1. LISTEN

Shh. Shush. Hush. Schtum. Silence is often something imposed, an instruction to refrain, to not participate, something we leave behind when we hold our tongue and keep mum. It seems appropriate that many of the silencing verbs, which are primarily directed towards a silencing of speech, are onomatopoeic in origin: pre-verbal imitations of sounds that hold voice back from language. Even the physical action of the verbs’ pronunciation requires a narrowing of the mouth, a gesture which in the mumble of closed lips and shushed tittle-tattle of tongue against teeth, mimes the physical restraint of utterance. But the refrain of silence need not be a negative imposition, it might be a positive choice, an elective and possibly selective withdrawal from presence. Steven Connor writes:

Citing the anthropologist Peter H. Stephenson who suggests that the ability to keep silent may literally have ‘been a matter of life or death for early humans’, Connor states:

However evolutionarily beneficial, such silence remains an act of concealment, something is being hidden or unsaid. But silence is also an inherent component of speech, it speaks in the commas of our breath and the rhythm of the sentence we string together. In conversation we share silence with others, we participate in a silence that for a moment, becomes our silence. This communal silence is perhaps most apparent in the spectral landscape of the telephone, where voice arrives, flayed of tone and ‘desiccated by distance, yet warm and damp with the [unformed] breath that lingers and trembles in [it]’ (Connor Reference Connor2004). On the phone, voice has the volume of conversation, but the position of whispers, we hold it close, so close we can hear language as it is inhaled. Between the receivers we figure a dynamic and spatial silence, our being there immediately reliant upon the rhythms of our words and pauses. Here, we are ‘between silence and murmur’ (Bachelard Reference Bachelard1971: 30) and there is always the possibility that we might disappear, that we may, unannounced, return to the silence from whence we came: ‘Wherever phones are ringing, a ghost resides in the receiver’ (Kittler Reference Kittler1999: 75).

When my elderly mum was alive, I would phone her every day. Our conversations had little in the way of direction. At times she would forget her words, her place within them. ‘Where was I?’ opens a silence into which she wanders in search of what it was she was saying. The sound work Duet for Radio (2004) is based on a covert recording of one of our conversations.Footnote ² In this duet I have removed my own voice and replaced it with the noisy quiet of telephonic communication. My mother’s voice, now bereft of reply, is isolated and widowed. Re-composing the silence between us, extending or reducing its duration, augments her vulnerability. At times she is left talking to herself, at times she disappears ‘into the silence of her own forgetting’ (Hegarty Reference Hegarty2002: 25). Listening in on this soliloquy of pauses, the audience is implicated in a lack of reply. As the listener listens in on voice and its absence, they are also listened for. ‘Silence is [always] listening’ (Picard Reference Picard1952: 25).

Silence:

Silence:

Silence:Footnote ³

Figure 1. At times she disappears ‘into the silence of her own forgetting’. Second Listening (2001) Video Still.

Our duet closes without goodbye, mum simply ceases speaking, quietly disappearing into the silence, as she listens to the rain we cannot hear. Max Picard writes, ‘When language ceases, silence begins. But it does not begin because language ceases. The absence of language simply makes the presence of Silence more apparent’ (Picard Reference Picard1952: 15).

In Sound Poetics, Seán Street notes that ‘the first word in Dylan Thomas’s script for his play for voices, Under Milk Wood, is “Silence”’ (Street Reference Street2017: 15). This silence is not an instruction to refrain, but a place from which voice may arrive, the moment before voice. Street writes: ‘In the 1952 radio production by Douglas Cleverdon, there then follows about seven seconds of stillness before the first words of the First Voice’ (Street Reference Street2019: 91). Although in performance, the scripted ‘[Silence]’ is ‘open to interpretation’ (ibid.), it will always have a set and staged duration. On the written page, the unspoken square-bracketed ‘[Silence]’ is not held to time nor enclosed behind muted lips, it is what Gaston Bachelard might call an ‘“open silence” … a silence that breathes’ (Bachelard Reference Bachelard1988: 242). A silence unbracketed, limitless and audible, which we simultaneously, read, imagine and thereby compose. The First Voice that emerges softly italicised from our composition, asks that we ‘Hush’ (Thomas Reference Thomas2015: unpaginated) so as not to disturb the sleeping silence that it now narrates. We are participant as a listening and potentially sounding, presence. In his phenomenology of sound, Don Ihde writes: ‘Listening begins with the ordinary, by proximately working its way into what is yet unheard’ (Ihde Reference Ihde1976: 49). As we hush away and refrain from sounding, First Voice tilts our ear towards, not only the unheard, but also the invisible and inaudible details of the muffled ‘night moving in the streets’. ‘Listen … You can hear the dew falling’ (Thomas Reference Thomas2015: 3).

