Two white men tipsy on Scotch whisky are driving a golf cart next to a sand dune. The sound fades in very slowly as they approach the microphone attached to the existing first flag. We will also hear the soft rhythm of waves from the sea and the occasional oystercatcher. As this recording reaches its peak and the golf cart is close, we suddenly hear the sound of a tall twenty-two-year-old man living in Yuendumu, his young daughter by his side, angrily kicking a slightly deflated leather football with a wide-sounding thwack. As the tail of the sound we hear all the helium escaping from punctured Disney balloons bought for children around the world. The ball begins to soar through the air.
A sonic bomb explodes in Syria.
Beneath the hum and churn of vibrating feeders on a machine for washing sand we hear nine imported cashmere goats in Afghanistan having their throats slit, one after another in quick succession, all at the same loud volume, all slightly sped up so that the sound goes past quickly. Somebody staples an invoice to an A4 photocopy. Snap – a mousetrap goes off. Crack – an egg from a battery chicken breaks on the floor of a hospital. Click – a hook snaps onto the belt of an engineer on the top floor of a skyscraper in Seattle. Crack – the snap of twenty-four chopsticks pulled apart in Japan. The bang of claws and feathers into metal as a peacock attacks its own reflection in the passenger door of a black car. The sizzle of a cow’s rump being branded with a hot iron. A splitting-off of a huge slab of marble in a quarry. The messy clang of a handful of dead batteries into a steel dustbin. A large tree pulled over by a machine and chains with a series of birds’ nests still in it. The snap of a packet of aspirin along a perforated line. A tractor’s wheel driving over an organic yoghurt pot. A gardener unknowingly sticks a garden fork through a daffodil bulb. A pig electrocuted. We hear it thrash around until it’s dead. A toilet won’t stop flushing.
An empty plastic bottle of Evian on a beach in Ibiza is folded in half with a crumple pitched way down, so it feels like something large is toppling over.
A melodic arc, a long whine of whistles tied to the feet of pigeons in China recorded from a model aeroplane. Fading in, we hear the metallic harmonics of a shopping trolley in a river as water rushes through the wire mesh. Underneath we hear any feedback from microphones on stages right now, mixed extremely quietly. It slowly crossfades into a cello on fire in a cul-de-sac in Marseille, crackling in the heat as the lacquer melts and warps. The buzz of electric lines overhead in a national park recorded from a fibreglass canoe. Beards being trimmed in Iceland. The spitting and spreading of salt from the back of a yellow lorry. All the hairdryers in Taiwan. Distantly, a tired fly bops against the window of a café. It’s been doing this for some time and there are longish gaps as it stops, crawls, bops, stops.
After fifteen seconds or so the fly has some renewed energy and after a few intermittent fuzzy bumps into the glass, we hear a particularly loud one. At the same time we hear, through a microphone buried inside an anthill, the exact moment that a young boy jabs a stick in it. Some broken sheeting on scaffolding hiding a new coffee shop flaps viciously in a strong wind. A bonfire crackles with ivy as the smoke swirls. The furious noise of bees swarming round a beekeeper. An army helicopter appears suddenly over a headland, raising the volume and tempo again. All the sounds of drilling right now.
A dart misses a dartboard hung on a tree and sticks with a thwack into the trunk. A cat’s paw on a crisp packet. An obese boy swings at a clownfish piñata with a stick. A bin bag full of disposable plates splits and spills over a lawn. Crack, a plastic surgeon breaks a patient’s rib. A monkey lunges at bruised mangoes but a chain pulls it back with a sharp yank. A howl of pain from a fox in a trap by a railway bridge, then a snarl. A charity-branded promotional pen snapped.
A butcher in Malaga saws through a collarbone in a long, even motion. Over the top we hear acanthus-tree branches rubbing against each other in the breeze.
