Disquiet

Among the many overused words in the description of drones is “quotidian.” It suggests daily experience so pervasive as to have become nearly invisible, but such a word, and such an experience, best sums up much of the sound art perpetrated by Pete Kemble as part of his ongoing “The Heard World” series on the London-based radio (and web-) station Resonance FM. Take episode 40 (MP3), which Kemble describes in his brief webposting as “20 minutes of your favourite worker drone, live from my living room, november 4th, 2006. all featured noises are from homemade instruments.” The lo-fi excursion, recorded on a sturdy old-fashioned cassette recorder, is a languorous swath of the sort of background noise that one learns to ignore, the light buzz of a distant vacuum, the whir of radio interference, the whorl of a faraway siren. It’s the sound of someone else’s activity invading, or overlapping with, one’s own inactivity. More info at petekemble.com and resonancefm.com.

By Marc Weidenbaum