Listenings -- a sampler
Overhearing
The art of overhearing. If you’re hearing somebody else’s conversation, let’s be frank, it is because you’ve been listening. Probably it started as an accident, someone seated nearby or on the other side of a wall, and then there you were, you had to know what happened. A hole in the air and you put your ear to it. We all do that, hard not to, why stop.
Indeed, wherever we go there is so much to overhear, how do we keep such sounds in their place? In the background, the above and beyond, the not-right-here. That’s even less clear in a crowd, where sounds lose their place all the time. And in the age of cell phones, it’s like an exhibitionist’s dream with so many half-conversations brazenly on offer, practically asking us to try them on. If we are in a playful mood and well positioned, we might be inclined to listen to those partial dialogues in tandem, let our ears fold them together somehow into an almost conversation, made possible only by our hearing, our creative consciousness that makes connections where there did not seem to be any.
One of the properties of sound, as we know, is that it passes through walls and other obstacles. Miraculous creatures that we are, therefore, we can hear through walls, around corners, in recesses we were unaware of. What would an aural map look like, if we were to sketch one out? Completely subjective, no doubt, and according to a person’s location. What purpose would it serve? And yet we generate such internal schema often. We know where the sounds in our vicinity are supposed to be; if the dryer, the toilet, the doorbell were heard in different directions from where we expect them—let alone if the configuration continued to change—we would be enormously confused. So, our hearing has to make sense, to some extent; likewise, we know when we are overhearing, whether or not we bother to tune in.
The art of overhearing. If you’re hearing somebody else’s conversation, let’s be frank, it is because you’ve been listening. Probably it started as an accident, someone seated nearby or on the other side of a wall, and then there you were, you had to know what happened. A hole in the air and you put your ear to it. We all do that, hard not to, why stop.
Indeed, wherever we go there is so much to overhear, how do we keep such sounds in their place? In the background, the above and beyond, the not-right-here. That’s even less clear in a crowd, where sounds lose their place all the time. And in the age of cell phones, it’s like an exhibitionist’s dream with so many half-conversations brazenly on offer, practically asking us to try them on. If we are in a playful mood and well positioned, we might be inclined to listen to those partial dialogues in tandem, let our ears fold them together somehow into an almost conversation, made possible only by our hearing, our creative consciousness that makes connections where there did not seem to be any.
One of the properties of sound, as we know, is that it passes through walls and other obstacles. Miraculous creatures that we are, therefore, we can hear through walls, around corners, in recesses we were unaware of. What would an aural map look like, if we were to sketch one out? Completely subjective, no doubt, and according to a person’s location. What purpose would it serve? And yet we generate such internal schema often. We know where the sounds in our vicinity are supposed to be; if the dryer, the toilet, the doorbell were heard in different directions from where we expect them—let alone if the configuration continued to change—we would be enormously confused. So, our hearing has to make sense, to some extent; likewise, we know when we are overhearing, whether or not we bother to tune in.
Writing Liner Notes
Any number of implications might spin out from the simple act of listening to music. Among the most ridiculous of those spinnings is the five-act comedy that unfolds whenever I set out to write liner notes (typing gave me loiner notes, which would surely be easier to write: only a three-act comedy and less reliant on listening). Not that I’ve written so many such notes—maybe a dozen times in three decades—but once I’m asked I want to say yes, and so I labor over intangibles for days, weeks on end. In that interval, most other writing—most other listening, too—gradually comes to a halt. But the brand new record I’m writing about, or for, or on the occasion of, I listen to over and over again, and over and over some more. I listen to it every which way possible: across it, under it, in different orderings, softly, at full volume. I think, once this is done, I might not ever listen to it again.
For the longest time, though, that writing of notes is not done. How can it possibly go on for so long, I listen and listen, I scratch out some phrases, string them together, reach for the next point—and then much of it unravels. Where was I going with it? Pages of notes and phrases I’d scribbled; but find a beginning, construct a coherent text? I wish it were easier. Each day I manage to add a sentence or two, a slow accretion of reflections and statements, articulating its own sense of movement.
The music takes a while to sink in. Or rather, it takes many listenings to find a language to speak about the music. Can’t be helped. I want to know as much as I can about the occasion for the music that I’m hearing, though may use little of that information in what I end up writing. That’s the first obstacle in trying to speak of an invisible object: what to say about it. I have no interest in composing a breezy profile or tackling a track by track analysis; I want to say something unique to this record, so I have to find out what that is.
While I am in the midst of that writing, still listening or sometimes no music at all, it seems absolutely absurd how slow a text can be in its elaboration. This last time, I spent two weeks filling two pages. Certainly I have considered that the slowness is all mine. And yet, trying to be coherent, to actually say something worthwhile and not waste people’s time, is a matter of great pains. I do not deny that it takes me a long time each day to settle down to the task. The avoidance principle remains in play, without a doubt. Rewards are necessary too, now and then, because you know it will get done eventually, very soon it will.