To begin at the end. It is autumn 2004, and this will be my last packet of cigarettes. The fag-ends of this habit coincide with a move to a new house, requiring me to find an external location for the morning drag. Although enclosed, the front doorstep is uncomfortably conspicuous and social. The small back garden offers a more secluded and suitably unsociable retreat. I have always welcomed the anti-social nature of smoking, it provides an excuse to leave, to be apart and socially distant. Even in the loneliness of my studio, a cigarette offers the solitude of a ritualised, meditative interval, a moment away from doing and purpose.Footnote ⁶

In the garden, the seclusion of my morning cigarette focuses attention on the sensory details of the habit’s gesture; the match struck gently away from the body, the prayer-like cupping of hands to protect the moment of ignition. The rhythm of my breathing slows as the air is taken – held – exhaled – the air – held – exhaled – the air – held. As I inhale, I hear the cigarette paper kindle and the occasional minute explosions of Saltpetre. The focus of my listening is exhaled with the tobacco smoke, out into the landscape. I breath in a dawn chorus of magpies, falling leaves, occasional coughs, church chimes and the ubiquitous combustion hum of traffic. Of conspicuous note is the range of bells reverberating faintly on as the hour-hand strikes. At the centre of this spatial array are the bells of Winchester Cathedral, although the mercantile peal of the Brookes Shopping Centre clock offers appropriately brassy competition. According to R. Murray Schafer the ‘church bell is a centripetal sound; it attracts and unifies the community in a social sense, just as it draws man and God together’ (Schafer Reference Schafer1994: 54). Whilst the clocks count down the day, the church chimes out a perimeter, bringing all those who can hear into the congregation of its audible parish. The bells are all slightly out of time, chiming a quiet cannon over the city. At 8 o’clock in the evening, a curfew bell, first rung in 1361, continues to ring, but no one now listens to the nightly embargo it chimes.Footnote ⁷

For the composer Jonathan Harvey listening to the sound of a bell leads us ‘from the material world into the world of silence without a break, without a seam’ (Harvey cited in Street Reference Street2014: 45). Substance can be heard disappearing into thin air. The writer and academic John Hull, who became registered blind in 1983, describes how listening to bells causes the distinction between his body and the chiming air, to evaporate: ‘My head seemed to be ringing [and] the very air I was breathing was bell-shaped’ (Hull Reference Hull1997: 168–9). The fading bell ‘[moves] us from the physically heard sound to a point where we search our hearing for the disappearing tone in the air and then in our imagination’ (Street Reference Street2019: 1). As I listen and inhale the soundscape, the bells, sometimes near, sometimes distant, are also taking breath. Occasionally they completely disappear: the time tells me they are chiming yet my ears do not ring. Perhaps this silence is weather related; the direction of the breeze oratmospheric conditions. Or perhaps I am listening to a silence I imagine not hearing.

A Year from Here (2004–5) was a prolonged sound project that attempted to ‘“soun[d] silence”’ (Hooker cited in Street Reference Street2014: 38) by recording the occurrence and disappearance of the bells chiming in the Winchester soundscape. The regulated occasion of the bells (and their absence) was used as a position from which to collect silence on the axis of every hour of different days over a 12-month period. Recording from the lughole of my bedroom window provided a secluded and fixed site from which to eavesdrop on the landscape (Figure 2). Together, the recordings (which I called, soundings) formed a spontaneous archive, indexing the silence gathered. The soundings taken are as short as cigarettes, beginning 2 minutes before the hour and ending a few minutes after. Over days, weeks and months, this listening habit reveals silent rhythms hidden in the familiarity of the local landscape; quiet calendars of seasonal, religious, social and personal consequence and insignificance.

