A Personal Anthology, by Ed Garland
I’ve collected some stories that feature sonic technologies, and some that behave like sonic technologies themselves. I’ve used a broad and wonky definition of ‘story’ that includes bits of novels and essays.
‘The Sound Sweep’ by J. G. Ballard (First published in Science Fantasy, February 1960. Collected in The Voices of Time, Orion, 1992)
Madame Gioconda is an opera singer who lives in a noisy future. The daytimes are full of traffic noise and nighttime brings “the mysterious clapping of her phantoms”. She calls Mangon, who tries to tidy up the psychoacoustic mess with his “sonovac”. But the story is by J. G. Ballard, whose rectangular concrete head was furnished entirely with messes, so peace and quiet are not on the menu for Madame Gioconda.
Sometimes I like to think ‘The Sound Sweep’ is an elaborate cautionary tale about the kind of miracle cures for tinnitus that occasionally appear in the little advertising zones of my laptop screen. Sometimes I like to think it’s an energetic plunge into the idea that sounds exist as objects, or a berserk exploration of the relationship between noise and waste. It’s a big philosophical hoover, and it’s heading directly for your house.
‘Radio Baby’ by Deborah Kay Davies (Collected in Grace, Tamar, and Laszlo the Beautiful, Parthian, 2008)
As soon as radios were invented, people believed they could transmit messages from the afterlife, and the foggy notion that electromagnetic waves have supernatural clout has been with us ever since. The radio in this story, instead of receiving messages from the dead, prevents communication with the living.
Grace’s mother returns home early from the hospital after giving birth. She locks the baby in a bedroom and turns up the radio so she can’t hear the newborn crying. Grace is forbidden to phone her absent father because it’ll “scramble the sounds”. The radio must be tuned to a musical station – speech is intolerable.
Eventually, Grace’s mother decides that a single device is not enough to defeat the baby, and drafts in a record player for support. The two of them have to sit in the resulting dissonance and “listen for instructions, make sure we’re tuned in.” Her mother, slumped in a chair while her “face gleams dully in the small light of the on switch,” draws a very unsettling picture of the baby on a sketchpad. Attuned to the frequencies of horror in everyday objects and situations, Davies produces a brilliant, haunting conclusion.
In her fiction, Davies attends to sound as a multi-sensory experience, and deftly anchors her characters’ peculiar ways of listening in their material and historical surroundings. In this story, sonic technology allows tension to flow around the family network, and acts as a catalyst for post-natal mental upheaval.
‘Nineteen Fifty-five’ by Alice Walker (Collected in You Can’t Keep A Good Woman Down, The Women’s Press, 1982)
Two weird white men come to Gracie May Still’s house. She’s a singer, and they buy the rights to one of her songs. Later, she sees one of the men, Traynor, singing the song on TV, and he’s “looking half asleep from the neck up, but kind of awake in a nasty way from the waist down”. She has an uncanny feeling: “If I’da closed my eyes, it could have been me. He had followed every turning of my voice, side streets, avenues, red lights, train crossings and all.”
Traynor’s version of the song is a global mega-smash, but after a couple of years he returns to Gracie May’s house to confess that he doesn’t know what the lyrics mean. The story follows Traynor’s Elvis-ish career over the decades, his letters and visits to Gracie May, his artistic incomprehension and his increasingly soul-less, machine-like vibe. “It was dark but seems like I could tell his eyes weren’t right. It was like something was sitting there talking to me but not necessarily with a person behind it.”
‘The David Thuo Show’ by Samuel Munene (Included in A Life in Full and Other Stories, the Caine Prize for African Writing 2010, New Internationalist, 2010)
A classic of everyday goading. The narrator’s family watch TV together, and their reactions to the shows are a proxy for arguments.
The mother laughs at The Jeffersons because the “short, bald and clumsy” Mr Jefferson resembles the father. The father starts coming home late to avoid The Jeffersons but makes sure to catch Love and Hate. The narrator watches a quiz show and gives the correct answers out loud, because “I wanted to make [the family] feel brainless and annoy them”. Each of the family members has a distinctive laugh, which they use as an extra weapon to annoy the others.