A pregnant woman is pouring water into a jug in Flint, Michigan. A handful of small river fish flap loosely but panicked in a plastic cooler. The crack of a water vole in a mole trap. A drip from a tap in an empty bathroom at the Mexican border. A shark bites through a surfboard. An excerpt of a jagged rockfall into a lake. An explosion. More rocks. Another explosion. Gravel rains down on reed roofs. The scoop of wet sand and grit onto the ramparts of a sandcastle. A dolphin bumps its head on the bottom of a wooden boat. A teenager throws a condom into a river in the dark with a pathetic splash. Two cans, one of varnish, one of paint, spill onto a canal path.
In quick succession: bang, a pigeon into a rooftop window on the left. Bang, a starling into a window on the right. Crunch, someone stands on a snail in bare feet. A sack of salmon-flavoured pet food dropped carelessly into the boot of a car. Someone stands on a mine. A vineyard sprayed with pesticide. A primate’s head being shaved. A team of council leaf blowers. A bee buzzes next to your right ear, but you can’t move. A wasp buzzes into your left ear, heading through the ear canal, further towards the eardrum. But now you’re in a dark room that’s not your own, next to someone snoring, and you can hear a mosquito above you. From nowhere we can hear many of the mosquitoes flying right now in Africa at once, millions of them, an orgy of tiny melodic humming and the friction of wings. It goes on for too long, maybe a minute in a crescendo. Then it snaps to silence.
Except we still hear one mosquito.
Someone cuts through a wasp’s nest in a garden with an electric hedge trimmer. Now an explosion in a quarry recorded by a series of 1,549 microphones, each placed one metre back from the other in a straight line from the centre of the blast, radiating away from the central point. We hear each recording, one after the other, with a 0.43-second gap between them. The debris rains down in small dusty pellets. It morphs down the frequency spectrum, filtered until from the low end we hear a nuclear explosion in the Pacific Ocean, recorded underwater.
Someone throws a set of house keys into the sea from a ferry; we hear it as a kind of arc. Fifty-six thousand footballs forcefully kicked.
The thunk of a poison dart in the side of a chimpanzee. The hum of fridges, machines, fans, fluorescent tubes beneath the scratching of mice in laboratories against the plastic walls. A tortoise on the floor tries to free itself from underneath a skiing jacket where it has got trapped upside down. This merges with a furious bug trapped in a beer glass on a picnic bench in summer, which in turn merges with a rhino’s tusk being sawed off. A shepherd bashes the head of a lamb with a sharp rock. The fly-tipping of a fridge. A professor washes her hair vigorously with lavender-scented shampoo; a tree in Borneo collapses. The tumbling of carpet rolls from a lorry. A bodybuilder is sucking up spiders and ladybirds with a vacuum cleaner. A distant car bomb recorded from a mountain. A father is blowing up a balloon for a baby shower.
From inside a Toyota Land Cruiser now, we hear a sandstorm – the pelt of sand against the metal and glass. Commercial European printers are rapidly printing out books about trees. Circular saws are spinning as people lay decking in their gardens. Every fly approaching a bug zapper in a butcher’s shop recorded from directly behind them. An environmental activist is gagged and bound. The crack of a jockey’s whip on a horse in Dubai. The click and snap of ski boots into bindings. A donkey strains on nylon reins in the snow. Someone peeling off a wetsuit. The hiss of the heat tongs as they seal the end of the vas deferens tube in a vasectomy operation.
The football is still in the air; we hear it pass above our heads.
The squirt of hairspray. The squirt of air freshener. The squirt of red paint on a pine cone in a factory making Christmas decorations. The squirt of an asthma inhaler. The squirt of window cleaner. The squirt of One Direction-branded perfume. The squirt of antibacterial handwash in a law firm. The squirt of pepper spray into the face of a Black Lives Matter protester. The squirt of insulating foam from a can. The squirt of water onto a model’s face on a suntan commercial shoot. The squirt of screenwash onto the windscreen of a tank in the midday heat. The squirt of a conditioner onto a dog’s coat at Crufts. The squirt of a cheap deodorant onto a boy’s armpit. The squirt of canned cheese onto a plate of nachos at a cinema in Malta. The squirt of vinegar onto chips. The squirt of a soda syphon in a BBC sound FX studio. The squirt of a small fire extinguisher in a toy factory. The squirt of butter-flavoured cooking spray onto a Teflon pan. The spray of an insect repellent on a neck. The squirt of shaving foam onto a crotch. The squirt of Roundup weedkiller on a driveway. The squirt of an athlete’s-foot spray into a rugby boot. The squirt of lice treatment onto a chicken coop’s wooden slats. The squirt of de-icer onto the bathroom window of a trailer. The squirt of a known carcinogen onto skin. The squirt of instant shoe polish. The squirt of sugar soap onto a bloodied, tiled floor. The squirt of suntan lotion into the eye of a young child. The squirt of lighter fuel onto a pile of A4 papers. The squirt of air fresheners again. The squirt of aerosol paint by a graffiti artist. The squirt of fake cream onto a stripper’s nipples. Someone pukes vodka into a snowdrift in Vaasa.
