The church's sold-out CD proves silence is golden [View all]

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The Sussex parish of St Peter's in East Blatchington has hit on a winner with a recording of the ambience inside the church – but its vicar isn't the only one to mine the artistic riches of silence



The calm interior of St Peter's church in Seaford, East Sussex.

Posted by Alexis Petridis
Monday 28 January 2013 14.13 GMT
The Guardian

On the one hand, the news that a CD containing half an hour of silence recorded in a Sussex church has sold out of its first pressing, and that the church is now taking orders from as far away as Ghana, seems a little baffling. "In this day and age, everybody seems to live busier, noisier lives – people sometimes like to sit down and just have a bit of peace and quiet for a little while," suggested Ronald Byng, the member of the congregation at St Peter's, East Blatchington who came up with the idea of recording in the church, although precisely how a CD of silence is supposed to blot out the relentless noise of everyday life remains unexplained. On the other, The Sound of Silence could be claimed as part of a surprisingly large musical subgenre: it's not the first silent album to be released – Stiff Records apparently sold 30,000 copies of the waggishly-titled Wit and Wisdom of Ronald Reagan in 1980 – and it's certainly not the first silent track.

If the first classical composer to offer a silent piece of music was Erwin Schulhoff, whose In Futurum of 1919 beat John Cage's better-known 4'33" by 32 years, Andy Warhol can probably take credit for introducing it to the world of rock. On The East Village Other Electric Newspaper – the same 1966 album on which the Velvet Underground made their recorded debut with a track called Noise – he got a credit for a track called Silence (Copyright 1932): anyone keen to hear this pivotal moment in rock history can download it in 320 kps MP3 quality from the ESPdisk website. You might reasonably have thought that this was not a gag that necessarily bore a great deal of repetition, but you would have been wrong. Within 18 months, the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band had concluded their third album with two minutes of silence: as perhaps befitted a record that also featured songs called Until the Poorest People Have Money to Spend and A Child of a Few Hours is Burning to Death, it abandoned Warhol's prosaic track name for the rather more portentous title Anniversary of World War III.

Since then, a startling variety of artists have had a go, including Afrika Bambaataa, Sly and the Family Stone, Soundgarden, Orbital, Mike Batt – who claimed to have been sued by John Cage's estate for "sampling" 4'33" – Crass, Sigur Ros, John Lennon (twice), Korn, the Melvins, Boards of Canada, prog band Coheed and Cambria – who in true prog style split their silent track into 11 different movements – Sonic Youth offshoot Ciccone Youth, Brian Eno and Robert Wyatt. The latter intended his silent track as "a suitable place for those with tired ears to pause and resume listening later" midway through his 2004 album Cuckooland, but – as in the case of The Wit and Wisdom of Ronald Reagan – silence seems to be most regularly used to make a point about politics.

Indeed, using a silent track to make a political point is perhaps the only thing that links the oeuvre of winsome folkie John Denver – home to Annie's Song and Take Me Home Country Roads – with that of terrifying industrial "power electronics" pioneers Whitehouse, authors of Shitfun and My Cock's On Fire; Denver's was called The Ballad of Richard Nixon, Whitehouse went for the more wide-ranging Politics.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/shortcuts/2013/jan/28/church-sold-out-cd-silence