Munene’s neat wry prose produces a subtle but definite tellyish feel, while the atmosphere ‘flicks’ between sitcom, soap opera, and serious drama. When the TV breaks, the repairs take three weeks. The narrator reads “Emotions, a pornographic magazine”. The parents quarrel about having affairs, and the mother leaves the family.
When she returns, she brings a new TV, to everybody’s relief. The real-life quarrelling is over, the proxy-quarrelling can resume. The TV is a chattering object that emits a kind of stabilising wave.
‘There’s Someone in the House’ by Ludmila Petrushevskaya, translated by Keith Gessen and Anna Summers (Collected in There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill her Neighbour’s Baby, Penguin, 2011)
There’s a poltergeist in the narrator’s house but she doesn’t tell anyone, since its activities are low-key. It also seems a bit like a TV itself: “Something has definitely moved in, some kind of living emptiness, small of stature but energetic and pushy” (we’re in the cathode ray tube era, before the plasma screen took over).
For distraction, the narrator “immerses herself” in the “bluish rays” of the television, and thereby “floats off to foreign worlds, becomes frightened, intrigued, heartbroken – in short, she lives.” Naturally, the poltergeist wants attention, and attacks the sound-machines: it trashes a shelf of records so it falls onto a piano the narrator used to practise on as a girl. She then transforms into a being called “the mother-daughter”. To outwit the poltergeist, she destroys half of her possessions. “The television is the worst. She has to wait for dark and then throw it out the window with all her might, [then] carry the remains to the trash in her little grocery cart”. She’s left with her books and records, and a sewing machine. I like how this story explores the weird presences of audiovisual devices – how they change the emotional gravity of a house. I’ve used the same hi-fi for 24 years but still await my own poltergeist.
‘New Year’s Eve Adventures’ by Arno Schmidt, translated by John E. Woods (Collected in The Collected Stories of Arno Schmidt, Dalkey Archive, 2011)
Schmidt pulls you sideways by the ear into murky and frantic language-battles, clattering around in the sound-drenched possibilities of so-called silent reading. He rarely resorts to telling us what’s happening. The stories spurn orthodox creative writing handshakes such as [X] was [Y] when [Z] occurred. Instead they begin like this:
“(Snipping=snipping=snipping slips o’ paper : if somebody had sung me that lullaby at my clothes basket, how at age 50 I’d be helping construct an index for a 12 volume lexicon of saints . . . ! And glance at the things one more time from the idle corner of my eye : a thing with no guts, but only a spine; (and sometimes not even that : a book, a sick book, a terribly sick book); I took more and more exception to this ALBAN BUTLER !). – “
What is going on here? It might help to know that you’re not supposed to say ‘equals’ to yourself when you see that symbol between the snippings. Schmidt discarded the hyphen in favour of its double-decker cousin, whose mathematical resonance suits the madcap exactness of the prose. He uses other punctuation to startle and contort and hiccup and glitch and pause. “Let us retain the lovely=essential freedom to reproduce a hesitation precisely,” he says. The very deliberate space between the end of BUTLER and its exclamation point above reads to me like a comic gesture, a tilt of the speaker’s head a split-second after their utterance.
In the story, the characters are listening to each other and to the radio on New Year’s Eve. There is some snipping of printed texts and some walking in the outdoors and a return to the indoors, where we see one of them “bent to the lemon glow of the dial”. And another “eagerly directed his large ear to the government=apparatus. / Where, predictably, there resounded the beloved hodgepodge of bullschmaltz & observations by Leading Politicians”.
Having identified the radio as a bullschmaltz delivery unit, the protaganists revel in their homemade sonic-linguistic explorations. I think they’d agree with the philosopher Marie Thompson’s conception of noise as a productive, transformative, inescapable, and necessary thing. Schmidt’s abrasive and invigorating style, where the text feels scrambled but the narrative pulse feels strong, is like a lo-fi recording played through a distorted amplifier to get a thrilling, moreish surface that operates as the perfect antidote to I’m not sure what exactly but I like it.