On the other hand, last year, at a difficult time, I wrote liner notes in a process that was quite unlike the usual pattern. A friend, who had given me most of his records in the six years since I knew him, asked me to write something for his new record. I had imagined he probably would ask me sooner or later, though I had no idea what I could possibly say. His music is an acquired taste, and not much like anything else. I was away, dealing with family issues, when he sent me the links to the music. Before long, he grew anxious about the schedule, sooner than he initially told me, and I had neither the focus nor the time to listen to those tracks, let alone whether the very old computer at my disposal (the only internet connection) could handle it. Then one morning I woke up before six, and lying there trying not to get up yet my mind running, I began to think of the opening lines, so I did get up and for the next hour or two wrote out the requested liner notes—without having once heard the record. I had listened to a lot of his music and seen him play on multiple occasions, in this case all of that sufficed for what I needed. I could speak more broadly about his music, and maybe it was better that I didn’t have to get bogged down in all that new listening.
Any number of implications might spin out from the simple act of listening to music. Among the most ridiculous of those spinnings is the five-act comedy that unfolds whenever I set out to write liner notes (typing gave me loiner notes, which would surely be easier to write: only a three-act comedy and less reliant on listening). Not that I’ve written so many such notes—maybe a dozen times in three decades—but once I’m asked I want to say yes, and so I labor over intangibles for days, weeks on end. In that interval, most other writing—most other listening, too—gradually comes to a halt. But the brand new record I’m writing about, or for, or on the occasion of, I listen to over and over again, and over and over some more. I listen to it every which way possible: across it, under it, in different orderings, softly, at full volume. I think, once this is done, I might not ever listen to it again.
For the longest time, though, that writing of notes is not done. How can it possibly go on for so long, I listen and listen, I scratch out some phrases, string them together, reach for the next point—and then much of it unravels. Where was I going with it? Pages of notes and phrases I’d scribbled; but find a beginning, construct a coherent text? I wish it were easier. Each day I manage to add a sentence or two, a slow accretion of reflections and statements, articulating its own sense of movement.
The music takes a while to sink in. Or rather, it takes many listenings to find a language to speak about the music. Can’t be helped. I want to know as much as I can about the occasion for the music that I’m hearing, though may use little of that information in what I end up writing. That’s the first obstacle in trying to speak of an invisible object: what to say about it. I have no interest in composing a breezy profile or tackling a track by track analysis; I want to say something unique to this record, so I have to find out what that is.
While I am in the midst of that writing, still listening or sometimes no music at all, it seems absolutely absurd how slow a text can be in its elaboration. This last time, I spent two weeks filling two pages. Certainly I have considered that the slowness is all mine. And yet, trying to be coherent, to actually say something worthwhile and not waste people’s time, is a matter of great pains. I do not deny that it takes me a long time each day to settle down to the task. The avoidance principle remains in play, without a doubt. Rewards are necessary too, now and then, because you know it will get done eventually, very soon it will.
On the other hand, last year, at a difficult time, I wrote liner notes in a process that was quite unlike the usual pattern. A friend, who had given me most of his records in the six years since I knew him, asked me to write something for his new record. I had imagined he probably would ask me sooner or later, though I had no idea what I could possibly say. His music is an acquired taste, and not much like anything else. I was away, dealing with family issues, when he sent me the links to the music. Before long, he grew anxious about the schedule, sooner than he initially told me, and I had neither the focus nor the time to listen to those tracks, let alone whether the very old computer at my disposal (the only internet connection) could handle it. Then one morning I woke up before six, and lying there trying not to get up yet my mind running, I began to think of the opening lines, so I did get up and for the next hour or two wrote out the requested liner notes—without having once heard the record. I had listened to a lot of his music and seen him play on multiple occasions, in this case all of that sufficed for what I needed. I could speak more broadly about his music, and maybe it was better that I didn’t have to get bogged down in all that new listening.
Record Hunting
What are we searching for so assiduously? To hunt, dig, excavate; unearth from the vaults.
Recorded music is far more complicated than meets the eye. Visually, it’s as if nothing, a wafer, a ribbon. But what is embedded there in that nothing can reach astronomical value or promise the most arcane of illuminations upon listening. Or, it is just one more record, like a billion others.
We don’t know, and because of that we spread out through the record stores and flea markets and library sales, our fingers walking the stacks, ever on the trail of a find. How will we recognize it when we see one? The aim is not simply to add another item to the collection, or to snag a few bargains, all very nice but we’re a little beyond that. We, the tribe of discerning listeners, must keep looking. There are always records we didn’t know about, that may or may not be worth having, no need to be a completist. The mental cataloguing also has to be fed, as much as the ears. Sometimes it’s enough to just read the cover and imagine the rest.
Still, I wonder what will jump out at me, each time I step into the alternate universe and extreme sport known as the WFMU Record Fair, as I did the other day. What recording will suddenly land in my hands that says do not let it go? I dodge the vinyl completely, mountains and mazes of vinyl the past several years, though I may take a glance the next time. I don’t care about the stamp collecting aspects, the rare pressings and alternate album covers, it’s only the music that matters and some old albums never made it to digital. Instead, I comb through the CD stacks, especially the many $3 bins, while a whole elaborate inner dialogue plays out with each title I linger over. Faint sympathetic tones echo from across five decades of listening to recorded music, as I whittle down the reasons for keeping all but a few of my selections. It’s amusing enough to see what resonances are struck in the mind at the mere sight of a name or a cover, and like a keyboard full of Proust’s madeleines, an internal sampling reflex, my thoughts bounce around an entire lifetime, and further. A couple of years ago at the record fair, deep in the $1 stacks which I normally consider a waste of time, I chanced upon a CD by Kolinda, which turned out to be (as I’d suspected) the Hungarian folk group I heard on record all the way back in 1980, when I was living in that crumbly neighborhood in lower Montparnasse, on the Rue du Texel near Pernety—a neighbor on the ground floor played it for me and let me make a cassette copy, which I still have in my basement, Bernard committed suicide not long after I moved across town, I could still recall the tonalities of the group’s sound, and so for one dollar I had a later record of Kolinda some three and a half decades after first hearing them. Clearly, when we listen to a recording, we are listening to so much more.