The scratch of police dogs in the back of a van blend into the sound of a branch of an ancient oak tree through a council shredder on a residential street. The sound of a garden centre in a hurricane. Everyone giving birth right now. A child’s toy bulldozer makes a piercing bleeping noise. More child’s toys. It becomes an ocean of bleeps and whines and buzzes and fake chainsaw noises. It rises and rises. At its peak, now the rolling of a plastic wine cork for each bottle of wine made in France this year – 7.5 billion approximately – down the steps at the Sacré-Cœur. It is recorded from the bottom as they roll downwards towards the listener, towards fifty microphones set up. Someone has dug up all the plastic things you threw away when you were a child and is firing them at your house from a series of cannons. An anti-aircraft gun spills empty shells onto concrete. A high-pass filter removes all the lower frequencies and then blends them until we just hear the tiny nervous rattling loops of silica gel packets found in the bottom of boxes of new TVs made today. The pouring of kitty litter into a plastic tray. The pouring of water from a kettle on an ants’ nest. The sound Donald Trump’s pen makes in a video as it skims across paper as he signs something. The glug of filthy cooking oil down a drain in the heat. A fox biting down on dyed food from a bin. A walnut cracked, a roadside bomb, a horse touching an electric fence, the slap of a cat flap, knitting machines, bread machines, mixing machines, sewing machines, machines for resetting the pins at bowling alleys, running machines, car-crushing machines, dog food.
A cat eats a bird on a porch while someone nearby reads an article about sound in the New York Times.
A group of hungry ramblers crunch over heather on a hilltop. A dog treads on a broken gin bottle on a beach. An empty cargo plane lands, we just hear a fragment: the exact moment the wheels hit the tarmac. There’s a crackling and bubbling of brand new hot black asphalt settling just after it’s been poured from the back of a paver. A can of Fanta shoved roughly in a rubbish bin on a train. A meagre morsel of tasteless, overcooked, chlorinated chicken stuffed in a mouth. Twelve concrete mixers turn and twelve builders bang the outsides with spades. The last strike is followed by the bang as a Jeep Cherokee hits a badger. Pause: a bee is against the inside of an office window again, trying to get to a flower it can see outside, but it’s tired. A bear’s stomach rumbles; we turn this sound up and up. The badger’s corpse slumps down the metal grille of the car, a wet snort from its nostrils. A child rolls an upside-down snail down a metal slide in a play area. Two sisters in gloves pull a long continuous thread of carpet out of a poodle’s backside after it has spent the last two days eating the fringes of it.
With a clicky noise and a spark, every pub and bar in London starts up their outside heaters. A whoosh followed by many small plops as the feeder for a salmon farm shoots food laced with pink dye out into the lake. A cutting of rosemary for supper. Someone dumps a broken microwave oven off a bridge into a canal with a splash. In Cuba a plastic basketball hits an abandoned fridge. A leisure sales regional manager is shaking a carton of unfinished rotten milk. A scraping, gouging of the bottom of an oil tanker against rough rocks in a storm, creating a gash, a hole. Reverb is added: it is an impulse response – a recording of the acoustic qualities of the inside of a giant Asda warehouse. A shoplifter runs off with a bottle of Pepsi.
We hear the amplified sound of a grasshopper as it lands on a just-varnished garden table and is suddenly stuck. Someone slips three corpses into a lake at dusk in quick succession.
