Each sound in itself, he said. Each passing moment in itself.
—Gabriel Josipovici, Infinity: The Story of a Moment
John Joe was in the first bed on the right as I entered the ward. Two nurses were holding him down by his arms and he was staring at them with wild, terrified eyes. He clearly had no idea where he was, who these people were, or what he was doing there. They kept trying to talk him down, telling him to relax, telling him to take it easy. His head swivelled as he shouted back at them. He was swamped by the bed, covered in white sheets, thin wisps of hair floating above his pale, frantic head. Even in that state, there was a strength in him that took the nurses by surprise. His arms were long and thin, but they could still exert some force; each nurse needed both hands to keep his fists from swinging.
My grandfather had that morning been admitted to Tallaght hospital in Dublin for a kidney operation. The procedure had gone to plan, but he had woken up very confused and agitated after his anaesthetic wore off. My parents were driving up to stay with him for the evening, but they were still two hours away. Living much closer to the hospital, I was asked to get there first, in the hope that I could calm him down a little. They thought a familiar face would do some good.
I have always hated hospitals, and I still feel deeply uncomfortable when I find myself in one for any reason at all. I am more unnerved by the firm professionalism and the stoic faces than the intimacy of sickness and death. I have never been more than a visitor in a hospital as an adult, so I’m always on the periphery of whatever situation has brought me there. I’m never the one the doctors approach, never the one who takes the phone calls, the one who arranges the food, the card, the flowers, or the one who brings a spare cardigan from the wardrobe at home. I have always been an observer by the hospital bed, standing mutely with my brothers as someone else does the talking and the organising. No matter my level of interest or empathy, I have to try hard not to look bored. When it comes to hospitals, I have retained the attitude and demeanour of a child.
That afternoon I was going to be, even if only temporarily, the first point of contact for the doctors and nurses. I didn’t really know what was going on, but I would have to try to answer questions, try to be the necessary liaison between John Joe and the hospital staff. My actions – asking for my grandfather’s ward at reception, navigating the featureless corridors and elevators, talking to the nurses on his floor – were guided more by what I’d seen people do on television than any personal intuition or experience. I tried to think of myself as an actor. I felt I could follow the script and people would point me in the right direction. I would just keep trying to hit my cues, make sure I was facing the right way, keep moving through the scene.
—
I barely slept that summer. Through the bars that covered my bedroom window in Dublin, I would watch the sun come up most mornings. Once it became bright, I would sleep for two or three hours before getting up again. I began to see the dawn hours as the most beautiful, as those most suffused with potential. Through the night I would listen out for the sounds of the church bells ringing on the hours. With my window open to the June night, I counted the tolls, seeing in my mind the spires from which each had come. I was surrounded by churches then, living in the oldest part of Dublin. I could see two from the window, and there must have been half a dozen more within earshot, each as distinct in the dark as they were in daylight. The bells were travelling past me, signals in some relay, and they were deep and clear as they spread, uninterrupted, out across the city.
I balanced my portable recorder on the sill inside the window, which was open just a crack, hoping to capture something of the atmosphere. I failed every time. Sometimes sound is essentially a function of the light, inseparable from the colour of the air it passes through. The bells permeated a deep, watery blue with a texture like rough paper. Without that light, the sounds became thin and distant, lacking completely the startling sense of proximity they possessed in real time. Sitting on my bed, lit only by the blue glow from the window, it felt like I was draped in that sound, shrouded in that light.
During the day, I was drawn repeatedly to the fountain in the small park beside the cathedral next my house. I would stand there with my recorder and my headphones, pointing the microphone this way and that, balancing the water with the birds calling out as they dropped from the trees to the rubbish bins, the sound of the children in the playground, the milling tourists. The fountain was not much to look at, but its affable trickle mingled peacefully with the lives passing round. It stood in the centre of the park, as distant from the roaring traffic as could be. Walking in from the gate, the fountain would gradually replace the cars and buses as the dominant sound, becoming clearer with every step. I find it is much more difficult to linger in urban places than the relative emptiness of the countryside, but the fountain seemed to invite a slow approach and a moment of calm. I would sit there for an hour or more, listening, sometimes reading, often just watching people as they passed.