Something else about the $3 bins at the record fair: a reminder how popular artists live on. I saw live recordings by the Doors and Jimi Hendrix that I’d never seen before (not that I’ve kept up), probably released in the last decade or two but nonetheless many years after their deaths. I resisted the urge to feel like I had to buy them. Even in the sixties—half a century ago—an awful lot was recorded, so we never know when a new record may yet come out of someone long gone. Indeed, we like to be surprised by such discoveries, as if to remind us that time may be circular or built on resonances as much as linear, and that we might still hope to hear from the lost.
Whether in used record palaces like Amoeba in California, or the WFMU Record Fair, I think that is what drives our perennial search. The thought, for me, of a previously unknown recording of Chris McGregor surfacing, or further back, Herbie Nichols sessions. Records that don’t exist, that might have at a moment unaccounted for, that suddenly materialize almost because we went looking for them.
What are we searching for so assiduously? To hunt, dig, excavate; unearth from the vaults.
Recorded music is far more complicated than meets the eye. Visually, it’s as if nothing, a wafer, a ribbon. But what is embedded there in that nothing can reach astronomical value or promise the most arcane of illuminations upon listening. Or, it is just one more record, like a billion others.
We don’t know, and because of that we spread out through the record stores and flea markets and library sales, our fingers walking the stacks, ever on the trail of a find. How will we recognize it when we see one? The aim is not simply to add another item to the collection, or to snag a few bargains, all very nice but we’re a little beyond that. We, the tribe of discerning listeners, must keep looking. There are always records we didn’t know about, that may or may not be worth having, no need to be a completist. The mental cataloguing also has to be fed, as much as the ears. Sometimes it’s enough to just read the cover and imagine the rest.
Still, I wonder what will jump out at me, each time I step into the alternate universe and extreme sport known as the WFMU Record Fair, as I did the other day. What recording will suddenly land in my hands that says do not let it go? I dodge the vinyl completely, mountains and mazes of vinyl the past several years, though I may take a glance the next time. I don’t care about the stamp collecting aspects, the rare pressings and alternate album covers, it’s only the music that matters and some old albums never made it to digital. Instead, I comb through the CD stacks, especially the many $3 bins, while a whole elaborate inner dialogue plays out with each title I linger over. Faint sympathetic tones echo from across five decades of listening to recorded music, as I whittle down the reasons for keeping all but a few of my selections. It’s amusing enough to see what resonances are struck in the mind at the mere sight of a name or a cover, and like a keyboard full of Proust’s madeleines, an internal sampling reflex, my thoughts bounce around an entire lifetime, and further. A couple of years ago at the record fair, deep in the $1 stacks which I normally consider a waste of time, I chanced upon a CD by Kolinda, which turned out to be (as I’d suspected) the Hungarian folk group I heard on record all the way back in 1980, when I was living in that crumbly neighborhood in lower Montparnasse, on the Rue du Texel near Pernety—a neighbor on the ground floor played it for me and let me make a cassette copy, which I still have in my basement, Bernard committed suicide not long after I moved across town, I could still recall the tonalities of the group’s sound, and so for one dollar I had a later record of Kolinda some three and a half decades after first hearing them. Clearly, when we listen to a recording, we are listening to so much more.
Something else about the $3 bins at the record fair: a reminder how popular artists live on. I saw live recordings by the Doors and Jimi Hendrix that I’d never seen before (not that I’ve kept up), probably released in the last decade or two but nonetheless many years after their deaths. I resisted the urge to feel like I had to buy them. Even in the sixties—half a century ago—an awful lot was recorded, so we never know when a new record may yet come out of someone long gone. Indeed, we like to be surprised by such discoveries, as if to remind us that time may be circular or built on resonances as much as linear, and that we might still hope to hear from the lost.
Whether in used record palaces like Amoeba in California, or the WFMU Record Fair, I think that is what drives our perennial search. The thought, for me, of a previously unknown recording of Chris McGregor surfacing, or further back, Herbie Nichols sessions. Records that don’t exist, that might have at a moment unaccounted for, that suddenly materialize almost because we went looking for them.
Shower Drip
Water drip. Drop. Drip. When you’ve lived in California, if you’re conscious, you learn to not take water for granted. Some forty-five years ago, after my family moved to the West Coast and the concepts of ecology and recycling and drought began to filter into my teenage mind, I took on the habit of turning off the shower between first getting wet and later rinsing off. Beyond the pasty sounds of wet soap and its lather applied all over my body, a sampler of the house noises emerged as if in an unguarded moment, an interval in which the soundbox of my head was not immersed in that rain pouring down upon it. A toilet flushing through the pipes; warm air rattling up along the central heating ducts. Out the bathroom window, the trickle of the little stream below, the haa-haa-haa of the whateverbird, the thin descending whistle of someotherbird. The sounds around me surfaced unbidden, until they washed away again.
