Cusack's Favourite London Sounds

One of my favorite LPs is a sound travelog recorded during a car journey in 1955 from London to Calcutta (back when it was actually possible for a civilian to drive through places like the Balkans, Baghdad, Tehran, Kabul and Lahore). Mixed in with scads of great musical field recordings are the ambient sounds of crowds, cars and animals; even the van that made the journey becomes a prominent part of the sonic landscape. At once personal, sociological and musicological, carrying a tape recorder on a journey is a great way to document a trip.

A new disc from the tireless London Musicians' Collective embarks on a sonic journey in their own city, asking Londoners, "What is your favorite London sound and why?" They received hundreds of responses, and musician Peter Cusack took it upon himself to hunt down and record those sounds, 40 of which appear here.

It's an odd way to think about a city. If you remove the language, I think it's a fair assumption to say that most Western cities sound pretty much alike. Indeed, going by what's here, London doesn't sound a whole lot different from New York: there are the screeches of buses, wailing of sirens, humming of power plants, whooshing of rivers and electronic bleeps at supermarket checkouts. Some of the pieces, recorded in language-laden places like markets or coffee shops, catch Londoners in conversation, bringing a specific local flavor to the tracks. And there is a trove of favorite sounds that one normally doesn't associate with any city?the unaccompanied chirping of birds or booming thunder?which, of course, are part of every urban environment.

Some of the sounds come with short descriptions, giving them more poetic weight: "Onions frying in my flat," "Rain on skylight while lying in bed," "Key in door," "London from near the top of a tower block, Holloway Road, on a damp evening," or a recording of an East London mosque, which is accompanied by the description, "The Music call to prayer is a recent addition to London's soundscape." The CD begins with the sound of Big Ben: "London's most famous sound is broadcast to the world daily from a microphone high in the tower. This is how it sounds from street level."

I've been to London several times, and listening to Your Favourite London Sounds gives me no real sense of the place. It doesn't snap you back in the way that, say, a pop song can when you hear it. In fact, it's not a particularly interesting group of sounds: the selections are subjective, as if the participants were not really thinking about how to define the ultimate sound of London. Instead they selected sounds they encountered in their day-to-day routine. In doing so, it's a more realistic sonic picture of the city than you would get from a promotional or commercial project that tried to describe a city.

It gets me thinking: if I were asked to participate in a similar project about New York, I'd probably select those same kinds of small sounds. There's a wonderful amplified screech that the floating dock makes at the Battery Park City ferry when it rubs up against the pier; there's the guy on 7th Ave. near Penn Station who works for a homeless organization and has a voice just like Howlin' Wolf's; and my son is now obsessed with (and endlessly repeats) the prerecorded "Stand clear of the closing doors, please" that's broadcast in the new subway cars. In a Cagean fashion, after listening to this disc I went out to the store to grab lunch. The streets were alive with sounds I'd never noticed before.