At night, sitting upright on the bed by my window, I would play back my recordings of the fountain. I let them join with the sounds of the night, with the sounds of the bells. In those capacious dawn hours, I would sit with my laptop and mix my recordings from day and night into minute sounds; loops that I listened to while falling asleep, and never saved.
—
I remember John Joe kicking back the sheets of the hospital bed, the legs of his pyjama bottoms riding up and exposing the unblemished skin of his shins and calves. I don’t think I’d ever seen his naked legs before, and I was really shocked by how smooth and lean they were. They were almost the legs of a child. His worn face and his scorched hands – the only skin of his with which I was then familiar – bore the marks of a lifetime’s hard work. His calves were different – they were innocent, protected. I didn’t know what to make of them.
If I swing my legs out from under the duvet in the morning, and stay a moment sitting on the edge of the bed, looking down, I now think of his legs in that hospital bed, forcing themselves out from beneath the sheets. The recognition is immediate, the similarity uncanny. Even the bend of the knee outlined against the tartan pyjama pattern is the same, the sad curve of the foot poking out the bottom comparably abject. Once I noticed it, I couldn’t stop. Sometimes I find myself just sitting there, staring at my own feet and thinking of his.
—
Joan Didion once wrote that it is easy to see the beginning of things, and harder to know the end. From this remove, it seems to me as if that summer became both at once – a period of months when two distinct velocities overlapped and cancelled each other out. I was caught between them, unable to take meaningful steps in any direction. I passed that summer without thinking; I did whatever came easiest, whatever could be done without having to make a serious decision. I went along with everything and everyone and for a while there it seemed like it was working out.
It was my first summer out of college, a moment I had been anticipating for some time. I’d spent the previous three years in the frustrating half-way house of a suburban campus, commuting between there, the country, and the city, never feeling properly at home anywhere. My days and weeks were defined by the many fallow hours I spent on buses – not sleeping, but not quite awake either. Now, my responsibilities to my parents regarding my education had been seen through and I was free to make my own way. I embraced that freedom and immediately began excising my rural upbringing, ploughing guiltlessly into what I thought of as a world of cultured urban possibility.
I set about worming my way into the artistic milieu I had longed to experience as a teenager in the countryside, back when I’d hoarded whatever diluted artefacts of the creative life I could, after they’d filtered down to the middle of nowhere. Thanks to a combination of accident, desperation, and a lack of better ideas, I found myself writing about music to make my rent. Historically speaking, this has never been a healthy or profitable occupation, and it remained so when I embarked upon it. At the start of the summer I moved in with my friend Dave, who was a few years older than me, and made decent money running student nights around town. Dave was tall, handsome and very charming – a real people person, genuinely interested in what you were doing, and always thinking of ways to do exciting work of his own. He was from the country too, and had left behind a sensible career in the construction industry to spend nights in loud, glittery nightclubs. We worked together a lot – DJing, recording bands, making plans. Dave could talk to anyone, and I was happy to tag along. I felt like I could learn a lot from him.
Living with Dave was fun, but I wasn’t making enough money. Every month I would lie and tell our landlady, a middle-aged woman, indistinguishable in my memory from Gertrude Stein, that I was just waiting on an overdue payment from a well-known, highly respectable newspaper, and that I’d have the full amount for her the following week. While I lived there, I don’t think I once paid rent on time. Eventually she kicked us out so her daughter could move in.
I spent much of that summer in music venues, in nightclubs, or at music festivals. I was typically there to work – reviewing, playing, organising – but the lines were blurred. I learned quickly that even a tenuous veneer of professionalism can open a lot of doors, so I never had to pay for anything. For the first time in my life, I had access. I had no money, so I didn’t feel too bad about taking what I could get for free. I was thrilled by it too; the freedom to move around, to keep my own hours, to be present in places where I could never afford a ticket. The entire setup was liable to collapse at any minute, but its precarious nature made it exciting – surviving the uncertainty still brought an intoxicating sense of achievement then, like I had won through to another round in some addictive but unfathomable game. That feeling is well gone now.