Figure 2. A Year from Here (2004–5).

Recorded on minidisc using a cheap unprofessional microphone, the quality is poor and although all the soundings have been notated and catalogued, they have not since been listened to. Nor have they realised an audible or composed outcome: sound has escaped use. The useless waste of time that the archive constitutes resonates with the uselessness of my attempt to record the absence of sound, to listen to what I do not hear. The archive of minidiscs gives mute physical form to my failure, offering a tangible, material silence that endures, a silence that keeps keeping schtum, quietly collecting dust as it whiles away towards obsolescence. The archive still has the potential to sound but remains unheard (Figure 3). This loss of hearing establishes an ‘action of inaction, of refraining from doing’ (Connor Reference Connor2019: 95) through which the possibility of silence sounds.

Figure 3. A Year from Here. Detail of sound archive.

2. REMEMBERING SILENCE

The silence of the archive is a shy and solitary undoing, but silence can also be a collective act of inaction. This is perhaps most prominently evident in the universally popular 2-minute pause of commemoration. Steven Connor writes, ‘We are used to thinking of doing things together as a signal of human affiliation … But human beings are also very drawn to not doing things together and drawn together through them.’ Connor calls this ‘holding together in holding back cohibition’ (Connor Reference Connor2019: 95). Sometimes confused with the word cohabit, cohibition appropriately withdrew from use in 1882, when it was last seen cited by the OED ‘in a lexicon of science and medicine’ (ibid.: 96).

In Britain, it was Sir Percy Fitzpatrick, who, in 1919, first suggested that a silent pause could be a way of commemorating the memory of those who died in the First World War, or perhaps more accurately to keep them from being forgotten: ‘for there is a dread … that those who have gone will not always be foremost in the thoughts of all’ (Sir Percy Fitzpatrick cited in Gregory Reference Gregory1994: 9). Such a silence would bring the nation together in a common act of inaction. Whilst each individual would hold their own intensely private silence, they would be keeping silent together in a synchronised public moment of mute cohibition.

Held on the anniversary of the armistice, at the precise time the noise of war ceased-fire, the first 2-minutes silence was an abrupt, complete and utter(less) pause in doing: buses pulled over and stopped their engines, ‘people halted in their walks, chatter ceased as if by magic, traffic stopped and the rumbling note of industry stayed’ (ibid.: 13). The silence, signalled most commonly by bells but also by maroons and artillery, created a ‘sudden hush’, so loud ‘it could almost be felt’ (Belfast Telegraph, 12 November 1919 cited in Gregory Reference Gregory1994: 13). The Silence touched the nation and proved so popular it was capitalised and became an annual event. Adrian Gregory suggests that it was the fusing of private and public commemoration that was central to its impact (ibid.). The Silence offered an opportunity to shy away from others, to be socially distant and not participate together.

For over a decade, the broadcasting of the 2-minute Silence was obstructed by the Home Office. Perhaps it was the poetic absurdity of transmitting silence, which caused such bureaucratic resistance, but radio and silence have history. According to David Toop, ‘All silences are uncanny’ (Toop Reference Toop2010: 182), but in the dead air of radio, silence is conspicuous, and its estrangement tinged with threat. On air silence is everywhere and nowhere, a place suspended between the real and imagined, between then, there, then and now. The very origins of wireless transmission are built on the suspect reception of three Morse code dots transmitted in 1901 from Marconi’s Poldhu wireless station in Cornwall to Signal Hill, Newfoundland. The di-di-dit of Marconi’s test signal, which Marconi heard arriving through the ether from Poldhu, physics and mathematics now calculate he imagined (Margolis Reference Margolis2011). In his later years, Marconi was convinced wireless communication would enable contact with the other world, believing his radio signals might pick up ‘the sounds of long-dead men who had drowned in the Atlantic’ (Hoare Reference Hoare2014).Footnote ¹⁰ In the susurrations of radio silence, something is in the air, the known and tangible give way to the hidden, unfamiliar and (im)possible. The broadcast of the 2-minute silence has of course never been completely silent, but silence propagates in its potential to be broken and the occasional ‘bickering of sparrows [and] creasing of pigeons wings as they take flight’ (Gregory Reference Gregory1994: 135) only serve to make the ghost of silence more apparent.

