On sound.
The first note of the album’s first song, (good enough) for now, is a G. Six octaves above middle C. It was generated by a songbird in the countryside sometime pre-lockdown, when Leslie and I were still able to explore Switzerland without fear of catching Covid. This first note is much more important than it seems on the recording, as it signifies my relationship to sound, my approach when making music.
The practice of field recording—also called phonography*— is nothing new. According to its wikipedia entry, field recording “was originally developed as a documentary adjunct to research work in the field, and foley work for film.” But the concept of reframing natural sounds as art was pioneered by Pierre Schaeffer, who was inventing musique concrète as early as 1940. And even earlier, in the 1920s, people were emulating natural sounds (think of a split coconut clip-clopping on a table evoking a horse’s gallup) to provide background in radio dramas.
Any walk in the forest is accompanied by a symphony of sounds, each generated by an instrument. A bird is an instrument. So is a falling tree. And the chainsaw that cut it down. An idling refrigerated truck is an instrument. It generates a waveform at a specific frequency which, interestingly enough, can be modulated by a pedal—in this case a gas pedal. My point is this: all sound is music. Our concept of music, rooted in historical structures of class, religion, gender, and commerce, inhibits us from recognizing a combustion engine as an instrument and the sounds it makes, music.
But there’s an additional component to these “found sounds:” context. Whereas the sounds generated by my cello most likely won’t evoke a specific memory outside of a concert hall (or maybe the subway), that sound of an idling truck** on the title track, in the context of the “music,” most likely will. And upon discovering the specific context of that recorded sound—in this case a refrigerated morgue truck outside Brooklyn Hospital during a deadly pandemic—the listener finds meaning.
*My buddy Dr. John Kannenberg runs a museum, headquartered in UK, called the Museum of Portable Sound. He’s curated a 325 sounds in the permanent collection “to tell engaging stories about the fascinating— and often overlooked—roles that sound has played throughout history, science, art, and culture.” Private tours are available on request.
**Geoff Gersh graciously contributed this field recording for use on it’s nothing, but still. It’s part of his major field recording study of New York City, when he documented the sound of every NYC neighborhood during the first Covid lockdown in the spring of 2020.
