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Your Favourite London Sounds
Your Favourite London Sounds is an album compiled by English musician Peter Cusack and released in November 2001 by the London Musicians Collective (LMC). It collects 40 field recordings of sounds around the English city of London, most of which were recorded by Cusack. The project originated when the LMC hosted a temporary radio station for the 1998 Meltdown Festival, which Cusack used to ask festival goers and listeners what their favourite 'London sound' was. He received hundreds of responses, many of which were varied and often personal.
The sounds on the recording are highly diverse and vary between outdoor and indoor sounds, some of which are famous and some of which are more atypical. Several sounds are specific to London while others are broader. On release, the album received critical acclaim, including being named the week's best CD by The Guardian, and inspired radio and newspaper commentary. Cusack commented that it received more attention than his musical work. Ultimately, the London project was the first in Cusack's larger Favourite Sounds Project, which visited other cities across the world.
As part of John Peel's Meltdown Festival in June 1998, the London Musicians Collective (LMC) launched and ran a temporary radio station, Resonance 107.3 FM, over four weeks. It was the first ever London station dedicated to radio art, and later evolved into the artist-run Resonance FM. The LMC and particularly the member Peter Cusack, an improvisational musician, used Resonance 107.3 FM as an opportunity to undertake research, asking festival goers and listeners to send in or tell of their "favourite London sound". This formed the basis of a programme, London Soundscape. Cusack received hundreds of responses, and then travelled around London to capture all the relevant sounds himself, providing hours of raw material.
There was no overwhelming "favourite London sound" to emerge from the replies, with few people offering the same answer as anyone else. Many of the selections were surprisingly personal, and varied between outdoor and indoor sounds (such as post hitting a doormat). Cusack was surprised by how considered and largely serious the answers were, as well as how detailed and specific they could be. He found this "especially encouraging", saying: "It has been said in soundscape circles that because of ever increasing noise we are losing the ability to hear. I think this is nonsense. We may find it pretty difficult to talk or think about sound but we certainly hear it, including the details within all the noise." He expressed surprise at minor details that participants often included in their answers, ones which "may not be sonically apparent but which for them were important." He believed such sounds slowly gain personal significance to those who "travel the same route everyday". The sound of Big Ben was the most popular choice, while some surprising picks included arcade machines and traffic, but a large number of responses offered a collection of sounds rather than an individual one.
Realised in 2001, Your Favourite London Sounds is a CD based on responses from the questionnaire, featuring 40 examples of London sounds given as choices. Some of the recordings are the same as those which debuted on the 1998 radio station. Cusack compiled and edited the disc and recorded 35 of its tracks; the others were recorded by Matthias Krispert ("Brixton Station"), Tom Wallace ("Bus Pressure"), Bunny Schendler ("Euston Main Line Railway Station"), Clive Bell ("Tottenham Hotspurs Football Club, White Hart Lane") and Syngen Brown ("LRT Transformer, Putney").
According to The Los Angeles Times writer Jill Lawless, Your Favourite London Sounds is an aural collage of London's distinctive soundscape, one which "has inspired Londoners to close their eyes and listen to their city." Author David M. Frohlich writes the project demonstrates that the favourite sounds of London are "highly idiosyncratic, and just as likely to include man-made sounds as natural sounds", while Lawless said the release "confirms Londoners' intense and idiosyncratic relationship with the urban soundscape." The subjects are diverse, ranging from frying onions, "rain on skylight while lying in bed", "the call to prayer from an east London mosque", double-decker buses, coffee makers, a voicemail message, a bicycle crossing a canal towpath, a hissing bus door, a noisy street market, birds, traffic, taxis, trains, geese, wailing sirens, humming power plants, lapping rivers and "electronic bleeps at supermarket checkouts." Kenneth Goldsmith opines that the project provides "an odd way to think about a city", while according to John L. Walters, the release is "not that outlandish" as many of Cusack's prior albums, including Where Is the Green Parrot? (1999), similarly include lengthy field recordings.