A dry sound over the top: we hear people in Amsterdam pulling on the tear-strips of Amazon packages. The snap of elastic on a pair of blue plastic disposable overshoes. The tightening of cable ties.
Two chainsaws bang in the back of a brand new pickup truck as the owner drives too quickly over a tree root. Then slowly, someone in the Hague opens a tin of Israeli olives. The stereo DPA mics are so close, and the sound slowed down so much, stretched until it feels like someone is peeling off the top of your head. Beneath it can just about be heard a forest on fire in Indonesia, fierce, crackling, rumbling. A girl carves the name of her lover in a eucalyptus tree in a city park in Melbourne. It’s getting louder.
There’s a smallish crowd at the game. The long, time-stretched, piercing squeal of a referee’s whistle.
Maggots squeeze up beneath a worker’s toes, going through the offcuts from Nile perch next to Lake Victoria. A coastguard’s Land Rover drives over a starfish with a splitting noise. An owl strains against the short leather leash attached to a pole at a clifftop castle somewhere. A razor scrapes down a leg in a hotel bath. A gentoo penguin in an aquarium bumps its head on a wall depicting a mural of Antarctica. A daddy longlegs repeatedly bumps into a light bulb on a houseboat, but we just hear it for a few seconds. The dab of a blue paintbrush. A half-eaten polystyrene tub of prawns drops onto the leather seats of the pickup truck. A very light digital distortion is applied to all the sprinklers at Thanet Earth as they turn off; we hear the drip and ticking as everything settles down. Some sheep on Welsh hillsides are pissing in unison. The bubble of aquariums in a shop selling tropical fish. A plastic beer cup rolls down the harbour wall at Pelion in the wind towards the sea. A leak of something toxic into the water table, out of sight.
A sound designer and engineer have removed all the tin from several rivers in Germany and tied it all together in a row and are now dragging it behind several large trucks along the Avenue de L’indépendance in Yaoundé. A pig’s tail is clipped off in a concrete shed with a metal roof. If you listen carefully, you can hear the clipping sound ping off the ceiling.
The click of magnets pulled together, switches making contact.The 14,000 chickens that are about to die in the next minute suddenly cluck quietly in unison. A butterfly flits in a corner against wallpaper in an ex-colonial administration building in Kenya. A filmmaker is making a short film of all the right-wing MPs in the UK mowing their lawns, but recorded from the nearest public road, heard through the open window of the editor’s room. Someone is spraying fake blood onto a mattress. There’s a huge can of rapeseed oil knocked over and it’s glugging its contents everywhere. Someone runs their hands up a rusted flagpole and listens to the paint flaking off. A slug makes its way vertically up the outside of a greenhouse; there’s a contact mic on the other side of the glass to record it. Schoolgirls aged between five and six are sharpening their pencils slowly, as quietly as possible, while we listen to the slug’s slow journey.
A nest full of new chicks in a hedge at a literary festival strain to be heard over the campers at dawn, and squawk increasingly loudly up to the sky. Twenty to thirty dogs tied up outside supermarkets want their owners back.
A depleted uranium shell grinds unheard beneath a rock as a taxi drives over it in Iraq. A lorry reverses up to the loading bay of a flower distribution warehouse in Savannah. The milking machine on a cow strains and pulls. A truck carrying pigs to market has overturned, spilling now-dead animals across the highway. We hear the shovel of a single person trying to clean up the carnage. Another person is digging for lugworms on a beach. The buzzing of Barcelona city lights is amplified and spread wide across the image. The flap of the wings of a moth above the pitch in a packed football stadium. The hum of Edinburgh from Calton Hill.
A bluebottle is flying around in a theatre during a show. A sheep is shorn of its fleece but we are recording it from a kestrel-shaped kite flown at some distance above. A box of apricots with moths in shifts backwards on a forklift truck. A dog is on the back of a bicycle on its way to being neutered. A barnacle ground off the side of a boat. A rough-legged buzzard is pecking at a radio transmitter attached to its leg. In the same rhythm, a family is crunching through leaves on the way to a firework show. The crack of lobster shells in brasseries. A huge carp is straining on a line, spinning the reel. A bat flies into a catch net.
