9.
Sostenuto
To work
Under harsh spotlights a worker – dark-skinned, thin, tired and immobile – has his head cocked back, looking up at the cabin of a crane in silence while another worker snips the ends of cable ties nearby. It is hot with barely any wind and just past midnight. Nobody is bothering to pick up the long, discarded tips of the black plastic ties. There are no radios on and no speaking or singing, but there are constant interruptions of bangs, power tools and engines. The recording is unlikely to contain birdsong. He clears the dust from his throat again.
An assistant is adjusting the legs of a tripod in the dark. An artist is mixing paints for a background in a title sequence.
A woman is washing bed sheets by hand in the moonlight in the left speaker. On the right, a few kilometres away from her, we hear a garment bag being unzipped, slowly. On the left, the rumble of a tank under a bridge; on the right, a Namibian is pumping water from a poisoned well without any light. On the left someone is writing racist tweets in a small room with no windows, on the right someone is upstairs in an elaborate Halloween costume on her own, stirring a hot chocolate. On the left police are dragging someone drunk to the cells. On the right someone from the local council is turning the lights off on a high street. On the left someone is sipping from a cocktail in bed while the person next to them is snoring; on the right, the horn from a huge cargo ship a significant distance away in thick fog recorded across the water from land. On the left, a sheet being pulled over a face; on the right, the boot of a taxi opens with a squeak at midnight. On the left, a bristle of paperwork into a folder; on the right, a fax spitting out a death threat into an empty office.
The tearing of gaffer tape beneath a table with a single microphone set up on the top. The waving of a huge, unwashed bed sheet to sound like a flag in a Foley studio.
On the left we hear the small pop of a lid removed from lipstick by someone skinny next to a chest of drawers. On the right a miner underground takes a small bite from a rotten apple core by the dying light of his head torch. On the left a lawyer doesn’t know if it’s day or night but is twisting and turning on a metal bed with her eyes closed. On the right someone is underneath a car attaching a small dark box by the light of a key-ring torch. In stereo now, two Australian girls are skinny dipping in the Maldives by moonlight and we hear them make weird noises under the water as we record them from above as they try to come up for air.
A piano tuner opens his briefcase. A steward in thick glasses tears tickets.
A person is supervising the unloading of coal in North Korea using repeated short blasts on a plastic whistle. Someone is shooting magpies across a field using only a torch as light. A researcher is in a small, hastily built hide covered in grasses and is writing a diary, unaware of the cracking sounds happening behind her. An army recruit is face down in damp dirt inside the hollowed-out remains of a fallen tree. A bedroom door is broken down while twins sleep as fire spreads and burns in the rooms above. People in a forest are chainsawing Christmas trees off at the base of the trunks. An electrician walks towards a dark figure with a candle across a meadow. A clean-shaven man is unbuttoning his shirt in a dingy hotel room in Buenos Aires with his phone tucked under his chin.
A big production meeting for a new piece of musical theatre on Broadway is interrupted by the sound of a news alert appearing on the director’s phone. An editor knocks a pair of glasses off a table onto the floor with his elbow.
A fake snow machine is turned to maximum. A microphone is suspended inside a Saudi oil tanker as it fills with oil. As we hear the throb and gush of it rush over us, some recordings fade in taken inside windowless trucks in the rain, carrying animals to abattoirs. Office staff are hiding under tables while we listen to muffled shouting. Someone quietly pulls a needle out of the arm of a heroin addict; we may not even hear this. A family is trying to quietly pack all their things in a single suitcase as fast as they can before dawn breaks. We may not hear them either. A legal assistant is putting piles of A4 paperwork in to manila folders by the light of her phone. A sudden jolt and we are inside the walk-in wardrobe of the mistress of an American Republican senator listening to a Mexican cleaner sweeping up broken glass.
An exotic headpiece is pulled firmly onto the head of an actor by a wigs specialist. A film catering truck pulls into a parking lot by a river beneath the light of a full moon.