3. MO[NU]MENT

On Wednesday 5 January 2005 a 3-minute silence was held across Europe in memory of the 150,000 people who had lost their lives in the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami. The silence took place towards the end of the project A Year from Here, and was one of the final recordings made. Recorded from the same window, using the same cheap microphone, the quality of the sound remained predictably poor. The silent 3-minute memorial took place at 12 noon on a busy weekday, but unlike the first armistice, Silence, industry did not stop: the consistent rumble of combustion and consumption continued to smother the soundscape. However, my intention was to listen to the moment of silence and record its absence, the quality and content of the sound was therefore unimportant. I had no expectation of the recording having any audible trace of the silence held. But as the cathedral bells chimed midday, a distant dull explosion detonated the air. Silence had begun. Three minutes later, another insubstantial blast sounded its end. The origin of these ballistic apparitions remains unknown.

As part of an ongoing series of silent releases, Mo[nu]ment (2006–8) cuts and presses this recorded moment as a limited edition of ten 7-inch single-sided vinyl records (Figure 4). The ephemerality of silence, lost in the act of recording, is lost again by being duplicated and preserved in material form. And yet in becoming substance, silence is open to imperfection and damage. Each record of this memorial edition becomes another moment, a particular silence, vulnerable to harm and therefore subject to change. The authorship of harm was handed over to the Royal Mail, with each record being stamped and sent to its recipient, without the protection of an envelope. The records were labelled with instructions for the receiver to play, record and return the silence. Recordings were to be made at 12 noon (preferably by microphone) and the record returned with details of where the recording was made. Canadian artist Matt Rogalsky did not have a turntable, so he created his own phonograph, ‘using a battery-operated fan, and a paper cup with a pin glued in. The direction of spin [was] contrary to normal and at a much higher speed’Footnote ¹¹. The resulting silence is reversed, shifted in pitch and compressed in time (reduced from 4 minutes to 42 seconds). Filmmaker Guy Sherwin recorded the record with his young son over two sides of a cassette. With the tape left running, the silence records ‘Guy and Kai playing with quacky duck, hitting [the Tape] recorder [and] picking up vinyl.’Footnote ¹² Each participant recomposes and remeasures silence, adding their own acoustic and temporal layer, whilst underneath, the slow accidental damage of postal transit writes over and erases the original silence. Of the 10 records pressed, four remain silent: one has been kept unsent and un-played and three were posted but not returned. Missing presumed lost, silence may never have arrived, or perhaps it persists somewhere, unused, forgotten, but unsounding still.

Figure 4. Mo[nu]ment (2006-8). Edition 0002 ssv7 (2:4).

4. SILENCE LOST

[Pause.]

[Pause.]

In The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, Charles Babbage proposed that: ‘The pulsations of air, once set in motion by the human voice, cease not to exist with the sounds to which they give rise’ (Babbage Reference Babbage1838: 108). He continues: ‘The waves of air thus raised, perambulate the earth and ocean’s surface, and in less than twenty hours every atom of its atmosphere takes up the altered movement’ (ibid.: 109). Having disturbed the air, every utterance, although ‘inaudible to human ears’ (ibid.: 110) remains unforgotten: sound persists in silence.

The silence of the things we did not do, the unredeemed vows and promises unkept, are also implicated in our airy record. According to Babbage, these mnemonic qualities are elemental, shared by air, earth and ocean:

Although in ‘endless transmission’ the waves do not disclose their ‘testimonies’ (Picker Reference Picker2003: 39) to even the ‘acutest ear’ (Babbage Reference Babbage1838: 110), they may break their silence on the shore of the imagination. The ear, ‘an organ at once external and internal [offers] a link between different worlds (real and imaginary) and different registers (physical and mental)’ (Chion Reference Chion2016: 18). Holding a shell to the whorled labyrinth of our own shell-like, we can listen to the tidal estuaries of these physical and imagined worlds. The acoustics of wave mechanics and auscultations of blood circulation combine with the ghostly swell and disembodied shush of the ‘[o]ceanic other’ (Helmreich Reference Helmreich2012: 24).

