Sonic Elements

"To fall into that quiet immensity was to breach through the thin skin of the everyday and to pass through to another realm."

The sound of exhiliration

There was a dream you used to have. It was a dream of endless space. Of limitless echoing silence that roared. It was a dream of white noise – the sound of the world in its molecular complexity. Each element you experienced in the dream had an aural dimension. And in your dream the sounds of the world were one.

First steps

The buttress was at the limit of your climbing competence. There were some letters and figures attached to its grade, but that didn’t seem to matter. You wanted to take your friend climbing. It was his first time and you had promised to lead. You had given the guys a crash course in rope skills the night before, before the drunken revelry in the pub – then the club – had begun. The rhythmic beat of Underworld was pattering still through your mind as you eased up to the first belay point, meticulously placing protection as you climbed, the cantilevered mechanicals of the gear slotting just so into cracks in the limestone.

The thing you had liked about climbing was the simultaneous sensation of boundless space and intimate exactitude. Before your eyes was everything. The universe and the fleeting nature of your life within it were defined by the minutiae of your finger placements and toeholds. Behind you, meanwhile, stood the fathomless silence of space. Everything chaotic and out of control existed in that void. To fall into that quiet immensity was to breach through the thin skin of the everyday and to pass through to another realm.

There you were, on the interface of here and forever. You would rather be there than anywhere.
Your friend made the first pitch with ease. You secured him and experienced a brief moment of foreboding as the wind gusted with a quick and intense whine. Despite that, you stepped out and began to climb again. There were just a couple of moves until the crux of the pitch, and consequently that of the entire route, had to be negotiated. It was a ruggedly exposed step up and to the left – the handhold would be invisible until you were committed, having stepped up and around the buttress.

As soon as you rounded the western wall, you heard the wind wail. This time with a terrifying intensity. You froze. Overextended and stretched high, your fingers locked around a protruding knot in the stone, whilst your right toe was jammed in a crack some three centimetres wide, your left boot scratching against smooth rock. Your face kissed the limestone.

"You were listening only to the sound of the wind wailing, and the gust now of hailstones spattering an elemental percussion against your back."

You were there for an eternity. Or as these things go, it was probably for a few minutes. The noise of the wind in your ears and the patter and rush of hailstones made communication with your climbing partner impossible. In a momentary gap in the wail, you thought you heard him call your name. Your right leg, toe still jammed tight in a crack, began to twitch wildly. You were running out of time. Gathering it all, you reached and raced and stretched out of the exposed buttress. All the while the noise of treacle black fear reverberated and spread to each extremity of your body.

High Altitudes

Four thousand metres. The sky is deep blue. The ridge forms an iced outline in your peripheral vision. All you can hear in your helmet is the sound of your breathing and the scrape of your edge as you carve fast, low-frequency arcs into the ice. With each transition, there is a momentary change of pitch as you ride on the flat deck, before the sweeping side-cut of the board finds purchase and propels the geometry and speed of your line back to where the pendulum swings. You hear yourself grunt with the effort of each compression and with each extension of your legs. Soon you draw focus on the edge of the hard packed piste described by a wind lip that looks around shoulder high.

You punch over the lip and silence envelops you. Weight and speed seem to fall away, though this perception is of course counterintuitive. You were expecting sound, compression and greater velocity where now the oxygenated mist of powdered snow is everything. Perspective of space and movement disappears. In the wake of the initial silence, defined perhaps by the noise of ice suddenly evaporating, a faint hiss and whoosh filters through into your helmet. A hiss and whoosh of what? Atoms of air and water and infinitesimal solids interact with steel and plastics of the board strapped to your feet. In moments, you are at the foot of the powder field and your board begins to chatter and worry the ice forming in bigger and bigger clumps where the open glade channels into tightly spaced rows of pines.

Picking your line, breathing harder now, you auger in on the gaps between the trees rather than the trees themselves. You pump and grind and duck, leaping between stashes of powdered snow deep in the tree wells and the tracked pathways between the arbors. Each well is a hush and each pathway a percussive rhythm of stone, ice and air, the sound of your kinesis softened and whispered through the fronds.

The wood falls away, and a huge arcing field opens up around you, shaped like the smoothed-out terracing in a giant stadium. You are deep in the powder again. Silence again too, except for your tired groans. You attempt to keep the flow and weight your back foot, until with a slip and a crack and an exhalation of breath you fall. You are buried deep.

"A foot of snow cocoons you, your beard encrusted with crackling crystals of ice."

