In his extraordinary book The soundscape: our sonic environment and the tuning of the world, first published in 1977, the Canadian writer and composer Murray Schafer exhorts us to listen more carefully to the world. He introduces an “acoustic ecology” that combines everything from history (the changing experience of sound) to physics (the properties of sound itself). His book is arranged very systematically with numerous diagrams as if to suggest that all aspects of sound can be brought within a framework of scientific logic. Central to his thesis is the claim that through understanding sound we can make better sense of human societies in all their complexity. More recently, the cultural theorist Stephen Connor has written of the “modern auditory I” to underline how sound connects with our sense of identity to produce “the sonic self”. Connor and other theorists show us how the presence of sound is constantly reconfiguring space and blurring boundaries.
At Cafe Oto in Dalston last Sunday I listened to a performance of electronic music featuring a series of leading musicians and sound artists: BJ Nilsen, Stephan Mathieu and the TSU duo of Jörg-Maria Zeeger and Robert Curgenven. TSU began with an unobtrusive hum that gradually built up to a frightening swell of sound that was at times simply deafening. I occasionally covered my ears and feared for my internal organs but convinced myself that extreme sound has its place in the pantheon of acoustic experience. Second on stage was BJ Nilsen who uses juxtapositions of music and ambient sound to create complex textures that often invoke very specific locales or fragments of memory. His material featured elements from his excellent album The invisible city that includes musical instruments combined with other sound sources such as amplified objects, bees and crows. Finally, Stephan Mathieu presented an intricate layering of harmonic landscapes. Using a combination of early instruments, obsolete technologies and freeform experimentation derived from abstract expressionism, Mathieu created an ethereal soundscape as different chord formations drifted in and out of focus. In contrasting ways all three performances explored the edges of contemporary sound and produced an experience that seemed an oddly appropriate cultural echo from east London to the prestigious Wigmore Hall north of Oxford Street where Beethoven, Shostakovich and Debussy were being played on the same evening. As I stepped out into the dusty street after the show I was immediately conscious of the noise of traffic, human voices and precisely the kind of complex soundscape that is incessantly around us.
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