At the Meltdown festival in 1998, the London musicians' Collective (LMC) had the job of setting up a temporary radio station. They took the opportunity to do a bit of research, asking festival-goers to name their favourite London sound - and give a reason why.
Their choices, recorded in London and compiled by improvisational guitarist Peter Cusack, provided hours of raw material. This CD picks out 40 examples. The track titles speak for themselves: Blackbird dawn chorus; the bell on a 73 Bus; Post Through the Letterbox; Rain on a Skylight while Lying in Bed.
It's not as outlandish as it might sound. Cusack's own CDs, such as Where is the Green Parrot?, have included long field recordings, and many well-known composers and producers have incorporated city sounds into their recordings. Think of Summer in the City by Lovin' Spoonful, or Jah Wobble's Bananas, with the repeated chant of a market trader. Then there's Steve Reich's City Life - eerily topical, as it used speech samples from the NYC fire department recorded when the World Trade Centre was attacked for the first time in 1993. And six years ago we had Soundscape Amsterdam, an ambitious collage of the sounds of that city, from barrel organs to birds.
Yet compared to that somewhat self conscious collection, Your Favourite London Sounds is pleasingly mundane - the humble art of recording rather than 'recording as art'. Sometimes there's just a voicemail message. The voice of someone sheepishly nominating an espresso machine - "it's not specifically a London sound" - is followed by a delicious, drawn-out sequence of clunks, hissing and explosive boiling recorded in close-up, fetishistic detail. On the track Deptford Market, a woman is heard asking Cusack what he's doing. "Making a recording of all the clanging as you take all the stuff down," replies Cusack. "Don't mind, do you?" She chuckles in disbelief.
The booklet lists further questionnaire responses, not realised on this CD, such as "my boyfriend's orgasms and I love yous", and "a baby crying on the Underground" and even "none I wear earplugs". It's a concept that could run and run. The LMC describe it as an audio postcard, and I'm sure it will be a strong seller in tourist shops across the capital. It's a Christmas present for homesick émigrés; a souvenir; a generous sample library; a versatile source of filler material for radio schedulers; an audio document of contemporary urban life. It will bring a smile of recognition to many harassed city-dwellers.
Urban Hymns
The Sound of the City
With the Palace of Westminster on the cover and the tolling bells of Big Ben kicking off track one, "Your Favourite Sounds of London" looks like a tourist oddity found in charity shop. But this London Musicians Collective compilation is a fascinating and bewildering trawl through the city's unusual ambience.
From the bell on the 73 bus to 'Mind the Gap' announcements at Bank station; from match day at White Heart Lane to the Babel of noises that greet you at Brixton tube, this 40 track CD forces you to look at your environment afresh.
The album was compiled by musician Peter Cusack, who balloted several hundred Londoners - including all 74 of the capital's Mps with the question, "What is your favourite London sound and why?"
'London's soundscape is regularly described as general urban noise, loud, undifferentiated and not usually pleasant,' says Cusack. 'The amazing variety suggested here shows otherwise. Instead of filtering out this noise, musicians start to listen to it, to recognise its musicality and place it in other contexts.'
And there are some wonderful juxtapositions: the muezzin's call to prayer at Whitechapel mosque is set against the helicopter from London's City airport, while the organ-like buzz of LRT generators rubs shoulders with birds over Stoke Newington.
'Swifts are a key summer sound and mark out space in a way that few other do,' says Cusack. 'They also migrate to Africa connecting London to outside world.' It comes as no surprise to find that Cusack has also compiled several albums of birdsong.
One of my favourite LPs is a sound travelogue recorded during a car journey in 1955 from London to Calcutta (back when it was actually possible for a civilian to drive through places like the Balkans, Baghdad, Tehran, Kabul and Lahore). Mixed in with scads of great musical field recordings are the ambient sounds of crowds, cars and animals; even the van that made the journey becomes a prominent part of the sonic landscape. At once personal, sociological and musicological, carrying a tape recorder on a journey is a great way to document a trip.
A new disc from the tireless London Musicians' Collective embarks on a sonic journey in their own city, asking Londoners, "What is your favourite London sound and why?"
They received hundreds of responses, and musician Peter Cusack took it upon himself to hunt down and record those sounds, 40 of which appear here.
It's an odd way to think about a city. If you remove the language, I think it's a fair assumption to say that most Western cities sound pretty much alike. Indeed, going by what's here, London doesn't sound a whole lot different from New York: there are the screeches of buses, wailing of sirens, humming of power plants, whooshing of rivers and electronic bleeps at supermarket checkouts. Some of the pieces, recorded in language-laden places like markets or coffee shops, catch Londoners in conversation, bringing a specific local flavour to the tracks. And there is a trove of favourite sounds that one normally doesn't associate with any city-the unaccompanied chirping of birds or booming thunder-which, of course, are part of every urban environment.