But enough of my shower habits. Except to note that a certain small instinct took hold as well, a reflex of the ear, alert for the signatures of waste. I am often surprised by what others do not seem to hear. The toilet running: which thus suggests that anyone who so left it should bother to get up and jiggle the handle (unless that task falls to the person who couldn’t help noticing the problem). What gets me the most, though, is the dribble drip drip in the men’s showers at the gym. One stall in particular, and others too sometimes. I don’t know how, in a place where people go to maintain or build their strength, so many can be so oblivious that they do not bother to shut off the faucets all the way. How can people be so careless that they manage not to even notice? I listen without trying for the drip drip drip, and if I’m merely passing by the showers on the way upstairs to the machines and the weights, I’ll make a detour to turn it off. And certainly, if I’m in a stall nearby, amazed as I am to see the person walk away (even someone I know) and leave the dribbling behind, I wait till they turn the corner before I step over quietly and shut the handle.
Water drip. Drop. Drip. When you’ve lived in California, if you’re conscious, you learn to not take water for granted. Some forty-five years ago, after my family moved to the West Coast and the concepts of ecology and recycling and drought began to filter into my teenage mind, I took on the habit of turning off the shower between first getting wet and later rinsing off. Beyond the pasty sounds of wet soap and its lather applied all over my body, a sampler of the house noises emerged as if in an unguarded moment, an interval in which the soundbox of my head was not immersed in that rain pouring down upon it. A toilet flushing through the pipes; warm air rattling up along the central heating ducts. Out the bathroom window, the trickle of the little stream below, the haa-haa-haa of the whateverbird, the thin descending whistle of someotherbird. The sounds around me surfaced unbidden, until they washed away again.
But enough of my shower habits. Except to note that a certain small instinct took hold as well, a reflex of the ear, alert for the signatures of waste. I am often surprised by what others do not seem to hear. The toilet running: which thus suggests that anyone who so left it should bother to get up and jiggle the handle (unless that task falls to the person who couldn’t help noticing the problem). What gets me the most, though, is the dribble drip drip in the men’s showers at the gym. One stall in particular, and others too sometimes. I don’t know how, in a place where people go to maintain or build their strength, so many can be so oblivious that they do not bother to shut off the faucets all the way. How can people be so careless that they manage not to even notice? I listen without trying for the drip drip drip, and if I’m merely passing by the showers on the way upstairs to the machines and the weights, I’ll make a detour to turn it off. And certainly, if I’m in a stall nearby, amazed as I am to see the person walk away (even someone I know) and leave the dribbling behind, I wait till they turn the corner before I step over quietly and shut the handle.
Father’s Message
“We are not available! Please leave your telephone number and we will call you back!”
In the manner of a stern warning, the words carefully launched onto the message machine, my father’s voice still endures a year after his death. I call my mother’s number just to listen to it again.
Did he mean to tell us rather, “Stay away”? Or was that tone of his more like, “Leave a message if you like, for all the good it’ll do you, I won’t hear it anyway”? Like many old people he was hard of hearing in his last years and refused a hearing aid, but even if he didn’t want to hear, we just spoke louder, so he had to listen. For all the good it did us, or him.
My mother never hears that message. Why would she call her own number? She doesn’t need to listen to that voice to know it’s there—or rather the recording, since she makes no pretense otherwise. But to those of us who call, family or strangers, and land upon his message, we are confronted with a mystery: not so much the voice beyond the grave—in its simple fact a conundrum, sure, with its straddling of dimensions, though hardly a rare occurrence in the modern age—as the specific gesture of this voice that we chance to hear. Like any recording, it is the stamp of a personality printed, marked down, engraved, at a particular moment in time, before which only our listening changes. The purpose of the message is supposed to be one of reception; yet, hearing it, such an intention seems far from certain.
“We are not available! Please leave your telephone number and we will call you back!”
In the manner of a stern warning, the words carefully launched onto the message machine, my father’s voice still endures a year after his death. I call my mother’s number just to listen to it again.
Did he mean to tell us rather, “Stay away”? Or was that tone of his more like, “Leave a message if you like, for all the good it’ll do you, I won’t hear it anyway”? Like many old people he was hard of hearing in his last years and refused a hearing aid, but even if he didn’t want to hear, we just spoke louder, so he had to listen. For all the good it did us, or him.
My mother never hears that message. Why would she call her own number? She doesn’t need to listen to that voice to know it’s there—or rather the recording, since she makes no pretense otherwise. But to those of us who call, family or strangers, and land upon his message, we are confronted with a mystery: not so much the voice beyond the grave—in its simple fact a conundrum, sure, with its straddling of dimensions, though hardly a rare occurrence in the modern age—as the specific gesture of this voice that we chance to hear. Like any recording, it is the stamp of a personality printed, marked down, engraved, at a particular moment in time, before which only our listening changes. The purpose of the message is supposed to be one of reception; yet, hearing it, such an intention seems far from certain.
