Why Not Listen to Everything?

I have been haunted for 15 years by these words: “Very often if I was given the choice of listening to a piece of music I really liked or listening to nothing at all, I would choose nothing at all. … These days I don’t listen to a lot of music, and I find a lot of pleasure in no music. There’s a kind of silence and just hearing some conversation from outside, or hearing a police car in the distance, just these fragments of daily life are very poetic and very peaceful somehow.”

They were spoken by Britisher David Toop (footnote 1), confirmed music-head, someone who has spent his life playing, listening to, and writing about music. Why would a person who amassed such a dragon’s hoard of obscure releases that a documentary was made about it—who tried to listen to every darn thing ever recorded—at the end of the day prefer regular sounds that would not even fit the dictionary definition of music? I could see no possibility of ever coming around to his point of view, or ever wanting to, but Toop’s words stayed with me, like a riddle I could neither solve nor forget.

Music is how I navigated life. I approached each album as a privileged view inside another person’s mind. What had they learned, what had they seen, that I had not? I would be hijacked by a song, a band, an obscure subgenre, by the sound of a Hammond organ pouring like rainbow velvet magma out of a station wagon driven by an uncle. Looking back, my 30-year path seems clear enough: from Top 40 pop to grunge to indie rock to post rock. To IDM to anything electronic. To ambient, to the fringe of musique concrete, to questioning what music even is. To an empty field, a stainless steel mixing bowl accidentally struck while making breakfast, ringing like a temple bell. To the woods, an autumn beach, not worrying anymore but psyche dissolving in raw sound.

I swam toward the deep end, sinking into the most bizarre and powerful records and assembling an increasingly esoteric vinyl-based apparatus with which to hear them. But as my hi-fi system became more lifelike, as it became better at doing what a hi-fi system is intended to do, I was pulled away from it, as if caught in an alien tractor beam, toward real-life sound. Instead of being inspired to go see and hear live music, I was inspired to sit in city parks and listen to breezes rustling tree leaves, a crow, the unique Doppler-effect signature of each passing car. In comparison to the wide-open expanse of unrestricted bandwidth that is an outdoor soundscape, my precisely positioned boutique speakers started to sound canned and tinny.

I fought the process. I couldn’t just sit in my living room with the window open on a quiet morning and lose myself in the gentle squeal of a garbage truck’s brakes as my obsessively curated records sat unplayed in my dedicated, acoustically treated basement listening room—could I? Yet here it was, all around me, full-spectrum, 360° immersive surround sound, utterly real, more analog than analog, more fi than hi-fi, occurring in this precise way for a single moment then disappearing utterly. The perfect sounds I had been seeking were already there, more compelling than the painstakingly arranged and recorded music in my collection, the guitar players and singers and drummers so eager to showcase their talents, their songs heavily laden with human intent.

One afternoon, after I came to a stop in a parking lot, I cracked the car window and heard a hip-hop song from across the pavement, low-pass filtered by distance so that it was mostly kickdrum; I heard church bells from across an intersection, and the ticking of metal as my car’s engine cooled—all melding into a tearjerkingly beautiful soundscape.

All I had to do was stop and listen. I could pull into the same spot in the same lot every day for 1000 years and never hear that same poignant trio. To imagine that any soundscape anywhere, in any moment, is the song of the universe playing itself is to open the door to a never-ending supply of stunningly beautiful—or horrific, or bittersweet—performances. As I kept listening—to cicadas, children’s voices, guitars and synthesizers as I played them, footsteps in dry leaves, and closing doors—Nietzsche’s contention that “Without music, life would be a mistake” slowly turned into “Life without music would be okay, but life without sound would be impossible.” Heinrich Heine’s statement that “Where words leave off, music begins” could be extended to, “Where music leaves off, silence begins.” But aren’t words sound, and isn’t music sound, and wasn’t the silence there before the words or the music?

A scientific explanation of sound excludes the subjective, psychological impact and ignores the fact that sound passes through the whole body. The quivering intestines of anyone listening at a SunnO))) concert, or to thunder or a passing train up close, will realize we experience sound through our bodies and not our ears alone. I am drawn, like Toop, to the experience of visceral sound in real time, sounds I’m not in control of: The blissful sound of light rain on concrete interrupted without warning by the vicious barking of a toaster-sized designer mongrel. A leaf blower can only whine so long before silence returns like water in the desert. Real sound in each flowing moment—may I hear it and love it before it turns into something else!

The trouble with reproduced sound is that it is reproduced. An infinite amount of time and money could be spent in a never-ending quest to flawlessly recreate what can never be flawlessly recreated. No matter how lifelike the hi-fi, it will never have the energy, the punch, the mysterious chi, the vibe of life itself, expressing itself in natural, constant, unamplified sound.

Why not listen to everything?—Casey Miller (footnote 2)

Footnote 1: Toop is an English musician, author, curator, emeritus professor, and a member of the Flying Lizards. His books include Rap Attack, an early book on hip-hop, from 1984, and Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the Listener.

Footnote 2: Casey Miller tells Dad jokes and fights a losing battle with a fluffy cat for occupancy of a comfy chair in Champaign, Illinois.

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