Secret Sounds
I'm listening to ALP's Out and About with Alp again. It's the first disc in the cartridge in the stereo upstairs and sort of the default CD to spin when I turn on the stereo. Soleilmoon's press release says, "It's a continuation of his [Roger Horberry] single-minded obsession with the tiny sounds of everyday life in Amsterdam...This release documents and reinterprets the secret sounds of the streets, canals and parks of Amsterdam city centre...He calls it 'the secret sounds of Amsterdam, a neglected data stream revealing another side of the city.'" But, since I'm competing with street noise and a low volume level (not to mention fairly crap speakers), I'm not hearing much of the finer detail. It's just aural wallpaper.
I miss the headphone experience and now that I've gotten my Triports back from Bose (yeah, silly design flaw = two months of waiting for them to decide to replace my previous pair), I can settle down with some of these records and lose myself in these "secret sounds."
I'm reading the January 2004 issue of The Wire as well. There's a one-page article about Matt Rogalsky and his efforts with silence. His S project in 2001 was to record the silences in a BBC broadcast over the course of a single day and edit them into sound art. Since one of the basic tenets of broadcasting is the avoidance of dead air, the BBC (who considered legal action against the sample-based work) was caught by the Catch-22 of the empty spaces. Rogalsky also edited President Bush's voice out of the March 14th, 2003, ultimatum to Saddam Hussein. An MP3 of this edited version of the speech can be found here. It's not so much silence as two minutes and fifty seconds of secret sounds.
In this case, the secret sound is a leaky water faucet that someone left on somewhere in the White House and a breath of a back-masked vocal echo.