Breaking Things
Along a dirt road in the woods, over a series of ruts left by tire tracks through the mud, the ice that lay across them had a frosty cast, opaque as clouds, unlike the shiny sheets of ice on the ground nearby. I thought, it’s below freezing outside, why not try? One careful step, then another triumphant, until I was marching slowly upon every rut, savoring the dull yet resonant sound of the cracking and crumbling. Half an inch thick, that skin of ice covered no water underneath, which must have drained into the cold dirt. So, back and forth I stepped, gleeful at the celebration of all that breaking. And what if someone hears my happy mayhem, I wondered briefly in passing. Who cares if they think I’m daft or acting like a child? But would I, should I share it with another, let them have a chance? Too late, not enough to go around; I was having too much fun to leave any unsmashed.
The brittle seasons bring their own abundant gifts for those of us inclined to partake of them. Among my earliest sensations, I think, was an inexplicable joy at the clattering, crackling, loud dissolution of autumn leaves. Wonderful to go leaping into a cool, cacophonous pile of leaves; better still to go stomping where they gather, kicking them against each other, send them flying, never to scatter quietly, with each pass the resonant breakage a little finer underfoot. In the Jardin des Plantes, in Paris, when I lived nearby in the early ‘80s, I would often go strolling up and down the long alleys of plane trees, my gaze aloft at the high canopy they formed, the birds gliding all the way just underneath, as I aimed deliberately for where the leaves had accumulated, to kick up a percussive snap and clatter just by walking through them. If someone ever invites me to their castle, and wonders at my absence in the hour of the feast, there they’ll find me up some alley stomping through the heaps of fallen leaves.
But is it not, quite literally, the sound of breaking that grants such pleasure? When a glass or a window shatters, subtract concern or anger, is not our interest heightened, can we refrain from turning our head to look at the patterns that result, their fascinating singularity? Disaster movies, mere car wrecks, have long captivated audiences but cut out the sound and the sight is far less disturbing, less real; cut the image instead, and we see it anyway. And aren’t the promises of revolution predicated on breaking, tear down the old institutions so we may build something new and somehow better, truer? We want to really hear the breaking, with its sensual and existential thrill, for it reminds us we’re alive, that we’re still here, survivors of our complacency, and from that destruction, that sound sprung from nothing, a space is formed where surely something else will come along.
Along a dirt road in the woods, over a series of ruts left by tire tracks through the mud, the ice that lay across them had a frosty cast, opaque as clouds, unlike the shiny sheets of ice on the ground nearby. I thought, it’s below freezing outside, why not try? One careful step, then another triumphant, until I was marching slowly upon every rut, savoring the dull yet resonant sound of the cracking and crumbling. Half an inch thick, that skin of ice covered no water underneath, which must have drained into the cold dirt. So, back and forth I stepped, gleeful at the celebration of all that breaking. And what if someone hears my happy mayhem, I wondered briefly in passing. Who cares if they think I’m daft or acting like a child? But would I, should I share it with another, let them have a chance? Too late, not enough to go around; I was having too much fun to leave any unsmashed.
The brittle seasons bring their own abundant gifts for those of us inclined to partake of them. Among my earliest sensations, I think, was an inexplicable joy at the clattering, crackling, loud dissolution of autumn leaves. Wonderful to go leaping into a cool, cacophonous pile of leaves; better still to go stomping where they gather, kicking them against each other, send them flying, never to scatter quietly, with each pass the resonant breakage a little finer underfoot. In the Jardin des Plantes, in Paris, when I lived nearby in the early ‘80s, I would often go strolling up and down the long alleys of plane trees, my gaze aloft at the high canopy they formed, the birds gliding all the way just underneath, as I aimed deliberately for where the leaves had accumulated, to kick up a percussive snap and clatter just by walking through them. If someone ever invites me to their castle, and wonders at my absence in the hour of the feast, there they’ll find me up some alley stomping through the heaps of fallen leaves.
But is it not, quite literally, the sound of breaking that grants such pleasure? When a glass or a window shatters, subtract concern or anger, is not our interest heightened, can we refrain from turning our head to look at the patterns that result, their fascinating singularity? Disaster movies, mere car wrecks, have long captivated audiences but cut out the sound and the sight is far less disturbing, less real; cut the image instead, and we see it anyway. And aren’t the promises of revolution predicated on breaking, tear down the old institutions so we may build something new and somehow better, truer? We want to really hear the breaking, with its sensual and existential thrill, for it reminds us we’re alive, that we’re still here, survivors of our complacency, and from that destruction, that sound sprung from nothing, a space is formed where surely something else will come along.
Matter Speaks
Surely there is a sound life of objects and things just beyond us. What may seem silent to our ears might not necessarily be silent in another scale or frame of time. The warping of wood, the stretch and twist and bend of the material long after the branch has fallen or the tree has been cut, we are not likely to hear it; but that slow internal movement of the solid mass, that letting go down to the chemical level, does it not stir the air around it, set sound waves in motion even to a small degree? Would highly sensitive recording equipment, geared to the proper duration of that action, be able to capture the sound? Or, right at the center of the instrument, a piano sounding board, as it begins to crack from heat and dryness, that prolonged sound event can hardly be appreciated in itself except for the echo it pushes from the strings perhaps. The workings of organic matter, with their intricate dynamics, might well be considered for a proliferating alphabet of unsuspected sound properties, but what of simpler processes?
Yesterday, after washing a small cheap thermos and placing it upside down in the drainer, I noticed what I thought was the faint gurgling static of a radio signal nearby, as if it were about to tune in a message from afar. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out where it was coming from, what pipe or appliance or conjunction of household elements might be producing it, as I leaned in to investigate. Then I looked at the thermos, turned it right side up, glanced at the slight bit of water in the bottom. I held it to my ear; sure enough, there was the source of the sound, though I still saw nothing that explained it. Today, same comedy, the thermos as innocent-looking as ever.
