, sixty-seven people trying to eat mussels in silence. A shaken packet of hot sugared doughnuts at a fairground. A slam of frozen chips into a fryer in a van parked outside Berghain nightclub in Berlin. A Spanish peach stone spat into an empty rainwater barrel. A partner of a miner drops a plate of pap and vleis. An empty blender joins in, but it’s not actually a blender, it’s a dentist’s drill recorded in Guadalajara slowed down to resemble a food mixer. It slows down further, the whole track now sucked in behind it. A stream of vomit from a lead singer in detox. Someone else quickly eats two packets of chocolate biscuits in a bedroom in double time. Then off again. A crate of empty Coke bottles slammed down outside the back of a small café beneath a hydroelectric dam, answered by someone choking on a piece of steak. The sound is cut short by the crack of a dry organic oatcake being snapped by an embarrassed painter-decorator. The angry crackle of fat on a bit of industrial bacon on a campfire. A faulty extractor fan in a mountain lodge above a smoking, sticking fondue. A large bottle of thousand-island dressing falls off a table in Texas but doesn’t smash. The suck of separate teats from a milking machine on cows’ udders in a huge shed. The tumble of empty Roundup barrels in a pickup truck in Ha Giang. The dumb suck of an early-seventies chest-freezer lid opening, breaking its seal, itself interrupted by sixteen packets of crisps being stamped on in quick succession – each one a different flavour. Teetering boxes of wedding cakes cascade off the edge of a loading bay. A ripe tomato hits a politician on the back of their neck. A man slurps a prawn. Now the small squeak of human teeth against a too-thick, out-of-date slice of lightly grilled halloumi recorded in a studio in front of a live audience. Then immediately spat in a bin. The dull mini thuddish crack as you bite into a sour cherry expecting it to be sweet and also thinking that the stone has gone but finding too late that it isn’t and biting too hard on it. It’s a sound that comes again and again in what follows. A lemon tree uprooted. A child bites through a solid R White’s Lemonade ice lolly but doesn’t swallow. A quail’s egg dropped suddenly on a Delaware marble floor put through a reverb mapped from a huge indoor Polish pig shed just after all the pigs have been loaded onto a lorry. The slow long scrape of a Star Wars-themed ice-cube tray against the side of the freezer compartment of a fridge as the tray is removed. The sound slows down in time, but the pitch remains the same. It is as if the world goes into slow motion. This stretching of scraping ice eventually comes to a pause, a kind of hover. Gallons of blood pour onto the floor. A tanker in a traffic accident is spilling its cargo of milk. An industrial orange juicer is churning in Brazil. A thundering of taps filling washing-up bowls across the world. A series of underwater microphones record the rip of commercial dredging along the seabed. A Krispy Kreme executive is pissing in the shower. A mic inside the radiators of all the engines of all the Waitrose lorries on the M25 right now, even if they are stationary. The blood is still pouring. An unnoticed phone is vibrating on a messy kitchen table. A forklift idling in an apple cold store at Scripps Farm in Kent. A single gas-burner ring on full with nothing on the stove. The doctor stabs a pakora with her fork. This echoes within an unlit hollow, wooden space.

  All the kitchens cooking school dinners start to roar about this time, arranged according to the price per head, starting with the most expensive first. They pile in on top of each other quickly. By the end, it is cacophonous. It finishes with a huge tray of cheap frozen sausage rolls sliding into a giant open oven. Exactly at the end of this sound, the first Russian vodka bottle in an empty but huge recycling bin in Tbilisi strikes a hollow metallic ring.