A string bag full of footballs drops out of an estate car. An industrial vat of glue, bubbling. The peeling-back of the plastic layer on a ready-meal curry.
An artist has made a work in which they have bought all the animals about to be killed for food tonight in Washington and instead is walking them in a line from a restaurant in Paris to a special golden incinerator located in a field outside Monaco. A musician has asked forty-eight people to stamp on a snail shell made out of pastry for an album about Brexit. A scientist has assembled sixty people on a boat and asked them to blow across the tops of hollow animal bones she has excavated from different Neolithic sites across Europe.
The daughter reaches up and squeezes her father’s hip as he peers towards the sun, looking for the ball.
Someone is watching the movie of The Woman in the Dunes in the back of a tour bus and we hear the sound of sand under the actors’ feet on the screen. A haul of dead sharks is tipped overboard a trawling vessel, but it is recorded from fifty metres down. The whirring of the big data servers storing the words of this book somewhere in California heard from the location where employees are supposed to meet in the event of a fire, but where now a cleaner, learning German on headphones, is unwrapping a new packet of cigarettes and gulping vitamin water. A tap from a standpipe is running dry and the bucket placed beneath it to catch the drips has fallen over.
All the kids’ jungle-themed noisy toys with battery life left in them recorded deep in the world’s landfill sites. They make the occasional warped monkey or lion noise as the pressure changes. While we listen to that, two students are peeling the plastic wrappers off stolen CDs right now. A stream of water hosing down an ambulance. A maths teacher has diarrhoea. A limousine driver in Bolivia emptying his ashtray into a puddle in a quiet car park.
Fishermen sitting by a lake not far from Niigata, Japan are slowly reeling in. A Caterpillar digger has been slowly approaching from some distance. It has been sitting underneath all the other sounds since the chickens went silent, and is now coming to the foreground of the stereo image. We hear it moving over uneven ground, closer, louder and then a miserable grind and churn as it pushes over an ancient olive tree. A picture editor is photoshopping nipples out of a make-up advert. A celebrity chef is sniffing a lemon. Suddenly – bang, a seagull into a jet engine. A stabbing of the 500 million straws to be used today into McDonald’s cups. They squeak as they rub against the plastic of the lid. Someone sits down too hard on a crate of Moroccan oranges in the back of a lorry. A small mountain of pea gravel is dumped in a hole. A brown bear stands on a frozen river. It creaks a little beneath her. A fishmonger bursts the swim bladder of a whiting with a pop. A van and trailer full of white sugar overturns by a roundabout near a river. At Lake Coniston, teenagers are skimming stones. A bag of ice cubes now dropped in a child’s seat on the back of a bike to be ridden back to a party. A group of volunteers combs a stony beach for clues to a murder. A hiker in the Alps trips over the sole of an old walking boot on the path. The hiss of a gas leak. The slow tearing of a sachet that holds a tea bag. Different car number plates are hit by 73,984 insects at once. Then a different collection of 73,984 insects come towards the listener from all directions. Crack – a lightning strike on a Hindu temple. A flock of starlings startled by a gunshot. Garden chairs off a ship’s balcony in high seas. A huge drill strikes oil with a bang, gush, spurt – a microphone has been mounted right in the thickest part of the liquid. An overwhelming waterfall of Garnier Fructis shampoo. Farmers swinging by their necks from ropes. Every plant dug up since this chapter started, heaped in a pile. Chewing gum sticking to the sole of a nurse’s sneaker on the Marshall Islands. A mouse with its paws in a plastic tray of poison, unwittingly pushing it against the floor to make a scraping noise. A DIY shelf going up. Half-finished KFC bags thrown out of slammed VW Golfs. A camper spits toothpaste into the bush. An oil executive and lobbyist sign a contract over negronis. Plastic bags flap furiously in strong wind in trees. A crampon hits rock. A small canister of nitrous oxide dropped in a bathroom sink at a party. A factory. A factory. A war. A war. A climber is drilling into a cliff to insert something to hold his rope. The shattered glass of a cider bottle as it hits a dry river bed. A knife stabbed through a kidney. Someone biting into a grape that has too much pesticide residue on it. A rare beetle crossing a road crushed by a motorbike. A plant leaf snipped in a lab. Someone trimming a bush into the shape of a whale. Fifty-three boxes of Prozac shaking, trembling. A lunch break at a factory that makes cheap plastic toys for the covers of children’s magazines. Jet skis recorded from just under the surface of the water. A kid puking over the side of a wheelbarrow. A trained otter in Pakistan dives for fish. The champagne tipping over the cap of a winning racing driver. The grind of sand in an oily cog. The foundations of a new dam going in. Light bulbs pop. A cricket ball through the skylight of an art gallery. An insurance salesman stands on a baby turtle by accident. Grains firing through the metal tubes of a combine harvester, recorded from inside. A disposable barbeque dropped into the sea with a splash and a hiss.