You attempt to move, but the weariness and the pain in your feet and ankles and the lactic acid in your thighs make meaningful movement impossible. There is silence such as you have never experienced. You realise that the sun is shining hotly on an exposed slab of loose, heavy snow where you lay. You wait. The mountains’ quietness becomes all of a sudden something to fear.

Driving Force

Spa Francorchamps. A Ferrari F430 Scuderia. Second gear around La Source, then you open the throttle up and paddle right up through the gears, shooting down and around to the left as you lift the throttle for a second. The weight of the car is displaced dramatically forward. The discourse of motorsport dictates that you go flat through Eau Rouge. This near-catastrophic displacement of energy is the reason why. The engine note dips from its 7,500 revolutions-per-minute intensity. There is massive compression – then floaty release as you move through an invisible wall of g-forces as car and driver flow through, up and over the hill. Lateral energies urge to push you and the car left, left, left. The V8 engine is a symphony directly behind your left ear, tuned in Modena with the expressed intention of maximising the pleasure of in-car entertainment driven solely by internal combustion. Centimetres away from you, vaporous detonations and vacuum-inducing forces are thrusting and turning and twisting, driving exhausted gases through a system of alloy tubing loaded with resounders. The twin efficiencies of aural beauty and the physics of mechanical movement are at stake.

Below 3,000rpm, the Ferrari’s motor whines and ticks like a malcontent terrier determined to release itself from the collar. Between 3,000 and 5,500 revs, it revels in the intensity of a throaty tenor at full flight. As you push the mechanics through its broad power band wailing and screaming toward 9,000rpm – the lady soprano sings as is her man wrought, heaven-blessed birthright.

The Ferrari’s torsional body flexes as the diffuser at the rear sucks up the Tarmac, and the aerodynamic features on the front and on the side skirts of the monocoque conspire to force the car down harder with each increment of velocity. Soon, the Les Combes section of the circuit appears at the end of the long straight. Seeing the boards streak by 100 metres from the apex, you lean on the brake pedal and flick your left fingertips to send the drive back down through the cogs to third. Each ratio adjustment evokes a high-pitched blip. You flick the steering wheel to the left and then right, trying to keep the transition smooth. Now you’re riding fast through a series of long, sweeping lefts and rights. The sound of the engine reverberates through the pine forests of the Ardennes, sending flickers of sound and feathers of noise in all directions.

Emerging now through the Pouhon section at maximum speed and into a 25-second flat out parabola, you come to the realisation that this noise, this fusion of human mind and its resource-depleting instincts and urges is an increasing rarity on planet earth. What happens when a noise, something as abstract as a sound, becomes extinct? The question makes the indulgence all the more intense.

In The Waves

The thing you remember is the noise. It had been a big day in mid October, just before the clocks went back. It was called long before – one of those long, long-distance swells created by a storm in the Caribbean that doubled up with a North Atlantic low, only to be held at bay out near the Azores by the high pressure over the islands as the world beneath it turned. You had paddled out as the first ruler-edged lines began to meet the shelf and the tide began to push. There was a sickly anticipation in the pit of your stomach.

As you reached a point of calm, you noticed that as the smooth backed swells began to rise and fall, they looked like sperm whales sounding to the depths.

It might have been one of those freak waves that pulsed through the building rhythm of the swell, marching with the run of the sea but falling into step with the sound of an altogether different drummer. Wherever it came from, you realised too late that you weren’t going to make it over. There was silence as you scratched for the horizon. Your perception of things

"Your perception of things slowed, and the world seemed drained of sound."

slowed, and the world seemed drained of sound. But as the critical moment came closer when you would have to attempt to duck beneath the wave, your ears filled with a falling, tragic arpeggio. There was the mottled, streaked face of the wave as you dived deep and everything began to change.

As the wave breached above you, the dark green to steel blue of the water faded to olive and then to black. The chord that had disappeared now crystallised and began to sing and hiss as the pressure increased in your eardrums. You took a froglegged stroke deeper to avoid the falls but the mass of water began to tug hard at your ankle, which was attached by leash to the board above you. With a sickening release of energy you felt the leash tie snap. What had been the low, muffled rumble of the wave’s energy being spent on the rock-strewn sandbar below you, now took the form of a tangible presence. Released now from the buoyancy afforded by your surfboard, you felt yourself rising quickly, accelerating as you spiraled upwards. Again that ascending sequence of liquid notes, reaching a crescendo now, began to flood your mind. There was a moment of weightlessness as you reached the point of the wave’s critical mass. The next moment you crashed back into blackness. The water’s cacophony was all that remained.