A microphone is hidden at the bottom of a basket of dirty laundry as it makes its way up some stairs on a ship, past the sound of banging from a locked metal door. A bottle of Brunello di Montalcino slips a little in its slot in a wine cellar as a helicopter goes overhead. A rat nibbles the corner of a cardboard box of old contracts in the attic of a building on Rue de Varenne in Paris. A radio controlled Subaru BRAT drives slowly up a driveway. A woman is unconscious by stairs, but we hear her breathing. A chef is trying to finely slice a tomato by the light of his phone, but slices through his thumb instead.
Someone in the costume department is steaming a peasant’s outfit. A crew member is rigging a bank of fake keyboards and various bits of music technology on a vast stage.
A photography student slips a photo of Eric Garner into a chemical bath in a school darkroom. Someone is standing on the rim of a toilet bowl in the dark in a toilet cubicle quietly counting poker chips over the sound of flushing. A volunteer at a cancer-charity shop picks up a box dumped by the door full of golliwog toys and t shirts with racist slogans on. A girl rattles her piggy bank as her father turns the lights out at bedtime. It’s answered by every child awake with a piggy bank at home, rattling theirs in response. Someone has recorded all the individual clicks of computer mice used in the planning, making and editing of the new Marvel film and played them one after another at extremely high speed. A coin falls off the top of an overflowing vegan café tips jar. A furious clattering of trains race round tiny tracks as a model-railway enthusiast with his house lights off bends down at eye level and watches the tiny red and green lights on the trains as they whizz round too fast. A jackhammer attacks a pavement, recorded out of the window of an ad agency office nearby. A hard drive spins, writing picture and movie data – we hear it from a contact mic placed inside the housing. A ball bearing bounces down the stairs of a dolls’ house at midnight. Someone hurls a collection of VHS tapes from the top floor of a tower block just as the street lights turn on.
Beneath artificially bright lights, next to a huge fake waterfall, a laying of fake gold plates on a golden tablecloth. An injection of chemicals into a body.
An Olympic sprinter is slowly pulling on Lycra at night. A worker is raking already-rotten leaves from the cover of an outdoors swimming pool sealed for winter. We listen from the perspective of a plastic diver toy bobbing on the surface below. Warm coconut oil is being dripped onto the back of a DJ having a massage in a São Paulo hotel bedroom. Now we’re inside the throat of a heavy smoker, hearing the peculiar rasp of phlegm. Someone who’s overslept and missed their alarm is snoring loudly. An underpaid teenager is washing dishes out of sight at a private members’ club. A footballer is pumping iron too quickly in a home gym. Rupert Murdoch bangs his hand on a table. Now we hear the turn of the mechanical coat rack in the cloakroom of the Royal Academy of Arts in Piccadilly. A Lazy Susan in a Thai restaurant is pushed round agitatedly by a waiter. Now we’re inside a diamond mine. Now inside a bag of Christmas decorations in an Ohio garage, a faded Santa starts to make the sounds of Christmas, but its batteries are low and it sounds like a distorted, pitchless growl. Now we’re inside the body of an upright piano in Venice. A man shouts at a woman: we can’t hear the words, but the piano’s lower strings are vibrating in sympathy. We’re now in a coffin listening to earth being shovelled on top in long, slow clumps. A small boat rounds the headland at dawn.
A young boy is wearing ill-fitting boots and a woollen cap from a bygone era and is stamping to keep himself warm. Twelve skydivers are waiting
for the signal to jump and are gently punching each other on the arms as a gesture of support in the same rhythm as the boy.