Some sounds are specific to London, such as the London Underground sounds (such as the "mind the gap" announcement) and the bell on the 73 Bus. Cusack said many people "mentioned bus sounds – but not just any bus. It had to be the No. 73 bus, or the No. 12 bus. It was much more personal than I was expecting." He believed that different parts of the world sound very different to each other one part of the world, adding: "On the London Underground, the way the 'mind the gap' echoes down the tunnel comes to you in such a London way, you can't fail to know where you are when you hear it." As Goldsmith describes, some sounds captured in language-laden locations (such as coffee shops and markets) catch locals in conversation, bringing "a specific local flavour to the tracks", while other sounds are not often associated with cities, including rolling thunder and "the unaccompanied chirping of birds". Several sounds are presented with brief descriptions, which Goldsmith says gives them "more poetic weight".
Lawless says that in addition to "predictable natural sounds," such as a fountain, blackbirds, and rising and falling barges moored in the Thames, there are less predictable sounds and several "extremely delicate and specific" ones, such as bicycle wheels riding over "loose concrete slabs" on a specific towpath, while others are more generic, including turnstiles moving on entry to a football game. She also notes the inclusion of several endangered sounds, such as "the slamming of old-fashioned train doors, some of the few not yet replaced by mechanical sliding doors." According to David Toop, sounds vary from famous (Big Ben and "mind the gap"), social (a club queue and Dalston Market), highly personal (a phone message), "universally shared soundmarks" ("post through letterbox", "key in door") and unusual "ear-of-the-musician" answers. Toop also characterises some sounds as possessing "a distinct air of cinema futurism", citing the "disembodied announcements echoing in public space, polyglot languages overhead on the transport system, impersonal reminders of heightened security in the beleaguered city, ageing machinery grinding toward obsolesce, its tortured wails a taunting reminder of our financially draining dependence on clockwork history."
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Your Favourite London Sounds
Your Favourite London Sounds is an album compiled by English musician Peter Cusack and released in November 2001 by the London Musicians Collective (LMC). It collects 40 field recordings of sounds around the English city of London, most of which were recorded by Cusack. The project originated when the LMC hosted a temporary radio station for the 1998 Meltdown Festival, which Cusack used to ask festival goers and listeners what their favourite 'London sound' was. He received hundreds of responses, many of which were varied and often personal.
The sounds on the recording are highly diverse and vary between outdoor and indoor sounds, some of which are famous and some of which are more atypical. Several sounds are specific to London while others are broader. On release, the album received critical acclaim, including being named the week's best CD by The Guardian, and inspired radio and newspaper commentary. Cusack commented that it received more attention than his musical work. Ultimately, the London project was the first in Cusack's larger Favourite Sounds Project, which visited other cities across the world.
As part of John Peel's Meltdown Festival in June 1998, the London Musicians Collective (LMC) launched and ran a temporary radio station, Resonance 107.3 FM, over four weeks. It was the first ever London station dedicated to radio art, and later evolved into the artist-run Resonance FM. The LMC and particularly the member Peter Cusack, an improvisational musician, used Resonance 107.3 FM as an opportunity to undertake research, asking festival goers and listeners to send in or tell of their "favourite London sound". This formed the basis of a programme, London Soundscape. Cusack received hundreds of responses, and then travelled around London to capture all the relevant sounds himself, providing hours of raw material.
There was no overwhelming "favourite London sound" to emerge from the replies, with few people offering the same answer as anyone else. Many of the selections were surprisingly personal, and varied between outdoor and indoor sounds (such as post hitting a doormat). Cusack was surprised by how considered and largely serious the answers were, as well as how detailed and specific they could be. He found this "especially encouraging", saying: "It has been said in soundscape circles that because of ever increasing noise we are losing the ability to hear. I think this is nonsense. We may find it pretty difficult to talk or think about sound but we certainly hear it, including the details within all the noise." He expressed surprise at minor details that participants often included in their answers, ones which "may not be sonically apparent but which for them were important." He believed such sounds slowly gain personal significance to those who "travel the same route everyday". The sound of Big Ben was the most popular choice, while some surprising picks included arcade machines and traffic, but a large number of responses offered a collection of sounds rather than an individual one.