What I remember most is the amount of talking I did that summer – I talked all day and all night; more than I ever had before, or have ever done since. I had a lot of freshly formed opinions and more than enough opportunity to convey them. I had an infinite appetite for connection at that time, and a taste for argument. I had the energy to care about the daily social grind of the circles I was running in, and a willingness to go against the grain in what I said. I criticised openly and without restraint. The music I was listening to, the events I was excited about, the institutions and people I derided – it was all fodder for my performative self-narration. I was talking myself up, talking myself into the role I imagined for myself. Like every other young idiot, I didn’t realise yet how empty talk can be, and how little the noise of the night before really means by the morning after. Believing myself free of everything that had ever held me back, I was finally getting something I’d been craving for years – attention, excitement, involvement – and, for a few months at least, I couldn’t get enough.
—
Coming home late most nights, I would walk back through the rows of neat, small houses between Camden Street and Clanbrassil Street, listening to Brian Eno’s Discreet Music on my headphones. Discreet Music consists of two simple, three-note melodies played over and over again by a pre-programmed synthesiser. There is a lot of space between the repetitions, a space filled by the blurred and gradually decaying echoes of those same melodies. The echoes feed back into each other very slowly and very softly, a systemic recurrence and recombination which is well-defined from the outset, though its outline remains imperceptible while you’re listening to it. It is constantly surprising.
Discreet Music persists for just under half an hour without any real development. It is a quiet, mellifluous piece that forgoes any progressive structure. It has no narrative, no dramatic punctuation. Its elements are immediately recognisable and they do not change until they have faded out once again at the end. It is more a state than a journey, purely atmospheric. Listening to it is like slipping into a crevice in time, finding yourself suspended.
I had never heard anything quite like Discreet Music before then, and it really took a hold of me during those summer months. It felt very much like a night-time record, a private world, somehow both mechanic and organic, systematic and deeply humane. Even though it was nothing more than a process in motion, it felt more alive, more spontaneous, more exciting than any other music I was hearing at the time. Its restrictions were self-imposed and somehow comforting. It didn’t feel like a spectacle; like something to be consumed, or shared, or even talked about. When listening to it, my mind would wander without ever really escaping the music’s particular muted shade; it coloured every thought. I internalised its atmosphere, that feeling of being inside of the music without ever feeling like you could understand it, or reach its bottom. Eno himself said it was more like a painting than music – it was just there, and you spent time with it. You came and you went; the music didn’t change. Its reduction – almost absolute – spoke to a near-infinite set of possibilities; it felt like a boundlessly generous piece of music, open on every side. Walking home through the empty amber streets, quiet and alone after another night of endless talk, endless noise, it felt as if time had been dissolved, and I was caught in whatever nebulous cloud had settled in its place.
—
John Joe looked me in the eye when I arrived, and I don’t know which of us was the more alarmed. He was shouting at his two nurses, and I was silent. I had no idea what to do. The desperation of the nurses, relying on me to improve the situation, was palpable. I felt an overwhelming desire to run away. John Joe had been, until this point, an authority figure in my life. In some ways, he was the authority figure: John Joe could tell even my father to do something and expect it to be done. Seeing him like this – confused, out of place, violent – I no longer had a clear idea where I stood with him. The positions we had always assumed were now reversed; I was being asked to take charge. Instead, I froze. For several minutes I stood there, completely lost, mumbling and looking for a way out. There was none.
—
I remember now: I fell in love that summer. I fell in love in that room, on the bed, by the blue of the window. Sometimes a love in its early days is indistinguishable from the quiet in which it takes root. That blue dark quiet.
—
I realised John Joe was trying to talk about the bog. June is the time of year when turf is brought home, and here he was, prone in his hospital bed, wondering how much of it had been done and how much more was left to do. I didn’t know – I hadn’t been home very much – but I made up whatever I could to keep him focused. Whatever would distract him from the presence of the nurses, whatever would take him away from this blanched, aseptic place. He seemed to think at times that he was actually on the bog, and not in a hospital at all. I tried to meet him wherever he was, tried to follow whatever winding paths he was travelling in his mind that afternoon. He would snap sometimes into a terrible awareness of his situation, and in each moment of clarity I could see the anger and fear swell inside of him. I held his arm if he tried to raise it when the nurses came near. He called them all sorts of names and I could do nothing about it. I thought of my parents on the motorway and counted each minute until their arrival.