Like all water, the wet ‘substantial nothingness’ (Bachelard Reference Bachelard1983: 92) of the sea is ‘full of reminiscences and prescient reveries’ (ibid.: 89): the earliest mingles with the latest. R. Murray Schafer answers his own primordial question of listening ‘What was the first sound heard?’ with an oceanic ‘caress’: ‘As the ear of the fetus turns in its amniotic fluid it … is tuned to the lap and gurgle of water’, a sound that is itself a reverie of oceans – a ‘submarine resonance of the sea’ (Schafer Reference Schafer1994: 15). Listening to the rhythmic ebb and flow of waves ‘has the ability to render duration unreal, making it escape linear time’ (Chion Reference Chion2016: 40). When we listen to the sea, we hear time and substance undoing.

On Saturday 4 May 2019 a final silence was lost to the sea off the coast of Holy Island, Anglesey. One of four such disappearances, this closing silence sank beneath the waves of the Irish Sea on a bright spring day in plain sight of the South Stack Lighthouse (Figure 5). The Metadata of a photograph taken at the time positions its disappearance with the global coordinates of latitude 53,18.1428N/longitude 4,41.3708W. This loss was part of the quartet Silence Lost (2015–19), which consists (or consisted) of four single-sided 10-inch records, each cut with a silent groove and lost to the seas surrounding the UK over a period of four years. Without input or original signal, the records are not recordings of silence, but rather a period of space and time during which nothing was recorded. Like an unwritten message in a bottle, each record is labelled with a return address: c/o The British Library Sound Archive. The disappearance is not documented directly. A small announcement hidden amongst the births, marriages and deaths of The Times newspaper classifieds, publicises and dates the location of loss (Figure 6). Published on the day of disappearance, the ad operates as both premonition and proof:

Figure 5. Silence Lost in the Irish Sea (2019).

Figure 6. Silence Lost in The Times classifieds, Saturday 4 May 2019.

The broadsheet proof of being here now quickly becomes proof of having been there then. For Connor, in their daily passing newspapers are underwritten with loss: ‘Such sad stuff, newspaper, sad with the sadness of the lost, the missed, the all but all over’ (ibid.).

The announcement in The Times together with a black and white photograph of the sea into which it disappeared and an empty grey archival sleeve bare dumb and dubious witness to silence ever being and ever having been lost. Although the circumstances of this evidence may call it back to memory, Silence Lost sinks into the unknown, set adrift from substance and truth, its existence and disappearance are always in question – a ghost of sound that cannot even cease to exist. Written out by time and tide it may survive like memories survive, in the imaginative reconstruction of remembering. But ultimately it will return to the silence that occurs and continues without you or me. A silence unlimited by human ear, which, like an unspoken ‘syllable thrown into the [sea] may go on [un]reverberating through illimitable space for ever and for ever’ (Dickens cited in Picker Reference Picker2003: 17).

5. SILENCE ON LOAN

Silence concentrates in libraries. Shelved books full of closed words being unread, rustle up silence in our hands as pages turn sentences quietly in our head. The Library Was tells us that the pulp of books carries in its cells the shushed ‘language of trees’:

The silence of a library is also a library of silences: a collective landscape of immersive quiet, where the ghosts of unbreathed syllables conspire with the acoustic paragraphs and chemical sentences of shrubs. So full of wetted breath the atmosphere here is fragile and vulnerable to changes in the weather. The environment is constantly monitored to check moisture levels and ensure a stable climate of stasis. The silence is of course never complete. Just as the crease of pigeon wings breaks the ceremonial 2-minute pause, so too the digital pecking of keyboards and soft chiffchaff of fabric provide sonic peeks that only serve to make silence more present.