A shovel of coal into a boiler. An aerobics class is struggling to keep up with the teacher. A wine exporter is having an affair in a car park. Someone goes over a waterfall inside a barrel. A girl drops her newly extracted bloody tooth on the top floor of a bus. A journalist has a virtual-reality headset on, but it seems to be broken. As she twists her head, we can hear she is struggling to breathe. An Egyptian man is tied to a chair, shivering, with an eye mask on. We hear a kettle boiling in the background. A drone pilot is hyperventilating in the bathroom at a friend’s barbeque. A dead pigeon is frozen in ice, by a river, but a microphone is frozen alongside it and we hear the studs in motorbike tyres over the top at the same pace as the shovels of earth on the coffin lid. Several plumbers are on their backs using ratchets trying to unblock something untoward and you can hear the quick click click click of the ratchet as they unscrew the pipes. A classic-car garage is respraying a damaged car. A fisherman has fallen overboard at night and is drowning in the darkness. A craftsperson is weaving a pot from human hair. Someone with an unsteady hand is making a scale replica of a Nazi-occupied French village and from a microphone placed in the model of the local church, we hear the brief whirr of an electric screwdriver. A musician in Tehran has put a microphone inside a crash helmet and is tapping the outside of it with a pair of car-battery clamps to try and get a decent kick-drum sound out of it. It becomes boomy and works for a while, even though the rhythm is uneven and out of time. A huge oil barrel tips over in a car forecourt in Port-au-Prince and glugs down a drain in the gaps between the helmet taps. The roar of a steel blast furnace. Drawers full of screws, bolts, nuts and nails come crashing down. A video-game sound designer has too-dark sunglasses on and has smoked too much weed but is still trying to replicate the sound of a black hole for a documentary on the solar system.
A sound recordist on set has the hiccoughs and is holding up filming on a set. A lighting rigger is swinging from a harness up in the gantry in a partially built Olympic stadium; we hear the creak of the harness.
A woman is sewing the lining into someone else’s handbag. A phone is ringing in the bottom of an abandoned wire basket in a shop during a power cut. A stuntwoman about to ride a horse off a cliff into a river is pulling on ropes in a sharp, jagged rhythm. The singer from your favourite contemporary band is breathing a little faster than usual. Someone is pulling off used sheets from a bed. A clicking together of two bits of metal at an arms factory in one satisfying clunk. An official stamp on a stained piece of paper. A tailor squatting down picks through a box of safety pins. A black Mercedes car door closes quietly. An orgasm. A doctor is picking scabs off an arm.
A gay cheerleader troop is in the middle of a warm-up routine somewhere outside of America. A special FX person is priming an explosion.
The smash of skittles as a pharmacist on a night out in a bowling alley gets a strike and then a huge crashing and shattering of glass is made up of many sounds piled up on top of each other: a teenager kicking a bin really hard in a rehearsal room in Wales, spilling bottles of Coke and non-alcoholic beer everywhere; a stunt person throwing themselves through the window of a fake corporate law firm; a chandelier falling from the ceiling of a European theatre by accident; an actor hurling a wine glass at a wall, but we don’t know if it’s part of the show or backstage; a movie extra punching one of the light bulbs round the outside of a mirror; a fruit bowl being knocked off a table in a Portuguese recording studio; a body smashing through the windscreen of a car on a film set in Hong Kong; the glass from a pair of glasses being ground into the wooden planks of an opera-house stage.
A sound person is fixing a microphone to the neck brace of an actor dressed as a slave and we hear her tapping on the mic as she does it. A prop-maker takes a swig of fake beer and spits it in a nearby plant pot at the moment the tapping stops.
