Remembering Through Sounds

One of my earliest memories is sitting on the front-seat of an old truck with my grandmother. The seat was no longer in the truck, though - it now belonged to a small hill beside my grandparents’ rural home.

My grandfather was a welder and electrician and, therefore, an avid accumulator of discarded items found at yard sales and flea markets. Consequently, my childhood surroundings were a cluster-fuck of nature and indestructible, man-made objects, that were now undergoing their own process of decay. Although my grandfather’s intentions were to put everything to “good” use, this intention was oriented toward “eventually I’ll find a place for that car door or that sheet of metal or that bag of cement or that underwater suit.” To me, the land I frolicked in as a child was a graveyard, of sorts - a place where things came to go back into the earth. Here I could see how trucks and human beings and butterflies were all made up of the same stuff. Nothing was superficial.

“What are the leaves saying, Lindsay?” my grandmother asked, as the wind blew through the trees above us. “Shhhhhhh,” I replied with my index finger to my mouth, and we continued to listen.

I spent a lot of my childhood listening. Listening to the woods. Listening to my great grandmother ask for a “8” or “Ace” (I could never tell the difference) over a game of Go Fish. Listening to my grandfather’s welding torch. Listening to my Mom make paper-mâché alien masks for her friends. Listening to that weird squeaking sound the upstairs bathroom window made when it was windy. Hiding under the table when I heard it, and listening to my grandmother chat above with her friend Carol.

I even listened to music. A lot of it.

Thanks to my grandfather’s interest in accumulating objects, I had a record and 8-track player in my room when I was four, five, six. I would spend hours alone listening to albums passed down to me from as far back as my great grandmother’s collection. I had no sense that more than one of each recording I possessed existed. I just assumed that Elvis, Diana Ross, Gladys Knight, the orchestral disco guy and many others created the sounds I listened to for me alone. Music was this private, magical experience that tied everything together in my small world. The in-need-of-repair aviator arcade game downstairs was included in the soundtrack by means of the clapping in “Baby Love.” Elvis’ voice was the central character in the nighttime cricket and frog orchestra. The doo-doo-doo-doo-doo’s in “Tossin’ and Turnin’” explained my uncle’s sense of humor. And the physical interaction with records through their blips, static, warbles, slowing down, speeding up was a testament to nature’s creativity and destruction.

Due to my early experiences, sound has always been my primary way of seeing, interacting with and remembering my world. It seems to me that sound is not separate from matter - sound is the creator, destroyer and voice of matter. Sound makes an impact, even unheard.

I invite you to check out my sound project, Broken Deer, at http://www.myspace.com/brokendeer.

The sounds that comprise Broken Deer have been unearthed from a fluid landscape - sometimes actual, most times imaginal. Some sounds are more present today than before, and some have faded away to an oxidized whisper. What I share with you now is the forgotten and remembered of a tender history.