Music Feedback
New This WeekAround TownMusicFilmArtTheaterNews & FeaturesFood & DrinkAstrology
  HOME
NEW THIS WEEK
EDITORS' PICKS
LISTINGS
NEWS & FEATURES
MUSIC
FILM
ART
BOOKS
THEATER
DANCE
TELEVISION
FOOD & DRINK
ARCHIVES
LETTERS
PERSONALS
CLASSIFIEDS
ADULT
ASTROLOGY
PHOENIX FORUM DOWNLOAD MP3s



Found sounds
Ringtones and the noises of London
BY DOUGLAS WOLK

There are two kinds of sounds: the kind you’re supposed to pay attention to and the kind you’re supposed to ignore. Pop is an example of the former. So are alarms, especially the most common kind: ringing cell phones. Most phones can now be programmed with almost any set of notes that will interrupt your train of thought, from your favorite radio hit’s hook to simple trills. But that’s not going far enough for the compilers of Touch Ringtones (Touch), who’ve assembled several hundred hypothetical mobile-phone rings. It’s an elaborate, delicious joke on the idea of sounds that demand attention (or that can’t): a computerized voice that whispers, "Help! help!"; a barely perceptible ambient hiss; a string quartet playing a snatch of Vivaldi; a golden plover’s alert call; a smash of glass followed by a man murmuring, "I am angry"; a station identification for Radio Bulgaria.

As a label, Touch specializes in recordings that push the definition of music, and parts of Ringtones are excerpted from earlier releases (a few bars of New Order’s "Video 5-8-6" that suggest alarm patterns more than a song; a chirpy newscaster announcing "cool in the north and very warm in the south"). Most of it, though, is newly commissioned from a wide range of avantish (and mostly electronic) musicians, including saxophone improviser Evan Parker, two members of Wire, and Mika Vainio of Pan Sonic. Visual artists Gilbert and George even get in on the fun with a series of tiny, dry-witted dialogues. Incongruity and brevity are the only constants. At times, Ringtones comes off as a reductio ad absurdum of pop: a "song" edited down beyond its chorus, beyond even its hook, to a single sound that makes you respond immediately.

Composer Phil Kline splits the difference between commanding and rejecting attention with Unsilent Night (Cantaloupe), a CD adaptation of a piece he’s performed and changed every December for the last 10 years. In its original form, Unsilent Night is divided among 50 or so cassette tapes, which are played in boomboxes by volunteers carrying them across New York’s Lower East Side, from Washington Square Park to Tompkins Square Park, in a loose procession that stretches for a city block or more. The tapes aren’t identical, and they fall out of synch immediately, which is the point. The effect, for the unsuspecting audience of pedestrians, is of a gradual polyphonic transition from one set of sounds to another, and one space to another. There are strains of hymns drifting through the piece (though nothing too familiarly Christmasy), but it’s mostly a wintry sparkle of bells and electronics — an enhancement of the urban cold and the snow, a gentle wash of color across the ordinary background noise of a city.

That background noise is exactly what people tend to tune out, unless they’re trying to notice it. Your Favorite London Sounds (LMC) is the result of a project conducted by the London Musicians’ Collective in 1998; the LMC asked hundreds of Londoners what their favorite sound in their city was, and why, and then recorded them. The resulting 40-track CD is fascinating: a unique document of the city’s ambiance at the turn of the century.

The chimes of Big Ben that open the disc (here recorded from street level in what sounds like heavy traffic, instead of the usual carefully miked version — the idea is to present the sound as locals hear it) signify London, and so does the Underground’s ubiquitous "Mind . . . the gap" announcement. Other site-specific sounds here are subtler, like cacophonies of birds that resolve into the distinctive cries of London’s blackbirds and swifts, or an electrical generator’s hum juxtaposed with the splash of water at the Deptford Grid substation. Still others could never be recognized by people who aren’t intimate with the city, like a brief recording of concrete slabs by a canal towpath going click-clonk as someone bicycles across them. In perhaps as few as 10 years, at least part of this will be the sound of a vanished world, a sound very few people took the time to notice while it was around. There are signs of that already: halfway through Your Favorite London Sounds, there’s a vintage (1987) recording of train doors being slammed shut at Victoria Station. Train doors don’t slam shut anymore.

Issue Date: January 10 - 17, 2002
Back to the Music table of contents.


home | feedback | about the phoenix | find the phoenix | advertising info | privacy policy | the masthead | work for us

 © 2002 Phoenix Media Communications Group