Try as we might to ignore it, matter keeps speaking to us. In the constant wash of cars over a highway, from our stationary vantage point at a distance, what are we hearing? Friction. Less the velocity of engines moving through space, I think, the rubbing of rubber on macadam as the tires roll along resounds across the landscape, a reflection of our unsettlement. All things rub against each other, on other planets too, wherever there are elemental forces, a sun, an atmosphere. Our hands caressing our lover’s body—are we listening to that? probably not—and I wonder, minus the dramatics of moans and whispers, minus the creaking of furniture, just the sounds of skin against skin, would we know? Would we hear it as our skin, and our lover’s skin, and their singular meeting?
Surely there is a sound life of objects and things just beyond us. What may seem silent to our ears might not necessarily be silent in another scale or frame of time. The warping of wood, the stretch and twist and bend of the material long after the branch has fallen or the tree has been cut, we are not likely to hear it; but that slow internal movement of the solid mass, that letting go down to the chemical level, does it not stir the air around it, set sound waves in motion even to a small degree? Would highly sensitive recording equipment, geared to the proper duration of that action, be able to capture the sound? Or, right at the center of the instrument, a piano sounding board, as it begins to crack from heat and dryness, that prolonged sound event can hardly be appreciated in itself except for the echo it pushes from the strings perhaps. The workings of organic matter, with their intricate dynamics, might well be considered for a proliferating alphabet of unsuspected sound properties, but what of simpler processes?
Yesterday, after washing a small cheap thermos and placing it upside down in the drainer, I noticed what I thought was the faint gurgling static of a radio signal nearby, as if it were about to tune in a message from afar. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out where it was coming from, what pipe or appliance or conjunction of household elements might be producing it, as I leaned in to investigate. Then I looked at the thermos, turned it right side up, glanced at the slight bit of water in the bottom. I held it to my ear; sure enough, there was the source of the sound, though I still saw nothing that explained it. Today, same comedy, the thermos as innocent-looking as ever.
Try as we might to ignore it, matter keeps speaking to us. In the constant wash of cars over a highway, from our stationary vantage point at a distance, what are we hearing? Friction. Less the velocity of engines moving through space, I think, the rubbing of rubber on macadam as the tires roll along resounds across the landscape, a reflection of our unsettlement. All things rub against each other, on other planets too, wherever there are elemental forces, a sun, an atmosphere. Our hands caressing our lover’s body—are we listening to that? probably not—and I wonder, minus the dramatics of moans and whispers, minus the creaking of furniture, just the sounds of skin against skin, would we know? Would we hear it as our skin, and our lover’s skin, and their singular meeting?
Concertgoing 10: Senyawa
The latest concert, two nights ago. What, even, to call the music? If that matters. It wasn’t jazz, or punk, or traditional music. And yet, more than threads of all these in what the two Indonesian musicians of the band Senyawa were doing. I’d never heard of them until last month when my friend Michael in Brisbane, Australia sent me something about the group in an email. He had noticed they were going to play in New York—their first concert here, the singer told the audience late in their set—the other night at the Bridget Donahue gallery down on Bowery below Grand. I’d never been there, and the only information online, besides the address, was the names of the two bands and a link for buying tickets; which I did, not expensive, just for me. I had listened to some of their music online at the Free Music Archive and was intrigued by the musical space they seemed to be coming from: ardent experimentalists out of a strong traditional culture. Granted, Indonesia is a very big country and most of what I’d heard was gamelan music, while they had nothing of a gamelan sound, except perhaps obliquely in the rhythmic attack sometimes and in the sole instrumentalist’s sound palette, above all because his instrument had a regional tonality, made of bamboo. Michael did warn me they can get pretty loud and also that I might not like them, which wasn’t a problem.
The whole adventure, for me, was against the odds. With the current heat wave and high humidity, I do not venture out much. As mentioned, I do not go to hear music in Manhattan very often, when I’ve got so many choices in Brooklyn (and that’s without even going as far as Williamsburg, which is a similar distance as lower Manhattan from where I live). Compounded with those factors was the discovery that the other group, the two-woman band I. U. D., was of a punkish bent—I never much cared for punk rock. So, why was I going? Why was I bothering to take the subway four stops on a hot steamy night just to be uncomfortable at the other end? Stubbornness, musical curiosity, the challenge of obstacles, who knows. Because I didn’t know anything about the seating, or whether the place would be crowded, and because the reliability of the subway can be quite unpredictable (at night, in summer), I left the house an hour before the scheduled start of the concert. But since the train came within minutes, I arrived at the gallery exceedingly early, at 7:30. The tall young fellow by the door handed me my wristband, and when I uselessly remarked there were no chairs, he chirped it’s punk, it’ll be hot. As if to further induce an internal grimace, seeing how bare the space looked I asked if there had been much response. Oh yeah, he said, it’s going to be full. The gallery was an empty loft, one flight up, what looked like the entire floor, probably 1,500 square feet at least. He also told me that I. U. D. was going first and starting a bit late.
