17:59:06 24 July 2023

now you are alive. the stream opens. there are no drops. you are free of sheets and budgets. you are oblivious. there is no sense to be concerned if these activities are or if they aren t – a plane sears overhead, popping and crackling. its bass blasts the terrain as it passes over. its turbines whip the air into a fine froth. drops fall on timber on galvanised steel. slate, plastics, thick fat birds sit in the lime branches surrounded by white green keys and dripping foliage their feathers give out light collected during the day. it s a warm dark summer day, drab and monochome, greens and browns, antennas, call and response of parakeets L to R and R to L – cloud in wads, wet brick, motorcycles in long rising lines, planes dropping, oscillating, modulating, pressing down the way irons or trowels over a surface: adding compaction, pressure, density, expelling bubbles consolidation and mopping up minor acoustic tendencies which slightly turn, acquire a slight flex or momentum, verging on motives: a breakaway momentum – taking those out, bringing those under the threshold of hearing. listening listens for unheard elements: ticks and anomalies occurring as rogue deviations. the chicken calls loudly in the R, moving towards the L, settling, simmering, clokclocclokclokclokclokclak clokklack very loud and bold in the green yard, the grey yard – lag: sounds arriving late – more vibrant, if anything, than at first. a car sounding like your grandfather's outboard motor. a car that planes like a hovercraft all the way down the hill: heavy with nostalgia with salt, its heavy rubber skirt dragging the sidewalk, skimming the road – thickness gathers as a property of air, saturated with liquid and particulate matter, full of trills, rattling, buzzing, screeching, purring of engines, drilling of some machinic bird, engines so buoyant they seem to float down herne rill road on baggy pouches of air, while other packets of air enter the syrinx of some bright _____ to be nasally compressed, folded, expelled – a shout from some situation, a plane from some stratum out of sight. another deep churning engine, then a high smooth surfing descent where the transmission drives the engine and the fumes just drift in wisps out of the valve holes, creating a slick high scent which agitates the moist membranes of a person as they pass – now something you have no way to identify: high, pulsating, insistent, approaching, a dynamo or propeller or turbo? a drop. oscillating above the croaks of woodpigeons (the flapping like dish towels, the crooning like wiping out glasses, as in Adam's show, Lucia was saying, but it didn't work, Adam was saying, in that show, the foley, the wiping out did not create the pigeon sounds) wufwuf – a high ping like alert – oscillation on repeat, on hold, on fade, overtaken by other sounds, until it seems to fade, to diminish, to merge into something more general, more generic – a sound world like this is an unforgiving environment for subtle occurrences – it works like a crusher, grinding up and down – working one thing together with another towards a smoother more homogeneous grain, stiff emulsion or soft paste – you are also grated and ground – clusters of green parakeets in the green foliage, upright, hunched or angled, a woodpigeon's white neckring – an insect by the microphones almost too high to hear – these superflous things remind you how time falls in strands – as if a bundle of braids was let loose and fell and swung, rebounding unevenly on sprung twists and curls – as if the yard was let down like that in a cascade – squeaking the way hair and soap, flicking spray scattering drops. this stranding – recalling kinds of curdling, glutinous ropes or tendons forming in dough, the sap bearing vessels of certain trees (el parot!) – enacts, you can say, a kind of temporal recollection: in some moments, time can be perceptible from within, as textural variation, striation, dropping in coils, counter currents of more liquid portions of an amalgam – the lines along which polyrhythms form and blur, come into being and dissolve, the way patterns appear in surf and form ephemeral casts in tidal mud. if listening is an esoteric study of lay acousticians, it tends, you can say, to unravelling of temporal conventions, in favor of something more plural and elusive [towards a non intentional space vol.1 Hu Fang]

Sound

Live stream recorded 24 July 2023. Cambria Road, Loughborough Junction, London. 59m 35s. https://self-noise.net/write/20230724/vlc-record-2023-07-24-17h58m40s-london_camberwell.mp3