Some of the sounds come with short descriptions, giving them more poetic weight: "Onions frying in my flat," "Rain on skylight while lying in bed," "Key in door," "London from near the top of a tower block, Holloway Road, on a damp evening," or a recording of an East London mosque, which is accompanied by the description, "The Music call to prayer is a recent addition to London's soundscape." The CD begins with the sound of Big Ben: "London's most famous sound is broadcast to the world daily from a microphone high in the tower. This is how it sounds from street level."
I've been to London several times, and listening to Your Favourite London Sounds gives me no real sense of the place. It doesn't snap you back in the way that, say, a pop song can when you hear it. In fact, it's not a particularly interesting group of sounds: the selections are subjective, as if the participants were not really thinking about how to define the ultimate sound of London. Instead they selected sounds they encountered in their day-to-day routine. In doing so, it's a more realistic sonic picture of the city than you would get from a promotional or commercial project that tried to describe a city.
It gets me thinking: if I were asked to participate in a similar project about New York, I'd probably select those same kinds of small sounds. There's a wonderful amplified screech that the floating dock makes at the Battery Park City ferry when it rubs up against the pier; there's the guy on 7th Ave. near Penn Station who works for a homeless organization and has a voice just like Howlin' Wolf's; and my son is now obsessed with (and endlessly repeats) the prerecorded "Stand clear of the closing doors, please" that's broadcast in the new subway cars. In a Cagean fashion, after listening to this disc I went out to the store to grab lunch. The streets were alive with sounds I'd never noticed before.
As Italo Calvino articulated so clearly in Invisible Cites, there are an infinite number of ways to look at a city, and so is with London. We are used to prismatic visual images of London: Tourist London (the Tower, red buses and Big Ben); Hidden London (lost rivers and forgotten tube stations, blackswine in the sewers of Hampstead); Historic London, with its palaces, churches, museums. Literary London, the London of the word, is well known too, conjured by Pepys, Boswell, Blake, Moorcock, Sinclair and the like. But beyond the Londons of word and image lie still other Londons, the Londons of the senses, less familiar, but just as evocative, and it is one of these that Peter Cusack explores.
This London is full of noises, as indeed are all the others. Silence is a rare commodity in London. The essence of a city lies just as much in its sounds as its architecture or its people, and what Cusack has succeeded in doing is distilling the aural essence of the city onto this CD. Since 1998, Peter Cusack and colleagues at the London Musicians' Collective have been asking people (including London's 74 MPs) "What is your favourite London Sound and why?", then going out and capturing the sounds on tape. Originally a radio piece for Resonance 104.4FM, the collective's limited licence radio station (back on the air in central London in February 2002), Your Favourite London Sounds blends the collected sounds into a subtle collage which strongly evokes the spirit of the city at the time of recording. The advantage of asking a large number of people to contribute, rather than just going out and recording the sounds which one person thinks typify the city, is that the sounds range the length and breadth of Greater London and enter many personal sound worlds which no one person could be alert to. They range from the obvious - Big Ben - to the obscure - the hum of the Underground Transformer at Putney (in fact there are several electrical hums - you can tell Peter Cusack knows lots of experimental musicians); from the loud -the crowd at White Hart Lane - to the almost silent - the ambience in the British Museum's Great Court. There are lots of Tube sounds, virtually no traffic, bagel shops and mosques, swifts, nightingales, blackbirds, domestic sounds - frying onions, keys, post arriving. There are new sounds (a muezzin in Whitechapel), vanishing sounds (slamming train doors - they're gradually being replaced by quiet sliding ones), the river, espresso machines, club queues, bus brakes, helicopters. Of course it immediately sets the listener's mind working too - what is your favourite London sound? For me, probably the sound made by the exhibits in the Science Museum's Launch Pad gallery when there are few visitors, while my fiancée settled for geese flying over Edward Road in Walthamstow on the way to the marshes.
To anyone who is familiar with London, especially those in exile, this is a curiously intimate meditation which brings ones memories of the metropolis to fond life. To anyone who does not know the place, it is a window into its personality normally afforded only to those who have spent their lives there. It is a beguiling document, which gives a glimpse of how London can hold so many in its thrall.
Originally made for the legendary but short-lived Resonance FM, this is a collection of the sounds that Londoners chose when asked for their favourite London Sound. It's a soundscape of the City that has the benefit of hundreds of ears. One should be made for every Capital. Personally I would say this is a document not to miss, bringing out so much not only about London, but also about the way that memory works and how sound can mean. Beautifully compiled and intelligently presented. This is a template for further work. With notes and pictures.