—
At the tail end of that first free summer, I found myself in a cottage on the grounds of a large house in the countryside with some friends, who were all in a band together. The main house belonged to someone’s aunt, and the cottage in the garden was empty; my friends planned to cloister themselves there for about six weeks with the intention of recording their first album. I went along with them to help out, as I had often done in the past. I can’t recall what made this seem like a good idea. I’d gone to college to become a sound engineer, but that aspiration had faded by the time I’d finished. I didn’t have much to offer my friends by way of expertise or advice, but I was envious of their proficiency, their ambition, and their gear, and I wanted to be a part of what they were making. This was the kind of thing I’d always wanted to do, and yet when the opportunity arose, I found I really had no good reason to be there.
I had begun to read the work of David Toop, an English musician and writer, and I carried his book Haunted Weather around with me while we stayed in that house. It’s a book about music that pushes towards the edges of sense – quiet music, improvised music, music of long duration. Toop says that these kinds of musics, which force a heightened quality of attention on both the audience and the performer, are largely a response to the rhythms and structures of the natural world, an attempt to let that outside world permeate the music in some way. The composers and artists Toop discusses – Brian Eno among them – are trying to imagine different registers in which the music might more accurately or sympathetically reflect our experiences as people in the world, blurring the existing distinctions between the musical and the non-musical. Memory, reflection, vulnerability, transparency – these are the touchstones of Toop’s investigation. Long spaces between notes, such as you find in Discreet Music, play on the fallibility of memory, asking us to remember what has already happened while, at the same time, straining our desire to find predetermined patterns in everything. Music that resists familiar forms asks its listeners to respond in an improvised, spur-of-the-moment way. When we don’t know where things are headed, nothing can be decided in advance. We just have to pay attention, stay with it, try to react in kind.
I was reading David Toop because, over the course of that summer, I had felt something shift in my relationship to sound, to music, to the processes of memory and invention involved in making and recording these phenomena. I’m not sure it started with Richard Skelton, whom I’d first heard that year, but Landings was certainly a factor. Concepts and traditions I had previously taken for granted no longer seemed to make much sense. I had spent so many hours of my life up to that point trying, and ceaselessly failing, to make music that explicitly detailed my innermost emotions; my strongest, deepest passions. This mostly meant writing songs about girls I thought I loved, and how much I hated everything else. It worked fine as therapy, but not so well as music.
Much of the music Toop talks about in Haunted Weather, like Discreet Music, is generative: it comes out of a process, grown from the bottom up rather than defined from above. Eno describes making generative music as being more like trying to create a seed than engineer a tree. I felt like I had been over-engineering trees my whole damn life, and I desperately needed to try something different.
Eno talks about how this kind of music opens outward from the composer’s original idea, mutating and regenerating as it spreads. He discusses the theory of ‘cellular automata’, put forward by the physicist John von Neumann: the process by which even the smallest cell might evolve into something beautiful and unexpected. This opening out was so fascinating to me. It implied that the artist was just a starting point, and that the real magic would happen when the work came into contact with the world. It becomes the listener’s duty not just to follow the composer’s dream as a spectator, but to act as a conduit, to help bring it into being.
More than a little influenced by this idea – railing against the flaws I perceived in myself and my earlier methods – I began to resent the very idea of composed music, which I soon saw as arrogant and foolhardy. I took to wandering around the grounds of the country house with my portable recorder, popping balloons in the farmyard sheds, listening to the wind in the trees and the scratching of the dying plants against the windows of an abandoned greenhouse. I was trying to listen to the world as I found it, but really, I was seeking an escape from the grand construct of the record failing to be made around me.
The album we were trying to make was not unlike most others: a concrete list of songs, written over the course of several years, to be preserved as a thematically and sonically coherent whole. By unfortunate contrast, I had begun to conceive of sound as something utterly contingent, something unstoppable, illimitable. Discreet Music had infected my thinking. The album my friends were making demanded a type of perfection I had begun to distrust; I had lost my faith in the idea of a perfect take, where the recorded sound matches faultlessly with the sound we had imagined in our heads. There seemed in this method very little by way of discovery, or surprise. Recording instruments one by one, building up an album layer by layer, you need to keep a clear picture of the whole in your mind, to know where each piece of the puzzle is going to go and how they will all fit together. I no longer believed such a picture was really possible. Even if it was, I felt like that picture would be no help to us.
