Peter Cusack: The Horse was Alive, the Cow was Dead

I'd never visited the Lea Valley when I bought this CD, though I have now. Eighteen months ago we considered moving there: specifically, to Clapton. The proximity to the Lea Valley and several of the locations featured on this soundscape album were the best thing about that area. Apart from that, it was grim — more grim even than East Dulwich. But not as smug. You can find some of my photos around the Lea among this cluster.

It was a review in The Wire that led me to buy the CD. I've long been interested in the idea of this kind of audio documentary, going back at least as far as watching films like The Conversation and Blow Out.

Cusack mixes short narratives from people who work and live around the Lea with 'naturalistic' recordings (some done under water) and a few instances of Alan Wilkinson's saxophone played in different acoustic spaces. If he were a film maker, he'd be part-Loach and part-Godard, part-Pennebaker and part-Attenborough (David, not Dickie).

The Lea Valley is being transformed as I type, with scrapyards and marshes being prepared for the Olympics. A few years ago, Saint Etienne made a film, What Have You Done Today, Mervyn Day, about the area in 2005, just as the Olympics decision was announced. Here's an excerpt of something I wrote after the film's premiere:

An audio representation does not have a focus in the same way that a visual one does. It's more likely that, on 'playback', you will notice elements which the recorder/photographer was not concentrating on, or even aware of, at the time of the recording. The film Blow Up — in which a photographer unwittingly discovers evidence of a murder in a picture he has taken — was remade as Blow Out with the central plot device translated from photograph into a sound recording. With this translation, the fetishism of documentary evidence became more plausible and interesting (even if the remake remained the lesser film for other reasons).

…Mervyn Day uses a fictional script, involving an on-screen protagonist and voice-overs from his grandfather and mother, to project meaning onto, and 'elaborate', its images. The Horse was Alive… presents its documents more or less as found in the environment: in only one of the 45 tracks is there a commentary on what's unfolding, and in a few others music (live and recorded) is played to bring out the qualities of the environment. When it works, this approach sustains interest precisely by making you interpret, deduce and guess what you're hearing.

Example: in the recording The Dog Thinks it's a Duck you have to project a sequence of events onto a series of splashes, barks and grunts. The sleeve notes are terse: "Dog diving in after a stick — the title was his owner's comment"; the rest is up to you.

Cusack's recordings also bring out the potential of audio for surrealism. They include the sound of toads calling underwater, and tadpoles trying to eat the underwater microphone. The British Waterways man employed to maintain the river environment recounts a story of two bodies being spotted in the river, both still six feet long despite being decapitated. It turned out a circus had skinned and then disposed of two brown bears. A local prankster later left bear footprints in the snow, summoning helicopters and police marksmen.

Images yield period detail more readily than sounds, and, though both Saint Etienne's film and Cusack's album have ties to specific days in recent history, the film situates itself in time much more pointedly and powerfully. Apparently the filmmakers had always intended to set …Mervyn Day on 7th July, the day after the decision about the Olympics was due to be announced, but obviously hadn't anticipated how that decision would be overshadowed by the bombings that day. The closest bomb was two miles west of the Lea Valley, so there are no images of conflagration in the film. In fact, the bombs only filter into the film in indirect aural references towards its end, when the protagonist hears a radio report while sitting in Fatboy's Diner (on Trinity Buoy Wharf), and is then asked, "Didn't you hear the sirens?".

The Horse… has a recording of the 96% solar eclipse of 11th August 01999 as it sounded on Walthamstow Marsh. This is the track that has voice-over commentary, describing the progress of the eclipse. Perhaps the eclipse's effects on wildlife and ambience would not have been evident without the commentary, but unfortunately it gets in the way of listening and its literalness obscures as much as it elucidates.

Just ten days ago, tracks from this album were played on Radio 3's Hear and Now and Peter Cusack was interviewed about soundscape composition. A few years back, I nearly did a course at the London College of Communication where Peter Cusack teaches (he's also a stalwart of the London Musicians' Collective). Unfortunately, at my time of life, it was going to require a large investment of time with little prospect of financial return. I ended up writing a book instead. Hmmm, yes, you can't fault my logic and reasoning there, can you?

I'd still like to do some sound recording as a hobby.

Wikipedia entry for this album Listen to some of this album at Last.fm