Would I last? Every few minutes I reminded myself I could leave anytime. I dreaded the prospect of music that was painfully loud and hardly seemed like music while being surrounded by a crowd dancing like out of a mental ward. But the few people hanging about in back or up front hardly looked the part, and the band setup in the stage area was two electric drum kits with some electronics boxes in between plus two mikes and flanked by two midsize speakers. Nothing I couldn’t endure for a couple of hours, I hoped. Halfway toward the stage I sat on the floor against the wall and busied myself with copyediting work for the next forty minutes, finishing shortly before the music began, as the audience trickled in and gradually filled the entire space, about two hundred people. I kept telling myself I could leave after the editing was done, just mosey on out as if I were going to smoke a cigarette—but I stayed right where I was in what had become a precious spot, my perch against the wall. I noticed possibly two or three people my age, but most were not much past half that, in their twenties and thirties. And then at last the din of the crowd subsided and the concert started.
From about where I was seated and right up to the stage area, everyone sat on the floor; behind me, a mass of people stood all the way back to the door. At any lull in the music, the din from the back of the crowd continued unabated, which I didn’t understand. What were all these people doing here, I wondered, and who did they come to see? How did they know about the event? Was it because Senyawa had played at the WFMU studio in Jersey City the night before? Since when were Indonesian experimental musicians the cool thing to come out for here? Or was I. U. D. some kind of underground sensation? I wouldn’t know from the music. The two women banged on their electric drum pads with varying degrees of enthusiasm, but they did reach a genuine thrashing intensity, and that along with the singer’s extended screaming of words I couldn’t fathom convinced me of their quasi-punk credentials, but I really didn’t know what that meant now in music other than an esthetic choice (echoed by the T-shirt displayed on a rack onstage, with a crude drawing of a face and written under it the words Bad Sex). The electronics boxes did I don’t know what, something, not really noteworthy, and there was also some looping in the vocal, that was fun for a moment. The singer often used both mikes—maybe one had the looping—and between getting worked up and banging on the drums, her headscarf soon unraveled and her long hair got loose. Mercifully, nobody started dancing in that tight space, nor standing in front of me either, and the band was kind enough to end their set in little more than half an hour. Finding myself still there in the spot against the wall where I first sat down, I knew I wasn’t going anywhere. Even if the air felt too close, and the din of everyone talking again was oppressive, the band I came to see was about to go on. The drum kits and consoles were removed from the scene; only the mikes remained.
Without fanfare, the two musicians of Senyawa came out. The singer, a bandana over his head, appeared to be wearing an open leather jacket over his bare chest. The instrumentalist, long dark hair, was wearing a WFMU T-shirt I recognized because I bought one in the last fundraising drive. His instrument was an ongoing puzzle to me, since it looked like a valiha from Madagascar, way at the opposite end of the Indian Ocean seven thousand miles away. Over a length of bamboo, its strings were strung like a harp rolled up on itself, except this instrument was electric and most of the time he didn’t play it quite like a valiha. If it was an Indonesian instrument, I do not know what a traditional approach would be. This gentleman did indeed pluck the strings sometimes, with all his fingers, but more often he strummed furiously with a pick, or else bowed the strings, which could build a nice wall of sound. He too made use of a looping device occasionally. The singer, agile and expressive, often gestured as he sang, arms hunched up like a monkey, stalking his song like a rock star. He could really wail when he wanted, or reach the low guttural sounds of throat singers, and then suddenly he was up in the soprano register with the most delicate of lines. So, some punkishness flashed in and out of their music as well, while I also thought intermittently of Phil Minton with his vocal acrobatics often improvised, as this singer really commanded an incredible range. You could see the sweat glistening on his skin. There were a lot of heads nodding along to the sympathetic wildness of the duo, and I wondered if, shall we say, most of the crowd had ever heard such sounds in their life. For my own account, I could not tell in listening how much had been worked out and how much was freely improvised. If their pieces were based in song form, I could make no sense of it. After three-quarters of an hour their music had increased its mystery for me, and feeling my mission for the night fulfilled I got up before they started what was likely their last piece and threaded my way out through the thick crowd to the slightly cooler air on Bowery as I made my way down to Canal Street and over to the Q train.
The latest concert, two nights ago. What, even, to call the music? If that matters. It wasn’t jazz, or punk, or traditional music. And yet, more than threads of all these in what the two Indonesian musicians of the band Senyawa were doing. I’d never heard of them until last month when my friend Michael in Brisbane, Australia sent me something about the group in an email. He had noticed they were going to play in New York—their first concert here, the singer told the audience late in their set—the other night at the Bridget Donahue gallery down on Bowery below Grand. I’d never been there, and the only information online, besides the address, was the names of the two bands and a link for buying tickets; which I did, not expensive, just for me. I had listened to some of their music online at the Free Music Archive and was intrigued by the musical space they seemed to be coming from: ardent experimentalists out of a strong traditional culture. Granted, Indonesia is a very big country and most of what I’d heard was gamelan music, while they had nothing of a gamelan sound, except perhaps obliquely in the rhythmic attack sometimes and in the sole instrumentalist’s sound palette, above all because his instrument had a regional tonality, made of bamboo. Michael did warn me they can get pretty loud and also that I might not like them, which wasn’t a problem.