‘Machinery and Modern Industry’ by Karl Marx, translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (First published in 1889, collected in Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, Unwin, 1947)
Speaking of snipping, here we see Marx doing vocal collage. Within a lengthy analysis of the English factory Acts, he pauses to assemble a large number of very short excerpts from a select committee report on mining in 1866. The select committee interviewed mine owners and mine workers about whether or not the recently introduced laws on working conditions in mines were actually being followed, and their answers were recorded in the report. “The whole farce is too characteristic of the spirit of capital, not to call for a few extracts,” says Marx.
What emerges from the rapid question-and-answer snippets that follow reveals, of course, that the mine owners couldn’t give a shit about laws or people or the conditions they force their adult and child labourers to work in:
“Why do you not apply to the inspector?” “To tell the truth there are many men who are timid on that point; there have been cases of men being sacrificed and losing their employment in consequence of applying to the inspector.” “Why; is he a marked man for having complained?” “Yes”
During the collage, Marx throws in the occasional sassy comment, or gives one of the speakers a name like “Bourgeois Vivian”. It’s like reading an experimental radio play for the page, where voices with all their antiquated diction install themselves in your head, right alongside your personal rage about the state of capitalism, late capitalism, too late capitalism, techno-feudalism, etc.
‘The Mad Bell-Ringer’ by Samira Azzam, translated by Ranya Abdelrahman (Collected in Out of Time, ArabLit Books, 2022)
Alain Corbin’s Village Bells is a classic work of “campanarian history” that presents bells as a technology of regulation and an auditory aspect of collective identity. Samira Azzam’s very short story about a bell-ringer is a condensed evocation of this technological truth. Instead of being located in revolutionary rural France, though, this bell is being rung in at an unknown time in an unnamed location, but it doesn’t seem too far from Lebanon or Palestine.
Abu Masoud is the old bellringer being replaced by a young upstart after a long career. “Abu Masoud and the bell were one and the same thing,” we are told. The sound of the bell is the sound of the old man. But “he was coming apart”. Growing deaf, trembling, weak. The youngster’s not going to get the proper tone – he doesn’t know the right way to strike the bell. But the old man’s losing his touch.
Azzam’s stories in this collection proceed at a measured pace, with much allegorical resonance. I recently saw Adania Shibli explain the not-overtly-political resonance of Azzam’s fiction as a strategic move. When censors read her work in the 1960s, they found no obviously negative depictions of Zionism, and so allowed it to be published. What they didn’t realise is that Azzam’s fictions dared to imagine a world without Israeli apartheid.
‘The Preserving Machine’ by Phillip K Dick (first published in Fantasy & Science Fiction, June 1953. Collected in The Preserving Machine and Other Stories, Pan Books, 1972)
Doc Labyrinth invents a machine to store music, after having a vision of a paper Schubert score burrowing out of a bombed building, “like a mole” with a “furious energy”. Reasoning that animals possess a survival instinct, he decides to build a machine that converts music into creatures, to preserve their longevity.
The snag is that, much like our present-day racist billionaire innovators, he can’t build anything himself. So he enlists the help of “a small midwestern university,” who for some reason build it and send it to him.
Then we get the mozart bird and the beethoven beetle. “The schubert animal was silly”. The composers’ names lose their capitalisations, and become mere characteristics. Doc makes loads of these animals, and they live in the woods near his house. He has ensured they can’t reproduce. But they can still mutate.
A mutated bach bug is fed back into the machine, producing a score of “hideous, distorted, diabolical” music.
The story reminds me of the Lexicon of Musical Invective, Nicholas Slonimsky’s compilation of critical hatchet jobs of famous composers’ symphonies. Critics, says Slonimsky, tend towards a particular “psychological inhibition: Non-Acceptance of the Unfamiliar”. As does Doc Labyrinth. He has to learn that music and technology have lives of their own.
‘The Revolution’ by A. Naji Bakhti (Published in Between Beirut and the Moon, Influx Press, 2020)
It’s a chapter from Bakhti’s hilarious and moving novel, Between Beirut and the Moon. The scene is a schoolyard in the city, where an Egyptian boy called Abed with “a deceptively deep, strong voice” stands in the middle of a football pitch and commentates on the matches that play out around him. Abed reminds everyone of an Egyptian football commentator whose voice could be heard throughout Beirut during the 98 world cup. But unlike that guy, Abed uses his commentary to influence the game.
