It isn't always the case, but this time I think the Wired article was better than the Click Opera piece that inspired it. I had more time and space to think, and I was more ambivalent, seeing iPods as both part of the music-flooding problem and a solution to it, proposing a "Parkinson's Law of music", and so on. One important thing that emerged in the Wired piece is the idea of roomtone. The Wired editors split it up, rendering it as "room tone", but I like the run-together version. Roomtone, as I'm using it here, means "the raw, natural sound of a place". It means indigenous sound.
But I think the first time I heard the phrase "roomtone" was when I was working with students of the London International Film School in the early 90s, making a documentary called "Momus: Amongst Women Only". Nikos Triandafullidis, the director of this ten minute film (which "climaxed" in a scene of me getting castrated, though luckily it was Nikos who stood in as my body double for the gory chop), would wrap up each scene with a reminder to the sound recordist to "get a few minutes of room tone". Wherever we were, we'd then all have to stand still and quiet for a couple of minutes, listening to the background sounds of the location. The resulting "roomtone track" would be used at the editing stage to provide continuity between jumpcut shots, or provide a natural-sounding backdrop for any re-recorded dialogue. (You can read film tech types discussing roomtone here.)
Putting roomtone into my anti-music argument in the Wired essay allowed me to escape from the binary silence/music, with the implication that something is always better than nothing, and that "no music" means "no life", or nothing. Rather than a positivistic battle between music and nothing, I could propose a battle between music and "the lovely, subtle melodies of roomtone; raw natural sound". I cited Cage, Eno and Alejandra and Aeron as the people who'd opened my ears to raw sound as "melody"; I could have added the laptoppists of the late 20th century, or field recording "sound recordists" like Chris Watson.
Of course, the danger of this kind of metaphor is that, like the phrase "indigenous sound", or the phrase "natural", it begs a lot of questions about authenticity. Vegetation, like population, is a complex mix of the local and the imported, the feral and the planted, and so on. The word "indigenous" might make us think of the massacre by whites of the American Indians, the "raw natural sound" of the American continent. But the problem is that authenticity is an eternally regressing horizon; I've heard theories that a pre-American Indian civilization was displaced by the Indian tribes, for instance.
Things get more complicated when we listen to a "roomtone" track like "Barbearia Salão Ferreira" from Alejandra and Aeron's Porto album. It's a field recording of a Porto barber's shop. Close up, we hear the comforting, irregular rhythm of scissors cutting hair. In the middle ground is the barbers chatting. In the background is a Portugese pop song playing on the radio. If songs too can be roomtone, my whole opposition collapses.
Songs are fascist immigrants, conquistadors who've come, inevitably, to slay indigenous sound wherever they find it. They can't help it, the poor things, that's just how they're made. Correction, with a mea culpa: it's how we make them.
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