I realise that silence in libraries has come to be seen as an authoritative, hostile and deathly quiet. So much so that its presence is now segregated and prescribed: restricted to quiet zones or available for rent in study rooms. Silence is considered anti-social, creating exclusive, unproductive and inactive environments. In order to be doing, and we must always be doing (something), we need to produce noise. Even thinking is now measured by the noise it produces. In some university libraries, the engagement of ‘learners’ is monitored (and reported upon) by the digital noise produced when they log on to the catalogue or search the internet. If a student wanders into a library to stray the stacks in aimless pursuit of the unknown, or if they sit and read what they have chanced upon, this will not be measurable, and they will not have participated in learning. In his book Shy Radicals, Hamja Ahsan establishes (paradoxically in CAPITALS) the ‘SHY PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF ASPERGISTAN’ (Ahsan Reference Ahsan2020: 14). The constitution of this homeland for the ‘oppressed Shy, Introvert, and Autistic Spectrum peoples’ (ibid.) guarantees 24-hour access to public libraries, whilst Article 22 states that the national flag will be black and ‘punctured thusly “…” The ellipsis will be represented as three dark blue circles symbolising silence and the depths of the ocean. The flag will never be publicly hoisted’ (ibid.: 22). Article 24 states:

Where loud sound ‘consumes’ space, silence ‘creates acoustic arenas as a common resource’ (Blesser and Salter Reference Blesser and Salter2009: 32). The arena of silence is both common and communal.

At the end of January 2019, a silent vinyl record was slipped into the Artists’ Book Collection at Winchester School of Art Library (Figure 7). As I entered the WSA library, I was conscious of the sounds (and silent record) that I brought with me. Immediately inclined to whispers, I felt myself withdrawing from acoustic presence in order not to intrude upon the quiet of others. In the library we are tacit participants in the immediate and communal composition of silence.

Figure 7. Silence on Loan slipped into the Artists’ Book Collection at WSA library.

The latest edition in my series of silent releases, Silence on Loan (Hegarty Reference Hegarty2019), is an artists’ book, published in the form of a single-sided 10-inch vinyl or dubplate. As part of the music mastering and publishing process, a dubplate is a one-off test pressing, produced to check quality and gauge audience response. Originally pressed in soft acetone rather than vinyl, this advanced, provisional copy was an intentionally impermanent record, its fidelity limited to 1,000 plays. The dub in dubplate refers to the dubbing or doubling of an original sound: ‘When you double, or dub, you replicate’ (Toop Reference Toop1995: 115). But Silence on Loan has no sound to dub. Cut with a silent groove, it is not a record or replication of silence, it is a silence. Shelved without dust jacket or sleeve, silence is continually rewritten as accidental harm and particles of dust leave audible traces on the spiralled pagination of its surface. Left on the shelf, it holds back from sounding, adding its injured and accumulating hush to the silence present.

6. CLOSED STACKS

As the publisher of Silence on Loan (ISBN: 978-1-5272-3880-0), I am obliged under the Legal Deposit Libraries Act 2003, to deposit a copy of the publication with the British Library and The Agency for the Legal Deposit Libraries, which includes The Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford, The National Library of Scotland, Cambridge University Library, Trinity College Library, Dublin, and The National Library of Wales. The copies must be ‘of the same quality as the best copies which, at the time of delivery, have been produced for publication in the United Kingdom’ (Legal Deposit Libraries Act 2003: c28, s4). The Act applies to printed publications, but specifically excludes sound recordings. The absence of sound etched into the vinyl sets a mark upon on a surface and may therefore be called a print (but not a reproduction) of silence. And without an original sound source, the publication is not a sound recording and therefore it is subject to the Act. But submitting a ‘copy’ for legal deposit, still poses questions. At the time of publication only one ‘copy’ had been produced, although of course this was not a copy and to duplicate its sound would create a ‘sound recording’, paradoxically excluding itself from the obligations of the Act. It would also fix silence as this silence, undermining the unrecorded open silence published. Sleeveless, Silence on Loan is also in a state of continuous reprint; rewritten moment by moment through the scratched plosions and fricatives that bare materiality affords. In order to provide legal deposit ‘copies’, while maintaining these qualities essential to it, I reproduced the process of production, publishing six other silent grooves: six ghosts of Silence on Loan. The traditional library procedures of the rubber stamp were used to visually mimic likeness and establish difference. The application of pressure and subtle displacements of ink creating unique traces on the centre label of each record stamped.

