The sound of silence

Quiet riots and static kings

In his 1993 novel My Idea of Fun, Britain's Will Self imagined an ambient album called Twenty Great Fridge Hits. "Now that's an album you could market truly effectively," he wrote. "There has to be a demand out there for this kind of thing, everyone is so hip to the idea of ambient music nowadays, and what could be more consummately ambient than a fridge? It's both in the environment, of the environment and apparently a smidgen of a threat to the precious fucking environment."

Of course, the refrigerator's hits are already in constant heavy rotation, along with wind, electricity, breath, and everything else that fills our world with sound. There is no such thing as silence -- at least, not that anyone can hear. Silence is an ideal, a shadow on a cave wall, a purity that all sound, even music, violates. ("After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music," Aldous Huxley wrote in Music at Night.) But, beginning with John Cage's infamous "4'33"," a piece in which a pianist does not play the piano for four minutes and 33 seconds, "silence" is something that certain music has used, honored, or framed.

The music of Cage's "4:33" comes from whatever happens, by chance, within earshot of the people listening to it. Frank Zappa's take on the piece, recorded shortly before his death for the Cage tribute A Chance Operation (Koch), includes an accidental "thunk" or two, the sound of a car driving by outside, and little rustles of cloth, none of which is particularly audible until you turn up the sound. CD recordings of "4:33" really shouldn't be the equivalent of a digital void -- they just seem that way until you listen carefully. (The Magnetic Fields make a joke of that: on the Merge reissue of their Distant Plastic Trees/The Wayward Bus, the two original records are separated by a 4:33 gap.)

In the past decade, the antiseptic exactness of compact discs and digital technology has inspired certain artists to honor silence by violating it in increasingly tiny ways. Parts of German experimental composer Bernhard Günter's Un peu de neige salie (Table of the Elements) may appear completely blank to the casual listener. But turn the volume on your stereo up very high, in very quiet surroundings, and its roiling overtones and electronic gurgles begin to manifest themselves. They're like perfume -- a few atoms per million in the air are all that's needed.

Along with Günter's work, an entire subgenre of electronic music minimal enough to imply silence, or include it, has recently sprung up. The scene has its own heroes, of whom probably the most interesting is Finland's Mika Vainio, leader of the group Pan sonic, whose fine new album A (Mute) will be out in a few weeks. Vainio also records under his own name and as Ø, and he runs the Sähkö label, which releases like-minded material.

Vainio favors relentlessly dry sounds that seem to score the digital silence like pins: high-pitched sine waves, rumbles so low that their individual vibrations can be detected, infinitesimal ticks. His solo album Onko (Touch) starts with a series of hisses and buzzes that are practically Will Self's fridge hits: environmental static, presented as the focus of attention rather than a distraction from it.

Where Vainio's into stasis, Japan's Ryoji Ikeda prefers kinesis. His recent Time/Space (Staalplaat) is a set of two three-inch CD singles of fragmentary sounds dancing in patterns against the digital nothingness. "Time" sets up half-funky patterns of glancing blips like raindrops on snow, subdividing the emptiness into intervals of 1:11, 2:22, 3:33, 4:44, and 5:55. "Space" moves the tiniest of electronic chirps around the stereo field, making the space between the speakers more vivid by emptying it out almost altogether.

Carsten Nicolai, who records as Noto and runs the German label Noton, works with an entire stable of silence-loving musicians (including Vainio, who's recorded with him as Mikro Makro) -- this year, he's releasing a monthly series of ultraminimalist EPs, along with longer CDs by the likes of Signal, an all-star trio who make less noise than your typical bowl of breakfast cereal. His own recordings, though, use silence less for its own sake than for its ability to foreground the simplest of sounds. A week ago Wednesday he made a rare, brief public appearance at the Tonic club in New York City, accompanied by a DJ, Craig I-Sound. The austere throbs and clicks Nicolai pulled out of his twin laptop computers combined with I-Sound's dubbed-up atmospheres and scratches for an effect very different from their usual nouvelle cuisine spareness. That was fine: with the volume of the club's speaker stacks on Nicolai's side, his sounds held their form. They needed a little noise to pad them so that they didn't obliterate the silence that gave them meaning.