When he finds a loudspeaker to amplify his voice, the emotional weight of his words is also amplified: “he seemed to know strange, intimate matters” about some of the boys, and he puts them off their game by speculating about their family lives.
The loudpseaker remains at the physical centre of the pitch while it becomes a political centre of gravity. When a fight breaks out, Abed turns his commentary upon the fighters, playing them like fools with his expert provocations.
When Abed gives up commentary and takes up football, he kicks the speaker across the ground, and the people are spared from his weird verbal habits. Throughout the episode, the quickfire comedy comes from nested acoustic contexts: the close-range conversation between the boys playing the game, the mid-range commentary through the loudspeaker, and the wider context of the city and its history.
‘Krapp’s Last Tape’ by Samuel Beckett (First published in Evergreen Review, summer 1958, collected in The Complete Dramatic Works, Faber and Faber, 1990)
Audio tape-art had a big year in 1958. In Paris, sonic pioneer Pierre Schaeffer’s Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète, who made compositions using all kinds of recorded media, changed personnel and became Groupe de Recherches Musicales. In London, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop came into existence, featuring Daphne Oram and Delia Derbyshire. In Paris, Samuel Beckett finished composing something in English for the first time in years, Krapp’s Last Tape.
This short piece takes place on “a late evening in the future”. A 69-year-old man, who has a lifelong habit of recording himself speaking about himself, sits at a desk, “elbows on table, hand cupping ear towards machine” and listens to one of his recordings from thirty years ago. Impatient and brooding, he rewinds and fast-forwards this recording, then makes a new recording of his feelings about the old one, thinking of himself as a “stupid bastard”. At intervals he walks offstage to pop the cork of a fizzy bottle, down its contents, and return, progressively more drunk.
Beckett thought Krapp’s Last Tape was “sentimental” and described his own voice as “a Beaujolais Galouise pantgasp”. There is a great deal of rummaging, in pockets and desk drawers, but also within the recordings themselves. The tape technology is what makes this rummaging possible. Krapp doesn’t like it, but he has never stopped doing it, like a one-man avant-garde research unit.
‘Living with Music’ by Ralph Ellison (Collected in Shadow and Act, Random House, 1994)
“In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live”. Thus begins the essay where the author of Invisible Man describes everything he hears in his “tiny” ground floor apartment in the early days of his writing career. There’s a lot to be heard, and Ellison – a hi-fi obsessive – gets into an ongoing battle with a nearby singer by playing his own versions of the songs she practises. But their eventual face-to-face meeting takes an unexpected turn.
I was made aware of this essay in the book Phonographies by Alexander Weheliye, who says that Ellison gives us “insight, or more accurately, “inhearing”, into the acoustic geography of [his] apartment”. It’s one of those essays that changed my relationship with domestic sounds, and instilled a permanent urge to visit an audio equipment shop in 1949. This was a time, as Ellison says, when “between the hi-fi record and the ear […] there was a new electronic world”.
Ed Garland’s essay collection Earwitness: A Search for Sonic Understanding in Stories will be republished by Parthian in March 2025, and can be ordered here. His short stories have appeared in The Stinging Fly, and his non-fiction in various venues including the New Welsh Reader, Aural Diversity, and Beyond/Tu Hwnt: An Anthology of Welsh Deaf and Disabled Writing. He was awarded a place on Representing Wales 2024-25, Literature Wales’s professional development scheme, to work on his first novel.
* You can browse the full searchable archives of A Personal Anthology, with over 3,000 story recommendations, at www.apersonalanthology.com.
* A Personal Anthology is curated by Jonathan Gibbs, author of two novels, Randall (Galley Beggar, 2014, and forthcoming in the US from Tivoli Books, 2025), and The Large Door, and a book-length poem, Spring Journal. He teaches on the MA/MFA Creative Writing at City, University of London.
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