A child is peeling off mouldy wallpaper. A child is climbing through a small black hole. A child is climbing onto the top of a train. A child is picking up a loaded gun. A child is shaking a sealed jigsaw box. A child is drinking bleach. A child is doing their homework. A child is clinging on to its parent’s back in a river. A child is falling backwards off a ladder. A child is flipping pancakes. A child is turning a torch on. A child is reading a book about child labour during the industrial revolution. A child is picking food out of a bin. A child is picking fruit. A child is in a quarry. A child is sorting out shellfish in a bucket. A child is on the back of a moped with his two sisters. A child is tending a bonfire of toxic waste. A child is eating a hot dog. A child is stealing a wallet in a train station. A child is making shoes. A child is drawing a picture of a bomb exploding. A child is dressing up as Darth Vader. A child is running across the road. A child is smoking something other than a cigarette. A child is throwing a toy penguin in the air again and again. A child is making a prison from Lego. A child is walking through the door to piano lessons. A child is walking towards a crowd wearing an explosives belt. A child is throwing peanuts to peacocks. A child is crying on a train station platform, having missed their train. A child is pulling pages out of a diary and screwing them up. A child is holding the hands of their mother very tightly. A child is on their father’s shoulders, playing his head like it was a pair of bongos. A child is restlessly trying to get to sleep. A child is slamming a door closed. A child is dipping a candle in wax. A child is running for the door. A million children are now running towards a door. The child of the worker by the crane is asleep in a different country.
The whirr of fans on high-wattage studio lights in a TV studio in Florida. Singers are calling their agents on the phone but not getting through.
The buzzer to talk to security in a car park. A door buzzer in Montreal. Another buzzer to a clinic in Reykjavik. All the buzzers to prison gates, to gated communities, to nightclubs, to illicit poker games. A milkman knocks on your door and an accountant slams his laptop shut in anger. At that exact moment, we hear all the estate agents opening doors to prospective buyers right now in a cascade of roads and room tones and birds and footsteps and shouts and planes and TVs and kettles. A churning inside all the cash machines spewing money out. A cacophony of printers, one in each major city in every country in the world printing out legal documents in cases between corporations and governments. It’s a torrent of clatter and ink. From that dense clustering of noise comes a new cacophony, the voluminous rattle and metallic shiver of millions of coat hangers tumbling out of boxes on the floor of clothes retailers across Europe and North America. From that cacophony comes the high-speed furr of money-counting machines in all the banks knowingly and unknowingly processing laundered cash from drug cartels. From that mechanical fluttering to the sound of billions of white tablets made by pharmaceutical companies in India skittering through stainless-steel grading and sorting machines. Millions of robots are building things right now. From this to the sound of everyone in the finance industry at their desk right now typing the word ‘money’ in an email. To all the coins tipped into parking meters. From this to the world’s photocopiers on full. After this we hear everyone doing a marketing presentation right now using a pen on a whiteboard. Those millions of tiny squeaks segue into all the builders drilling into the walls of people who’ve bought their houses with borrowed money, and then into all the architects taking photos right now of building plots or sites on their mobile phones, then into all the journalists driving too fast towards a story, then into all the airline-industry personnel brushing and styling their hair right now in preparation to meet passengers, into all the insurance companies stapling photocopied documents together right now, into all the bleeps made by all the computers in call centres right now, into all the warning alarms in all the stockrooms and warehouses right now, into all the mouse clicks right now, into all the people programming computers right now, into all the scanning of barcodes right now, into all the volunteers
at charity organisations shaking money-collection tins right now. All the consultants and managers and freelancers drying their hands in a corporate bathroom right now, into all the writers paying for a coffee right now, into all the musicians taking their instruments out of their cases, into all the TV crews setting up, into all the doctors coughing right now, into all the fashion designers cutting cloth right now, into all the clogs on floorboards, into all the people making odd noises in their sleep in labs, into all the madeleines in trays sliding into ovens, into all the people collecting eggs, into all the people knitting, into all the receptionists putting on headsets or headphones right now, into all the people combing lice out of pets’ fur now, into all people in advertising sitting back in a comfy chair right now. All the drivers climbing out of their cabs, cars and trucks, to all the social- and care-service workers carrying a tray right now with someone else’s food on, to all the physios and fitness instructors warming down about now, to all the bodyguards and security people having a shower right now, to all the soldiers dragging on a cigarette right now, to all the porn stars getting dressed right now, into all the farmers closing gates right now.
The Music Page 11