What Noise


Wherein our narrator attends a concert of sorts.

As it turns out, my apartment in Surry Hills is across Elizabeth Street from an artist's loft exhibition/performance space. I knew there were lofts next door - the huge "for rent" sign on the front of the building was enough to make that clear - but I had no idea that some were actually occupied. As I was coming back from a long walk around the CBD with Nicola, I ran into "Mr. Snow" (sorry, can't remember that I even heard his first name) whom I met at the party in Bondi on Friday evening. And perhaps I met him at some time before that, but I'm not sure about it. (Though he does look a bit familiar.) He was walking onto Elizabeth Street, and said, "Hey, Mark. There's a performance over here - experimental music, a quiet sort of thing." When does it start up? I asked. "About 7:30, 8 PM," he replied. "On the first floor," and walked into the aforesaid building of artists' lofts.

So I stroll across the street at 8 PM, dutifully pay AUD $7 (it would have been five or less if I'd been unemployed or poor, and, not willing to give them the whole sorry tale of my financial woes, I just gave them the seven dollars), and get a VB at the small bar in the back of a medium-sized mostly unreconstructed loft space. It's the classic artist's loft, with paintings on the walls, bits of odd visual effluvium everywhere, and a small stage at the front of the room, really just some gear atop milk crates. I sat down, chatted with "Mr. Snow" - who was behind the bar, working - and discussed the emergence of a Vietnamese hip-hop from Sydney's Western Suburbs. After about a half an hour, the concert began.

Peter - it seems half the men in Australia are named Peter - crouched before his console, gently working nobs. It began as a single tone, much as Spool does, which then became a low roar of white noise. This was, to be sure, a "noise" concert. And I don't know that normally I'd have the patience for such a thing - you have to be very still, and listen very hard - but somehow the hour of the day, the time of the weekend, the beer at my feet, these all conspired to have me close my eyes and open my mind.

White noise is the tabula rasa, the Rorschack ink-blot of the ear. You hear in it what you wish to hear. Peter was a tall, thin, young Australian artist, dressed in the international artists uniform of work pants, dark button-down shirt, and black boots. (Jeff dressed almost the same, almost every day.) He had that tan that all Australians have from years in the sun (with no ozone, of course), and a sensitive, precise face which looked intently at the control panel, as he began to tune the dials.

You hear what you know, and recreate what you've heard, so I tried to put myself into his head, imagining the sounds he'd heard in his life, and heard the crash of surf at Clovelly's rocks, the growl of a Harley-Davidson chopper up the streets of Bronte, the ping-ping-ping of hail as it hit the railing on my balcony that afternoon, the gentle, then crushing roar of rain against a roof, the wind roaring through Redfern's trees as I had my tooth repaired on Friday. I heard Australia - all of it that I'd seen, anyway - in Peter's twenty-or-so minutes of sonic shapings, a journey which, like a dream, lacked narrative coherence but nonetheless told a story.

Posted: Mon - November 3, 2003 at 08:14 AM        

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