The whole adventure, for me, was against the odds. With the current heat wave and high humidity, I do not venture out much. As mentioned, I do not go to hear music in Manhattan very often, when I’ve got so many choices in Brooklyn (and that’s without even going as far as Williamsburg, which is a similar distance as lower Manhattan from where I live). Compounded with those factors was the discovery that the other group, the two-woman band I. U. D., was of a punkish bent—I never much cared for punk rock. So, why was I going? Why was I bothering to take the subway four stops on a hot steamy night just to be uncomfortable at the other end? Stubbornness, musical curiosity, the challenge of obstacles, who knows. Because I didn’t know anything about the seating, or whether the place would be crowded, and because the reliability of the subway can be quite unpredictable (at night, in summer), I left the house an hour before the scheduled start of the concert. But since the train came within minutes, I arrived at the gallery exceedingly early, at 7:30. The tall young fellow by the door handed me my wristband, and when I uselessly remarked there were no chairs, he chirped it’s punk, it’ll be hot. As if to further induce an internal grimace, seeing how bare the space looked I asked if there had been much response. Oh yeah, he said, it’s going to be full. The gallery was an empty loft, one flight up, what looked like the entire floor, probably 1,500 square feet at least. He also told me that I. U. D. was going first and starting a bit late.
Would I last? Every few minutes I reminded myself I could leave anytime. I dreaded the prospect of music that was painfully loud and hardly seemed like music while being surrounded by a crowd dancing like out of a mental ward. But the few people hanging about in back or up front hardly looked the part, and the band setup in the stage area was two electric drum kits with some electronics boxes in between plus two mikes and flanked by two midsize speakers. Nothing I couldn’t endure for a couple of hours, I hoped. Halfway toward the stage I sat on the floor against the wall and busied myself with copyediting work for the next forty minutes, finishing shortly before the music began, as the audience trickled in and gradually filled the entire space, about two hundred people. I kept telling myself I could leave after the editing was done, just mosey on out as if I were going to smoke a cigarette—but I stayed right where I was in what had become a precious spot, my perch against the wall. I noticed possibly two or three people my age, but most were not much past half that, in their twenties and thirties. And then at last the din of the crowd subsided and the concert started.
From about where I was seated and right up to the stage area, everyone sat on the floor; behind me, a mass of people stood all the way back to the door. At any lull in the music, the din from the back of the crowd continued unabated, which I didn’t understand. What were all these people doing here, I wondered, and who did they come to see? How did they know about the event? Was it because Senyawa had played at the WFMU studio in Jersey City the night before? Since when were Indonesian experimental musicians the cool thing to come out for here? Or was I. U. D. some kind of underground sensation? I wouldn’t know from the music. The two women banged on their electric drum pads with varying degrees of enthusiasm, but they did reach a genuine thrashing intensity, and that along with the singer’s extended screaming of words I couldn’t fathom convinced me of their quasi-punk credentials, but I really didn’t know what that meant now in music other than an esthetic choice (echoed by the T-shirt displayed on a rack onstage, with a crude drawing of a face and written under it the words Bad Sex). The electronics boxes did I don’t know what, something, not really noteworthy, and there was also some looping in the vocal, that was fun for a moment. The singer often used both mikes—maybe one had the looping—and between getting worked up and banging on the drums, her headscarf soon unraveled and her long hair got loose. Mercifully, nobody started dancing in that tight space, nor standing in front of me either, and the band was kind enough to end their set in little more than half an hour. Finding myself still there in the spot against the wall where I first sat down, I knew I wasn’t going anywhere. Even if the air felt too close, and the din of everyone talking again was oppressive, the band I came to see was about to go on. The drum kits and consoles were removed from the scene; only the mikes remained.
Without fanfare, the two musicians of Senyawa came out. The singer, a bandana over his head, appeared to be wearing an open leather jacket over his bare chest. The instrumentalist, long dark hair, was wearing a WFMU T-shirt I recognized because I bought one in the last fundraising drive. His instrument was an ongoing puzzle to me, since it looked like a valiha from Madagascar, way at the opposite end of the Indian Ocean seven thousand miles away. Over a length of bamboo, its strings were strung like a harp rolled up on itself, except this instrument was electric and most of the time he didn’t play it quite like a valiha. If it was an Indonesian instrument, I do not know what a traditional approach would be. This gentleman did indeed pluck the strings sometimes, with all his fingers, but more often he strummed furiously with a pick, or else bowed the strings, which could build a nice wall of sound. He too made use of a looping device occasionally. The singer, agile and expressive, often gestured as he sang, arms hunched up like a monkey, stalking his song like a rock star. He could really wail when he wanted, or reach the low guttural sounds of throat singers, and then suddenly he was up in the soprano register with the most delicate of lines. So, some punkishness flashed in and out of their music as well, while I also thought intermittently of Phil Minton with his vocal acrobatics often improvised, as this singer really commanded an incredible range. You could see the sweat glistening on his skin. There were a lot of heads nodding along to the sympathetic wildness of the duo, and I wondered if, shall we say, most of the crowd had ever heard such sounds in their life. For my own account, I could not tell in listening how much had been worked out and how much was freely improvised. If their pieces were based in song form, I could make no sense of it. After three-quarters of an hour their music had increased its mystery for me, and feeling my mission for the night fulfilled I got up before they started what was likely their last piece and threaded my way out through the thick crowd to the slightly cooler air on Bowery as I made my way down to Canal Street and over to the Q train.