Spring

New York, NY - Peter - Wednesday, April 10th, 2002 : goo

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Now that spring is coming, I punctuate my afternoons with park-sitting; each day, in those golden post-meridian hours that shower warm ocre-ish rays of light on Manhattan form the western skies, I walk the two short blocks to Riverside Park, collecting myself on a bench.

People watching is the order of the afternoon, but sometimes I bring along a journal or pens or pastels. Sometimes I just sit with my hands empty, watching as the endless parade of families, joggers and vagrants ply the cobbles. Some days, my headphones pipe fleetingly appropriate songs to my hears, direct auditory stimulus as a soundtrack to all the life going on around me.

This week, its been minimal-but-nicely-paced modern music. Not the sort of electronic cacophony that you hear seeping from nightclub vents or pumping from shiny midnight-black cars with New Jersey license plates, but endless hour-long tracks of slowly-morphing, oft-repeating rhythms; the sorts of sounds that subtly snag your attention and mesh so well with the urbanicity around me, the tracks they ascribe to Detroit, machine soul, techno.

I like to listen to these songs at a lower volume than I usually would at home; I generally do this when I'm out in the city. My reasoning is strictly so that I can percieve (if not fully hear) the perpetual ambience of noise that the city spins all around me. Yesterday in the park, the music seamlessly mixed with skyward jumbo-jet's afterburners ablaze; bus hydraulics lowering carriages to street corner heights, subways shaking the street-surface with the immediacy of their commute, footfalls on cobbles, endless automotive belches, horns; sirens. Oh, how the songs of the machines flirt with the voice of the city.

When I first moved to New York City, I had trouble sleeping. The perpetual concert of noise was such a stimulus that deep sleep was always at an arm's reach; not entirely unpleasant; there were so many good things to hear. Now, how the tables have turned somewhat; its almost as if I didn't appreciate silence anymore. I do, and often, but there's something about the cacophony that's obsessively rhythmic; constant sound-impulses massaging the eardrums, ever triggering synaptic stimuli in your brain.

Perhaps interesting noises work like drugs.

And the music I play differs little from the citysounds around me. It all blends into an existential vignette that thrives on brinkmanship, the joy of teetering on the edge of sensory overload; and I love it.

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jack: is this the first post, well congratulations.

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