I’ve been thinking about music in shops. It’s a cliche surely that people, if asked, would never say they wanted more or louder music to play in a shop. But I had an experience that got me thinking about the alternatives.
Last week I was in a shop that was some kind of converted industrial space with exposed pipes in the ceiling. It was raining heavily and this created two different drips in different pipes. So I was aware of two gentle “bong” type sounds happening occurring in different spaces above me, and in different rhythms. They might have both been constant but at different speeds. I certainly couldn’t predict when they happened. And then there was a third, electronic sound related to the shop door. It was a burst of maybe six repetitions of the same sound, like a skipping CD. It was a mix of something tuned and a crackle of noise that went dig dig dig dig dig dig and then stopped. It reminded me plenty of glitch music from about 20 years ago. It happened about every minute. Maaaaybe some kind of doorbell or something about air conditioning?
Over the top of all of this was some pretty shit indie rock playing all the time. And every time a track faded out I felt both relieved and excited, to hear these three other genuinely ambient sounds do their thing.
As might be obvious by my even bothering to write this up, I wish the music music wasn’t playing, because I heard the other sounds as music and enjoyed them much more. I guess I’d be in the minority, but it’d be a kind of fun experiment. It made me wonder if there would be certain types of shop/product that would be more or less appropriate for a gentle collage of noises.