Disquiet

The excellent Wavelength show on Resonance FM is first broadcast in London (at 104.4 FM) and later distributed as a podcast. The show focuses on a variety of sound, from field recordings to experimental music, and a recent entry was one of its most bare-bones episodes yet: about half an hour of a grandfather clock ticking away. It is titled “Tick Tock … Bong.” The “bong” is the intense striking sound that signals the arrival of an hour. It’s a gong-like explosion that disrupts the steady field of the tick tock. Putting aside that “bong” for a moment, the “tick tock” is a splendid thing unto itself, a quotidian Steve Reich installation, no counterpoint, just the steady progression of time (MP3).

As the Oblique Strategies card reads, “Repetition is a form of change.” In this case, the change that becomes apparent is the way the details of the to-and-fro procession of mechanized time come into focus. As it goes on, the whole concept of time comes into question, because the imprecision of the timepiece becomes apparent: the swagger of its off-balanced tone, the extended pause that makes every other beat slightly longer than the previous (or vice versa, depending on when you start counting).

And then, fair warning, there are those hour markers, the intense gong sounds — the “bong!” from which the entry takes its title — that provide the impression that the creaky grandfather clock has, for a moment, regained the ramrod posture of its youth. Heard here, the gong is preceded, as at 7:17, by a kind of winding-up, a quiet warning that the hour is about to be noted loudly. The first hour heard here is 11, and we are then treated to three more such markers (1, 12, and 6) after extended periods of tick-tock homogeneity. The bong is hard to ignore, but worth even closer consideration is the lingering resonance that seems to taper off to infinity, a slow decay that never seems to fully go away. The overall impression is that time doesn’t pass; it accrues. (Peculiarly, at the very end of the recording, there is suddenly traffic noise and then birdsong and then a plane crossing overhead.)

In the post associated with the track, there is a brief explanatory note:

It was midnight in Syston, Leicestershire and the microphone was inside the clock which was awarded to Sandra’s grandfather; William Cross who won a stack of individual and team titles with the army and Castleford Harriers and was presented to King George V and Queen Mary in January 1920 after finishing sixth out of a field of 700 in the army cross-country championship. Sandra’s mother came into the room, noticed the microphone and just said “tick tock” before going back upstairs.

Track originally posted at resonancefm.com. More on Wavelength’s host, William English, at williamenglish.com. (Image courtesy of flickr.com via the Creative Commons.)

The term “field recording” has two particular meanings in regard to audio. There are the so-termed phonographers who toil in the physical world, documenting soundscapes and incidents. And there are those of the Alan Lomax variety (Lomax being the legendary documentarian of blues, folk, and gospel), who record indigenous music for posterity. These two ventures can be seen as quite different from each other, as archivists in the worlds of sound (the phonographers) and of music (let’s call them the Lomaxes). And the distinctions can lead to annoying confusions and consequences, when that box set you ordered arrives and it turns out that “field recordings of the high desert” include not rattling sagebrush and coyote calls but old-time religion and cowboy poetry. But they have some things in common as well, things far more important than their differences, foremost the precious nature of sound. For both the phonographer and the Lomax are capturing something soon to be gone. Both are invested in preserving a record — in the broader sense of the term “record” — of sonic reality.

Richard Devine recently posted a host of recordings of ancient and becoming-ancient devices. Titled “The Sound of Data Transmissions-Electromagnetic Fields” it contains the sounds of (as he lists them) “printers, scanners, Nintendo Wii, PlayStation, Mac-book hard drives, 5 different wireless modems, fax machines, iPhone, iPad, and computers.” If you follow along the waveform of the recording, he has annotated when each new sound initiates:

To compare the sound of a modem to the song of an impoverished blues musician is not to elevate the former or denigrate the latter. It is simply to note that in the latter case, the documentarian was of use because for a variety of reasons the commercial recording industry had found no use for the blues musician. His song went underheard. And the phonographer is dedicated to the underheard, to the sounds that exist around us but are taken for granted.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/richarddevine, which is where the above photo was sourced from. More on Devine at richard-devine.com.