Cassette
The only sound on ‘Off the hook’ is the phone in the office where I work my day job. It was late, I was trying to finish something after everyone else had gone home. The tone came from nowhere and cut through the air for a second. Then it abruptly stopped. Then a series of beeps, like someone was dialling. Then silence. Initially spooked, I realised that, moving some papers around my always cluttered work desk, I’d knocked the phone off the hook. This routine – a held tone then fake dialing - the phone goes through if you’ve picked it up but not made a call. An attempt to get your attention perhaps. To fill an awkward silence maybe.
I put the phone back, slightly off the hook, and recorded it with the voice recorder on my mobile phone. It picked up the same routine, with some added background noise from inside and outside my office in central London. That recording was cut up, moved around and treated to create the eight tracks on Off the hook.
Nothing was added apart from some effects on my computer. Delay and pitchshifting mainly. The final track is the original phone recording of the phone unaltered and played in full.
There’s something about the sound of the phone, the phone itself, the situation and the location that feels pertinent to me. It cut through. But I don't really know what it said. You’ll probably have your own ideas.
Why record it? Why not?
"I love the purity of it. If you’ve ever fallen asleep with an off-the-hook landline lying on the bed next to your ear, you’ll be familiar with the hypnagogic dreamworld they conjure here.” Philip Sherburne, Futurism Restated.