A Harley-Davidson drives at speed past the football pitch. The ball is still in the air. A tree shivers.
On concrete by the Humber Bank Wall, a fisherman is pulling the skin off a Dover sole, peeling it back in a single, simple gesture as the skin is torn from the flesh. A camera crew is filming it. The producer steps back, startled by the incoming swoop of a herring gull, loses their footing and topples backwards over the wall and into the water. As we hear the splash, a bee pushes its sting into an ear. This is loud now. A mosquito lands on sleeping flesh. The sound is unnaturally high. The snap of a crocodile’s jaw onto a head. The pecking of a hooked beak on a ribcage. The crackle of a fire spreading through eaves. Brutal rain on temporary plastic roofs. Frozen water creaking sharply underneath a line of men in boots. The amputation of a leg. The crisping of flesh under intense heat. The thwack of a tree branch on a power line. A lightning strike in reply. We’re accelerating now. The rapid digging of a mole beneath a neoclassical statue. The tapping of woodworm. The scrabble of wasps in the plasterwork by beams of an old farmhouse. The sound of a bridge shifting and cracking. All the pens, paper and stationery in the offices of a car manufacturer shaking during an earthquake. The scalding of boiling water on skin. A brief sound of the collapse and crumble of lava down the side of a volcano. A cascade of bird shit. The yank of a typhoon ripping a roof off. The pelt of hailstones against wooden boards. The splash of thick black oil down a trouser leg. The cracking of an antler through a pelvis. The scrape of a rake across the concrete floor of an industrial duck shed. An elongation now, an excerpt of the time-lapse sound of an ivy bush growing around a shopping trolley sped up by a factor of one hundred and played at Café OTO as the opening act. The sound of mould growing inside a fridge. Acid rain falling. Toxic fog on an in-breath. Sand in your ears. Snow and salt and slush crashing through a hotel window. If bacteria makes a noise, it’s heard here, amplified, distorted. Ice spreading rapidly across a slip road. A wild boar loose on a cricket pitch. Waves hitting a living-room window. The stamp of an elephant on a car bonnet. A house dropping off the edge of an eroding cliff. The scuttle of a scorpion across the floor of a holiday apartment. A rat’s tail slipping through dust beneath a sink you once stood at. A spider leaps down at the microphone from a hidden web. A pit bull bites through a foot. A rusty nail in a knee. A frostbitten toe coming away from the foot. A glutinous splintering and cracking of sodden timber at the same time as we hear a large whoosh as doors give way in homes and floodwater rushes in. A tornado slices through a town. A snake hisses as it appears from the side of a fake log. A nettle plant stings as it is picked, amplified. A splinter of rusty metal from a farmer’s gate pierces a hand. A huge chunk of snow and ice calves away from an iceberg. A river bursts its banks. A flame licks around straw. A sharp splinter into a heel. The multiplication of an incurable cancer. A worm slips unheard through your gut. A heart skips, stutters. The rustle of branched thorns as an embossed golf ball disappears into thick bushes.
The deflated football hits a tree, drops to the ground and comes to a rest, the branches settle themselves. The daughter runs towards it, picks it up and heads across the pitch towards the highway.
A forest is listening out for you, waiting to hear you coming.