The vinyl ‘copies’ were sent accompanied only by a letter typed on an old Brother typewriter, documented and duplicated in triplicate using two sheets of carbon paper. The materiality of this correspondence was further reinforced by communicating only with physical address (no mobile number, no email). At the post office, silence was weighed, measured and sent recorded delivery to the Deposit Office of the British Library and The Agency for the Legal Deposit Libraries (Figure 8).

Figure 8. Silence on Loan. Legal deposits, weighed, measured and sent recorded delivery.

Signed for and lurking ‘off site’ in ‘closed stacks’, the deposits of Silence on Loan form a dispersed and lonely cohibition: all six records withholding their silence together, whilst apart. ‘Preserved for the use of future generations’ and now ‘part of the nation’s heritage’ (British Library n.d.; my emphasis), silence remains being securely forgotten.

7. RECORD TO ERASE

On Friday 31 January 2020, I returned to Winchester School of Art Library to find a table ‘reserved for activity’. It had been one year and one day since Silence on Loan was added to the Artists’ Book Collection at the library. Wedged alphabetically between the hardbacks at 741.64 HEG, this mute slither of vinyl is easily overlooked, but once a year it is taken from the shelf and placed on the platter of a portable turntable. (Re)Turning at 33⅓ revolutions per minute, the tongue of the needle pronounces the damage done: the silence that this year has lost. Once played it is gently put back on the shelf, where it is left unsounding for another year.

As a performance this annual audition is rather disappointing, nothing much happens for slightly more than 9 minutes (Figure 9). Those who are here to hear (and those library visitors who’s listening the silence borrows) listen to silence being both broken and unheard. Perhaps the tables are turned, and it is the listeners who perform the silence rather than the revolving groove and stylus. For many of those who came, this is a return to silence, having been here last year when Silence on Loan was performed at the moment of its inclusion into the library stock. Silence returning gathers like wax in the ears of those who come to listen and remember having listened last year. Everyone who was there to (not) hear silence again received a souvenir in the form of a Silence on Loan 2020 pin-badge, whilst the festival detritus of a paper wristband and UV handstamp confirmed presence and implied participation. Those library users who were not there to listen, were also offered these souvenirs as acknowledgement of their tacit listening participation and contribution to the silence composed.

Figure 9. Silence on Loan. First performance: 30 January 2019 (WSA library).

I had been inclined to record each performance, so that I might document and measure the audible change time brings. But such calculating permanence would surely confine silence in sound, completing and fixing still that which is essentially incomplete and fugitive. The physical failure of documentation could, however, allow the potential of silence to be caught in the (in)act(ion) of being unheard. The performance was therefore documented in mono on an audiocassette using an old portable recorder (Figure 10). Such obsolete media is characterised by a distinct lack of (hi) fidelity, recording its own imperfections and imposing its own magnetic patina upon the sound it records. This failure to create a faithful document is further enhanced by the recording not being monitored – the tape is seen slowly winding from left to right, but no lights or needles visibly meter the volume of signal. The condition, fidelity and very existence of the recording is physically apparent but audibly unknown. The quantity of tape used does measure the duration of silence, transcribing (no) sound and time into a spatial length. But, paused at a distance, silence remains being unheard, waiting here another year, in order to be rewound, recorded over and erased again.

Figure 10. Silence on Loan. Second performance recorded to tape. 31 January 2020 (WSA library).

8. SILENT RUT

The run-off or run-out groove is that point on a record where the track ends and the needle locks into the rut of the moment after sound. With a silent groove there is little distinction between the track and this moment after, silence just continues locked in its loop until the needle is lifted out its routine. Returned to the shelf, Silence on Loan remains unheard: quietly and pathetically adding silence to silence. Each year it will be performed, recorded and erased again. Another pointless routine, which will continue until the damage sustained or the innate obsolescence of the vinyl medium results in the record itself becoming unplayable and dumb. Or perhaps until, through a complete lack of interest, silence is at last withdrawn from use.