3 November 2020

Alone in Switzerland.

Three weeks in residence at the UNCOOL house in Poschiavo, Switzerland, including ten days of self-isolation. An unusually long (for me) period of uninterrupted solitude and work. After practice and before work on street noises I often record short pieces, using not street noise, but simple material. The wood-panelled room has a beautiful warm sound.

Heartfelt thanks to Cornelia Müller, UNCOOL, and Arts Council England.

https://carolinekraabel.bandcamp.com/album/alone-in-switzerland

October 2020

Going Outside: Observation and reproduction.

 Since lockdown began, towards the end of March, I’ve been thinking even more about the sounds of the streets, planning some work that a project grant from Arts Council England has now made possible.

 I’ve been walking and playing the saxophone in London for twenty years, but now I wanted to concentrate on listening and relaying what I heard as closely as possible. I planned four saxophonic walks, one in each quadrant of London, to begin to learn and reflect the sounds around me – sounds that have kept shifting their make-up and densities over the past seven months. To hear a sound is one thing, but to really understand it I have to try to play it.

 Having read that wind instruments, or even enthusiastic speech, might increase the spread of potentially dangerous airborne droplets, I made a mask or veil that covers my nose and mouth as well as the entire saxophone, but still allows me to play.

 I recorded the walks so I could listen back and work out how to do better. The first two walks (South and West) didn’t go too badly – in south London there was a lovely dog barking in F#, and a lot of variety in the sounds (ventilation shafts, traffic, construction work, birds), though only a scattering of human voices. In west London it was all motor vehicles, and very difficult to come even close to capturing with the saxophone, but the challenge was productive.

 A few days later I set out to play towards the east, planning to go from Blackfriars Station to the City near London Bridge. I began timidly, having realised that while the sax-mask doesn’t hinder my playing at all, it makes it harder for people to understand what’s going on (like face-masks do), and although no one had yet objected, their bemusement was often evident in a new way, different from the reactions to walks where the sax was visible. Maybe this is also to do with the long months of worry, uncertainty and fear taking the elasticity out of all of us, making us more prone to irritation and impatience.

 I had chosen the route for the tunnels there, which sound so beautiful. As I was approaching the end of the first of these – a cycle tunnel, parallel to the tunnel for cars that does not allow for pedestrians – just playing isolated mimicking sounds and enjoying the echoes of the traffic and the sax, a tall, very disgruntled man approached me at speed from a small empty access road sloping in from the left. He was holding an electric iron and swearing at me, radiating anger. He threw it at my head, and I managed to dodge, then he pushed me over, trying to pull the saxophone away from me, and succeeding in grabbing the mouthpiece and throwing it to the far side of the road. Fortunately, in part because I had the sax case on my back like a carapace, I was able to keep the sax safe and scramble away, running to where the iron had landed (he had had the same idea) and picking it up to keep him from getting it back and clobbering me. All along, my front was draped in this sort of white curtain/mask.

 Several cyclists were approaching; I went into the path and waved at them. The first just looked at me oddly, but the second one stopped; both had to have seen me being pushed to the ground. He asked if I was OK.

 – He attacked me!

 – Don’t you know him?

 My mind boggled to some extent at the assumptions behind this, but maybe the somehow excusable domestic dispute is easier to conceive than the veiled ambulant saxophonist ambushed by disturbed (in several senses – he obviously objected to my contribution to the soundscape) person.

 With the cyclist standing by, I went and recovered my mouthpiece, miraculously unchipped, and he walked with me a little way down the road, out of the tunnel in the mouth of which my assailant remained standing, looking after us. I was still holding the iron. A bit farther there was a church with a City of London rubbish bin in front of it that had a sort of pivoting container for a mouth. I’ve never seen such a bin before, but it was perfect for disposing of the iron safely. The cyclist carried on (thank you, whoever you are) and so did I, discovering that I’d hurt my left hand – not badly – and that my sax was playable but damaged in two places. I kept going for another half-hour or so, coaxing out an increasing range of possible sounds, initially very shaky but eventually feeling better, and good to still be playing (relieved).

 Having to take my sax to be mended delayed the fourth walk, but it played smoothly when we did it, and the walk was joyous.

https://carolinekraabel.bandcamp.com/album/going-outside-observation-and-reproduction-october-2020

© Giuseppe Tamponi

Caroline Kraabel is an improviser: Going Outside.

On 28 March 2019 at 12.45 I walked to Westminster, with saxophone, to hear and play through the sounds around the parliament buildings. So many sounds. The chewy shifty human sounds of busy streets, elusive as they slide past : engines in motion, walkers, piper on the bridge. Often their complexity and density boggles the ear, the playing sense – like translating a dance, a lake into mere words. Turn the corner to walk along the front of the parliament building, see the memorial stone for the policeman, Keith Palmer, killed almost exactly two years ago, a few hours after I’d crossed this same bridge in the same way, just getting on with my own life. The stone is new, clean, beflowered. Touching.

Hordes of people. Some on traffic island with megaphones, howling for brexit. Man in yellow vest (I did not realise until this moment of writing that it might have had some significance) approaches me– a suspension, curiosity, sniffing at me like a dog… but deciding there is only one possible response, ‘Are you with us or against us?’ I just played, as I had decided – here to listen and play, not to speak. TRAITOR TRAITOR TRAITOR he shouts and keeps shouting, TRAITOR TRAITOR, again and again, tentatively slapping at the bell of my saxophone. I play or reflect his sounds back at him and after a last slap, easily evaded (but a jolt to bell can cost teeth) he turns away disgusted. Carry on. No one else says anything though a few stare or laugh, at him, at me… Farther down on the other side of the road the pro-Europe demonstrators stand, ranks of flags blue and gold, blue and red and white. A man’s voice hoarse keeps slowly shouting S T O P  B R E X I T… but I don’t see him, he’s elsewhere. I leave the obvious indicators of conflict behind and try to hear engines again, their glissandi, density of coloured sound, shifting harmonics. Tiny scraps of birdsong appear in any gaps – I’m walking past Victoria Tower Gardens. Spring, after all. (Re-) birth of what ? I write this 36 hours later and the people and government of the ‘U’ K seem exponentially more divided even than yesterday. For 40 years, inequality has been carefully nurtured and anything standing in its way ruthlessly disposed of. Now these few days during which the Tory Government’s poorly realised spectacle of venality, self-interest and refusal to listen, based on the true story behind their accumulation of affluence and power for the few, could be the fulcrum for a drastic and very rapid change for the worse, as the most aggressive, thoughtless and unscrupulous seize upon their scapegoats and the vacuous moment.

29 March 2019