May 04 - Discovering Silence
By Stefano Blanca Sciacaluga
When I'm not writing on here or making art I'm playing and listening to music. For the past ten or eleven years I have been playing music with other people in a number of bands, and when I haven’t been playing in bands I’ve been playing in a number of bedrooms; mostly my own, mostly on my own. I’ve always - for as far as I can remember - been into music, but I think it probably didn’t get a little out of control until I was bought a discman, probably for a birthday, and I started buying my own CD’s. The discman gave way to a little Panasonic MP3 player that held far less music than an iPod Mini, which had just come out, but was way more durable than iPods (or maybe people in school just mistreated them), and had an in-built microphone, which was perfect when we were just starting my first band and really felt we were good enough to have these rough recordings done. They must be somewhere; I don’t think I want to look for them, to be honest.
By then I was about fifteen or sixteen, we very soon on started gigging, first at a concert we put together at the Youth Centre, then regularly at Sax, Nelson’s and Rock on the Rock; I had long hair, I was into everything from the Chili Peppers to System of a Down, but especially into grunge music. My MP3 only held about two or three albums, which was perfect, they were on constant rotation for weeks at a time and I started to really appreciate every tiny bit of the music, despite the loss in quality that (apparently) converting to MP3 format causes. I went everywhere with my MP3 player. It was tiny, a bit bigger than a 9V battery (that’s the brick shaped ones, for those without acoustic guitars that require them), and weighed next to nothing in comparison to the discman. I was lost in the music. My earphones were in on the way to and from school, in school during breaks when I felt like I needed a little fix and on the way to and from anywhere else, to meet friends, to rehearse. EVERYWHERE.
At just-turned eighteen (or was I nineteen already?) I moved to Portsmouth to go to University, and on a day trip to Southampton I popped into their Apple Store and used my student grant to get myself an iPod Classic. 160GB of music seemed crazy. For two or three years now I had been accumulating a crazy amount of music, first really slowly on a dial-up connection and by ripping the CD’s I could afford to buy, which weren’t many, and then later on with the crazy rush of “I can download anything I want!” of ADSL. I put my whole collection onto my iPod Classic and it didn’t even get to halfway full. I had so much more space, and I thought I would max it out. Excellent. Much like the Panasonic MP3 player the iPod Classic came with me everywhere. To and from England a bunch of times, around the country, to and from my placements abroad and accompanied me for a further two-almost-three years after finishing my degree and returning home.
Whilst listening to music all the time had become a constant, the only thing that had changed over all those years was that I had gone through a crazy amount of different headphones and earphones and weird things that were somewhere between headphones and earphones, until one day on my way to work at eight in the morning something was off. The music stopped playing, then started again, then stopped again. The battery was okay - even if for some time the iPod’s battery wasn’t lasting as long as it once did, and it had a tendency to say there was battery left when in fact there was none left. I quickly switched it off thinking it must be the headphones, which were relatively new but had been slightly mistreated, and carried on on my way. Got into the office, tried the computer speakers and some other headphones and realised it was the headphone jack, not the headphones. I was freaking out! What was I going to do? I somehow managed to get through the day without breaking down, (probably) angrily tweeted about it a couple times, went through all the range of emotions of a big loss and sulked the rest of the day when I realised that afternoon that not even cleaning the jack fixed it. I tried using it for another day or two, trying to keep it in the position where it would work, but it was too tiring to do and quite frankly not worth all the effort to hear Chet Baker like he’s calling you, driving through a tunnel and breaking up.
I was left out in the cold. I had withdrawal symptoms and spent a few days trying it periodically in the hope that it had somehow fixed itself. I Googled all over and didn’t find anything and in the end, after swearing at it a bunch of times I decided to tie up the cable of my headphones, which pretty much had no use now, and put them and the iPod away. Had the actual iPod broken I would’ve accepted it easier but the fact that it worked perfectly and was still half empty, even with all the rubbish I NEVER listened to, and was in pretty much pristine condition from being in a case the whole time, made me pretty sad. So I had two options: Buy a new iPod Classic (which had coincidentally just stopped being manufactured right around the same time) or learn to live without it. I mean, it wasn’t the first time I had gone without music, navigating Italian roads on a bicycle is never safe, let alone listening to music, so I went ‘silent’ for quite some time; but this was the first time for maybe eight or nine years that I had no portable music device, besides my phone, which didn’t really have that much memory either (or battery life, for that matter). So I decided to embrace the silence. Well, the silence. Because not listening to jazz on my morning walk to work meant I was listening to all these “new” sounds. Things I wasn’t accustomed to because they had been drowned out by sax, guitar and everything else solos. Coincidentally it was also the summer, which meant the summer hours had me walking to work before 8am, listening to the birds sing and the city waking up, as opposed to the city already three quarters awake at 9am. Then I started hearing people say weird and wonderful things that I started collecting on a blog, I started to really pay attention to every little thing. I was more alert talking and listening to people, I started cherishing the moments when I could listen to music and actively started sitting down to listen to music or making the most of listening to the radio in the car, or whilst I was in the kitchen, I would even stand still in places and listen to sounds: birds chirping, waves crashing, the sound of people talking coming out of open windows. I even started listening to the silence of Main Street and Irish Town late at night. Everything was new, and wonderful and music was better, and I started seeing sounds as more than just noises but as potential bits of music. I started playing instruments more again, and started new projects, and started playing with people again instead of on my own in my bedroom.
Music had kept me from enjoying music. My brain had forgotten how to tell my ears to properly listen. I had learnt to accept that music was meant to be there the whole time, as background noise; and then everything changed. I can’t even understand how people do it now. I see young kids hang out with their friends and each of them has one earphone in and trying to successfully communicate with the free ear; I see people who have forgotten that phones once had to be put up to your face to use; and even people who think it’s normal to walk around blaring music out of their phone, no earphones. And I know it’s none of my business, but do they really know what they’re missing? Do you know what you’re missing? You’re missing out on so many great sounds that are there to be discovered. In fact, they’ve always been there to be discovered. And I know it’s difficult to give up on listening to music when you’re going places, especially when it’s so convenient to avoid having to stop and chat to everybody, I still sometimes miss it and even considering downloading podcasts onto my phone; but trust me, once you discover silence…
Stefano is a writer, artist, photographer and bassist of local bands Manatee and Bob and the Boys
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