Kitchen Sounds, Recorded at Night

This piece began as an accident. I left a recorder running on the kitchen table in my flat in Vilnius one night in February, meaning to capture the sound of rain on the window, and forgot about it. When I listened back the next morning there was no rain on the recording at all. There was something much stranger: five hours of a kitchen talking to itself.

What follows is a guide to the finished piece, which runs to forty minutes and is edited from that first night and six others. The times refer to the time of recording, not to the length of the piece.

00:14, the fridge

The fridge in my kitchen is old and it has opinions. Every eleven minutes, the compressor starts with a low shudder, runs for about four minutes and stops with a click that sounds exactly like someone setting down a cup. Over a night this becomes the basic rhythm of the room, the thing all the other sounds happen on top of. I think of it as the kitchen's pulse.

01:02, the clock

A wall clock, battery-powered, bought at a market for almost nothing. During the day it is inaudible. After midnight it is the loudest object in the flat. I left it in the piece at its real volume and several listeners have told me that it is unbearable, which is exactly how it sounds at one in the morning when you cannot sleep.

01:47, the tap

The kitchen tap drips when the water pressure changes in the building, which happens when someone upstairs runs a bath. So the tap is not really the tap. It is my neighbour on the fourth floor, who works late and bathes at two, heard through the plumbing. I have never met her. I know her bathing habits better than those of anyone I have lived with.

02:30, the street

A single car, slowing for the corner. Then a group of three people walking home, one of them singing a few lines of a song and stopping, laughing. Then nothing for eighteen minutes except the fridge and the clock.

03:15, the building

This is the part people ask about most. At about a quarter past three the whole building makes a sound, a long settling creak that seems to move from the top floor down, as if the building were stretching. I have heard it on every night I recorded. I asked the caretaker about it and he said it was the heating pipes cooling. That is probably true. It is also, on the recording, the most human sound in the piece.

04:40, the birds

Before any light, a single blackbird starts in the courtyard. Within ten minutes there are several. The fridge clicks off. The piece ends there, with the kitchen still dark and the day beginning outside it.

A note on listening

I made this piece to be listened to at night, in a kitchen, with the lights off. I know that is a lot to ask. But I have come to believe that most of the rooms we live in are full of sound we never hear, because we are always in them during the day, when they are drowned out by us. The kitchen at three in the morning is a different room. It is worth meeting.