I was thinking instead of sound as a function of the atmosphere – emotional, social, climactic – in which it is made and heard. I thought it was this totalised atmosphere we were responding to, whether we knew it or not. I thought this is what we ought to be trying to record. Everything else felt arbitrary. I thought that if we could capture the atmosphere – the unrepeatable happenstance of our being there, as a particular group in a particular place and time – then the music would resonate with everything which, to me at least, gave it meaning. All the variables have to correspond for this to happen, this reverberation; from the placement of the microphones and the choice of room to the emotional state of the musicians and the light coming through the windows.
This kind of coincidence is a by-product of patience and alertness. It’s not even a question of waiting for the perfect atmosphere to come along; rather of recognising the characteristics of the one in which we find ourselves, and responding as suitably as we can to its affordances. I was beginning to develop something like an ethics of sound: could I be worthy of what was happening, what I was hearing?
This line of thinking did not make me a useful presence in that remote country house. I watched my friends work and felt a growing frustration at their approach. It felt like they were looking for something without opening their eyes: they had a fixed idea of what they wanted, and they set out to make that regardless of where they found themselves. The sounds they made then were rarely listened to, but rather compared – held up against some ideal version they had in their heads. I felt this was holding them back. With all the tools at their disposal, with all the freedom in the world, they had built a wall around themselves. As far as I could see, nothing good would come of it.
Burned out, confused, lonely – I caught a lift back to Dublin. I had lasted about three weeks. The following day, my father was in Tallaght hospital for a check-up on a serious injury he’d sustained at work earlier in the year, and I was to meet him there for a lift back home. I knew my way around the hospital this time. I was sitting on a bench in reception when I got a text from one of my friends in the band, politely suggesting that maybe it would be best for everyone if I didn’t come back.
—
Perhaps it is easy to see both the beginnings and the ends of things, but harder to know which is which at the time. John Joe’s memory was already slipping when he entered the operating theatre that morning, but the occasion marks for me the real beginning of his troubles with dementia. The most simple and most selfish reason for seeing that day as a starting point is that it was also the beginning of my personal involvement with those troubles. Never before had I been asked to step so fully into his world.
It was my job that afternoon to be familiar, to help him find his bearings in an acutely unfamiliar situation. I was asked to be an anchor. It was my job to recognise him for who he was, and to give him the tools with which to recognise himself in that alien environment. The nurses, for all their strength and kindness, could not make him feel at home. They couldn’t talk with him as if they were sitting by the range in his kitchen, or make him feel as if this was a day no different to any other. This was what he needed, and what I was unexpectedly tasked with providing. Trying to piece himself back together as the anaesthetic drained from his body, he reached for the building blocks of his identity and found them missing, or broken. He desperately needed someone to help him recover them. I was the only one around. He needed a mirror, someone to say: here you are, I see you. Only then could he reassemble himself.
It is easy, from here, to see that day as the beginning. Without realising it, I began a project – a shaky, unpredictable, overwhelming project – of trying to record John Joe in whatever ways I could. To track the situation in which he found himself, to follow it in a way that was not rigid, not predefined, but entirely sympathetic, alert to the contours and pressures of his particular atmosphere. It was some time, years really, before I realised that the pretentious theory of sound that I’d cooked up in that country house could have had quite practical applications in listening to, and caring for, someone who was losing their memory. These questions of recognition, of an adequate response to the demands a situation makes – if I’d had all that clear in my mind when I visited John Joe in hospital, maybe I wouldn’t have been so childish and quiet. Maybe I wouldn’t have been so scared. But I didn’t have it then, and nothing at all felt clear. Even now it is easier to talk about the repercussions of these thoughts in terms of one’s love of music, rather than one’s love of people.
That summer, when I was young and free of every restraint, liberated for the first time from every tie and bond, I somehow became caught up in my grandfather the way one gets caught in rain. The rural, family life which had seemed before to be a restriction and a limitation became, to my surprise, an opportunity, and then an obsession. John Joe was like a gale force wind I was unable, or unwilling, to resist. I just went along with him, back the direction I’d come. I realised in those days that I wanted to record him as I would a most precious and enthralling sound, like a passing vibration in the air. If that day was the beginning of this project, it was in some sense the beginning of the end also. I could sense, even then, that what followed that trip to the hospital would not be good for John Joe, and would not be reversed. I wanted to listen hard to his final emergence; to capture his life in the last stage of its becoming – to record that person still forming even as he began, contrapuntally, to unravel.