Realised in 2001, Your Favourite London Sounds is a CD based on responses from the questionnaire, featuring 40 examples of London sounds given as choices. Some of the recordings are the same as those which debuted on the 1998 radio station. Cusack compiled and edited the disc and recorded 35 of its tracks; the others were recorded by Matthias Krispert ("Brixton Station"), Tom Wallace ("Bus Pressure"), Bunny Schendler ("Euston Main Line Railway Station"), Clive Bell ("Tottenham Hotspurs Football Club, White Hart Lane") and Syngen Brown ("LRT Transformer, Putney").
According to The Los Angeles Times writer Jill Lawless, Your Favourite London Sounds is an aural collage of London's distinctive soundscape, one which "has inspired Londoners to close their eyes and listen to their city." Author David M. Frohlich writes the project demonstrates that the favourite sounds of London are "highly idiosyncratic, and just as likely to include man-made sounds as natural sounds", while Lawless said the release "confirms Londoners' intense and idiosyncratic relationship with the urban soundscape." The subjects are diverse, ranging from frying onions, "rain on skylight while lying in bed", "the call to prayer from an east London mosque", double-decker buses, coffee makers, a voicemail message, a bicycle crossing a canal towpath, a hissing bus door, a noisy street market, birds, traffic, taxis, trains, geese, wailing sirens, humming power plants, lapping rivers and "electronic bleeps at supermarket checkouts." Kenneth Goldsmith opines that the project provides "an odd way to think about a city", while according to John L. Walters, the release is "not that outlandish" as many of Cusack's prior albums, including Where Is the Green Parrot? (1999), similarly include lengthy field recordings.
Some sounds are specific to London, such as the London Underground sounds (such as the "mind the gap" announcement) and the bell on the 73 Bus. Cusack said many people "mentioned bus sounds – but not just any bus. It had to be the No. 73 bus, or the No. 12 bus. It was much more personal than I was expecting." He believed that different parts of the world sound very different to each other one part of the world, adding: "On the London Underground, the way the 'mind the gap' echoes down the tunnel comes to you in such a London way, you can't fail to know where you are when you hear it." As Goldsmith describes, some sounds captured in language-laden locations (such as coffee shops and markets) catch locals in conversation, bringing "a specific local flavour to the tracks", while other sounds are not often associated with cities, including rolling thunder and "the unaccompanied chirping of birds". Several sounds are presented with brief descriptions, which Goldsmith says gives them "more poetic weight".
Lawless says that in addition to "predictable natural sounds," such as a fountain, blackbirds, and rising and falling barges moored in the Thames, there are less predictable sounds and several "extremely delicate and specific" ones, such as bicycle wheels riding over "loose concrete slabs" on a specific towpath, while others are more generic, including turnstiles moving on entry to a football game. She also notes the inclusion of several endangered sounds, such as "the slamming of old-fashioned train doors, some of the few not yet replaced by mechanical sliding doors." According to David Toop, sounds vary from famous (Big Ben and "mind the gap"), social (a club queue and Dalston Market), highly personal (a phone message), "universally shared soundmarks" ("post through letterbox", "key in door") and unusual "ear-of-the-musician" answers. Toop also characterises some sounds as possessing "a distinct air of cinema futurism", citing the "disembodied announcements echoing in public space, polyglot languages overhead on the transport system, impersonal reminders of heightened security in the beleaguered city, ageing machinery grinding toward obsolesce, its tortured wails a taunting reminder of our financially draining dependence on clockwork history."