  Now the beating-out of air from a pig’s lungs by an alcoholic butcher at four o’clock in the morning comes in hard, a new tempo. Twelve cows, one after another, having numbers clipped to their ears. A beer-bottle top in Nigeria is pulled off by a singer’s teeth. Now teeth being pulled out of piglets’ jaws. A waiter in Monrovia slams down a tray full of burgers, fries, coleslaw – answered by 21,100 diabetics in America either pulling a ring-pull or twisting the lid off a pressurised bottle one after another in furious succession. Even at considerable speed, this will take time to play out, the horror in the repetition. At its end, it trips into more lungs being beaten, lungs, lungs. A slit throat. A furious mixing of icing, by hand, in a bowl. Three tight chops through a neck of celery on a chopping board. Blocks of hydrogenated vegetable oil drop in the boot of a salesman’s car with a thud. A salad spinner spins freely as, with the tiniest of plops, nail clippings drop into a bowl of soup someone is about to eat. Now a rolling boil inside a hospital kitchen in Aleppo at night – interrupted by blanched potatoes hitting hot
duck fat in a pan on a TV cookery show 4,252 miles away. A cork from a bottle of single-malt whisky on a British Airways flight. The jingly hop and splosh of a supermarket trolley into a canal is squeezed shorter, putting it all on a single beat. It punches the piece up, down. A stop. Two snappings of fresh Yorkshire carrots brings it back in. A lemon squeezed, pigs burned, bitter cherries bitten, teeth pulled, syringes thrown into a metal bowl with a ringing sound. A finger broken, snapped off, snaps in. The cruel grind of an arm through a machine – but gone again. A dry cracker eaten, an energy drink opened, a boat capsizes as an indeterminable hum beneath; celery snapped. A stop. A tractor reversing over a body crossfades into the fall of rain on king-prawn ponds in Vietnam at night. We luxuriate in this sound for a while. But then a toaster pops up, ready. There’s nothing in it. A food mixer twirls boringly on a film set. Inside, dough for chocolate brownies with the wrong combination of ingredients. An insistent, anxious door buzzer to a food bank in Newport recorded from the inside. Men stuff hot dogs in their mouths at an eating competition. An empty Cornish-pasty packet skates over the surface of a footpath at a stately home and it’s mic’d up by someone following and running alongside it, keeping up and pausing when necessary. Many bellies rumble, unheard by each other. The chicken you haven’t eaten yet, but will appear on a menu you will be offered in the next few weeks, is just hatching alongside 24,999 other chickens right now in a commercial hatchery. There are hums of industrial heaters and a multiplicity of tiny identical cheeps, creating an almost singular tone. Over the top of this sound comes something that almost sounds like a bonfire crackling, but is in fact Chinese takeaway staff gently filling a paper bag with just-hot prawn crackers. Crossfade into a child unwrapping the plastic of a seaweed-and-rice triangle from a Lawson store in Osaka. The tentative unwrapping of a squashed cheese-and-pickle sandwich wrapped in foil on top of a small mountain. A blowtorch on an amateur brûlée is quietly at the back of the mix. An unopened bagged salad is tossed in a cardboard box. Someone unknown forcibly breaks an olive-oil breadstick backstage in the green room at a Beethoven concert. A blueberry Innocent smoothie squirts onto a crisp white shirt. A glug of blood from a neck. Any Italians in any restaurant at the moment, snapping grissini at the same time. A single anonymous wrist snaps beneath the weight of a tower of stacked wooden crates, followed by the lids of 1 million rice cookers closing. We hear dim-sum steaming baskets placed softly but jerkily on a table; beneath it the hubbub in a canteen at a Red Bull factory, laid over someone trying to spread soft cheese on a cracker while lying in a hospital bed, laid over someone quietly sifting icing sugar, laid over a smallholder hoeing their vegetable patch, laid over the draining of spaghetti in a retirement home, laid over a distant vicious crumpling of the plastic tray from a Jaffa Cakes packet heard from the room next door, laid over a slow stirring of mint tea, laid over the laying-out of crisps, laid over the slow peeling-back of foil on a large, own-brand coleslaw tub, laid over a tray sliding across a stone floor, laid over a minibar door-shudder, laid over a child fishing for pickles from a jar – the sounds each having their moment before settling back into the general landscape of sounds.

 

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