title: 152 high street silence
date: 17th November 2015
time: 5:35pm

notes: a field recording, taken from the window of an artist’s studio on a particularly rainy day, is transmitted back into the place it was recorded. This done with a delay: it is 20 years later. The building no longer exists but it is not merely metaphorical to say that the spaces which once stood here are audible in the historic recording. Within its structure, the particular spatiality of the heavy, coldly incessant density of raindrops hitting the roof of the building and the street beyond, seems to create a dry region in the aural foreground, an audible hollow like a nest that shelters the ear, that braces it against both the substance of the rain in the foreground and the hollower space of the room positioned behind the microphone, all of this creating a particular shape within listening, which is the room appearing again, as a ghostly architectural-corporeal orientation, a set of coordinates that find solidity as phenomenological and physical planes around the body of the listener. In this, the recording exhibits the paradoxical status of most time based observations, as they recede from their temporal referent: it slowly inches closer to being a document which mainly reveals the inaccessibility of the thing lost, as much as it can also be said to preserve it within memory. A split perceivable, perhaps most acutely, when what is captured is the sound or image of someone or something who has died; although a recording of the space of a lost building is no different; such experiential air as its room contains is likewise a relation no longer open for editing. Perhaps what such documents teach us, when we listen to them in our present, is that it is time-keeping devices which construct time, which surround us with the ghosts of past experiences, our own and others, that they render unreachable through their very capturing. Perhaps the bittersweetness of such notions appears best in the ostensibly uneventful, the durational recording, nothing but an extended moment of time on an ordinary day. Yet what also becomes audible in this particular trace of a solitary day at home in an artist’s studio, is a portal for thinking, which is also the silence of the recordist’s attention to that which is heard. This silence, this listening, is the sound of a domesticia in which such contemplative space, as is represented in the recording, is possible. This possibility is what circles through the carpark, on this day 20 years later, carried by what is audible, the thinness of what is now extant: the hum of the casino air conditioner, the seagulls bickering on the concrete wall, the sparse but constant noise of cars, the noise of commercial stations trying to compete with the signal which carries the recording (of silence, of rain, of observation, of possibility), back into listening. It is not always clear; the little signal struggles with the weight of radiophonic space, with the wind, with the materials around it, with all that it is not; creating what it can in the air, a small room, in which a silence can appear, a sketch of something barely-there in the trace of itself. Just as the only extant physical remnant of the building which contained this observational silence, this listening space, is still here: a partial stone wall, which stands, incongruously and somewhat mysteriously, bisecting, like a kind of ruin, the regulatory partitioned architecture of the carpark space, its asphalt sealant, a place without memory, adjacent to the casino. It is oddly like the jutting backbone of a mountain range, a buried landscape, another possible map rupturing the flatness of the bitumen, the screen-picture, from physical deep time. The geology of this wall-remainder is a composite, and includes red brick, bluestone, and various miscellaneous items which seem to have been permitted to stay here: a dead bird, a discarded packet which once held AA batteries. The lead heart, the swallow, the pile of ashes. The signal drowned out by noise, but not before the apparition of a rainstorm.