'Your favourite London sounds' by Peter Cusak
by Ian Simmons
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As Italo Calvino articulated so clearly in Invisible Cites, there are an infinite number of ways to look at a city, and so it is with London. We are used to prismatic visual images of London: Tourist London (the Tower, red buses and Big Ben); Hidden London (lost rivers and forgotten tube stations, black swine in the sewers of Hampstead); Historic London, with its palaces, churches, museums. Literary London, the London of the word, is well known too, conjured by Pepys, Boswell, Blake, Moorcock, Sinclair and the like. But beyond the Londons of word and image lie still other Londons, the Londons of the senses, less familiar, but just as evocative, and it is one of these that Peter Cusak explores.
This London is full of noises, as indeed are all the others. Silence is a rare commodity in London. The essence of a city lies just as much in its sounds as its architecture or its people, and what Cusak has succeeded in doing is distilling the aural essence of the city onto this CD. Since 1998, Peter Cusak and colleagues at the London Musicians' Collective have been asking people (including London's 74 MPs) "What is your favourite London Sound and why?", then going out and capturing the sounds on tape. Originally a radio piece for Resonance 107.3FM, the collective's limited licence radio station (back on the air in central London in February 2002), Your Favourite London Sounds blends the collected sounds into a subtle collage which strongly evokes the spirit of the city at the time of recording. The advantage of asking a large number of people to contribute, rather than just going out and recording the sounds which one person thinks typify the city, is that the sounds range the length and breadth of Greater London and enter many personal sound worlds which no one person could be alert to. They range from the obvious - Big Ben - to the obscure - the hum of the Underground Transformer at Putney (in fact there are several electrical hums - you can tell Peter Cusak knows lots of experimental musicians); from the loud - the crowd at White Hart Lane - to the almost silent - the ambience in the British Museum's Great Court. There are lots of Tube sounds, virtually no traffic, bagel shops and mosques, swifts, nightingales, blackbirds, domestic sounds - frying onions, keys, post arriving. There are new sounds (a muezzin in Whitechapel), vanishing sounds (slamming train doors - they're gradually being replaced by quiet sliding ones), the river, espresso machines, club queues, bus brakes, helicopters. Of course it immediately sets the listener's mind working too - what is your favourite London sound? For me, probably the sound made by the exhibits in the Science Museum's Launch Pad gallery when there are few visitors, while my fiancée settled for geese flying over Edward Road in Walthamstow on the way to the marshes.
To anyone who is familiar with London, especially those in exile, this is a curiously intimate meditation which brings ones memories of the metropolis to fond life. To anyone who does not know the place, it is a window into its personality normally afforded only to those who have spent their lives there. It is a beguiling document, which gives a glimpse of how London can hold so many in its thrall.
