From the boutique-filled Dansaert neighbourhood in the city centre of Brussels, I head South towards the Brussels-Charleroi Canal. On either side I notice small, expensive shops. I’m drawn to ‘Attitude’, a bohemian flower shop and ‘Joya Brussels’, an avant-garde jeweller selling silver trinkets. The street lighting diminishes, I press on. I pass ‘Asian Green Chilli Foods’, a grocery store brimming with fresh fruit and vegetables. I cross the Chausée de Gand bridge. The buildings on this side are worn, some derelict holding visible evidence of the previous intense industrial period. I overhear a conversation in Arabic. A police siren sounds. A car, windows down, with the track ‘It’s a Sin’ by The Pet Shop Boys, pumps full volume. 

As I walk, the acoustic environment prompts me to think about sound, relationships, space, and time. I read somewhere how a relationship grounded in the sonorous contaminates spatial and temporal contingencies offering possible connections and links between and in one space and the next, between, in, and through one person and another.

I turn my attention to how sound situates me within these specific streets of the city of Brussels. I am sensitive to how the sounds I hear influence my feelings. 

A lone female voice with guitar accompaniment wafts from the window of a third floor apartment. I’m reminded of Italian philosopher Adriana Cavarero who notes, ‘the voice is always, irremediably relational’ (2005: 177). I feel drawn to her song. An indiscernible voice whispers ‘not yet’, I press on.

I arrive at the building, climb the metal fire escape stairs on the outside passing the ground floor, home to an events company brandishing the slogan, ‘the perfect location for your creation’. I continue to the fourth floor where views of the city of Brussels, in particular the shiny top of the spherical structure of the Atomium, constructed in the late 1950s for the ‘World’s Fair Exposition’ (Expo 58) catches my eye. Traversing a grey painted hallway, I enter a semi-lit studio, the floor creaks sending echoes around the vast open space. Not the creak of a haunted house, a creak more akin to a worn-out warehouse, an overloaded and overworked dense chipboard flooring. I pause. A vast space full of redundant objects stretches before me: an unstable wooden seated sculpture of sorts, several large loudspeakers, wooden chairs, tables, a well-used sofa, a very small blue leather jacket (almost too small for anybody) and a mouldy coffee cup. I look at the space around me, which of all the objects in the room might be a sound installation?

Sound engulfs, immerses, envelops me; it lends itself to interiority and intimacy as it is essentially mobile and contemporaneous, it arrives, attacks and surprises. Sound theorist Brandon LaBelle reminds me, sound ‘explicitly brings bodies together’ ( 2010: xxiv); it is a porous phenomenon connecting spaces and people. 

I turn my head as my ear, struck by the sound of voices in the air, hears sounds emanating from a collection of objects; words, tones, obscure shapes and shadows become audible. Unsure of what, or who I am hearing, I am drawn away from the fourth floor vistas into relation with the voices.

In the half-light I make out the reflection of a corrugated metal tube. I see fragments of bodies; the legs of a person from the waist down sitting on a black office chair, their head obscured by a blue plastic baby’s bath suspended, almost invisibly, by fishing wire.

I draw closer, some voices sound further away than others. I can’t see any faces or locate the exact source of the sound. French film theorist and composer Michel Chion (1999) describes this effect, when voice and image do not match, as the acousmetre. Chion cites examples from cinema, such as the booming voice of the wizard in The Wizard of Oz (1939), only to be revealed later as a little man with a large microphone. Though an effect we have now become widely accustomed to, in his seminal publication Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (1993), Chion notes how this is used to assign power and omnipotence, the all-seeing voice. In this case, however, the concealment of the source does not give a sense of omnipotence, more a sense of extended concealment. I cannot see exactly how the voice is being channelled, my perceptive capacities are sustained, my obligation to endorse the world through language is extended through an inability to articulate the experience, thereby expanding and deferring the space of spectatorship. I linger. 

I draw even closer. I see someone’s legs, their upper body is wrapped in foam, they are concealed by a plastic shower curtain patterned with small blue, red, and yellow polka dots.

I am in front of an odd collection of leftover materials, far from their habitual function: a baby’s bath, a yoga mat, a shower curtain, an upside-down chair faking it as a sound umbrella, a piece of green carpet too small to occupy any room, an upside down bag, and a broken unzipped sleeping bag.

Towards the centre of the space there is a metal opening, I am drawn to it, I rest my ear on the edge of the corrugated material. I feel the heat of voices, a human warmth that touches me on the ear, not like a warm breeze but something more rancid, a wet warmth fragrant with coffee and cigarettes.

The metal opening is dark and obscure inside, like the opening to a mouth or a cave. I look deep into it and try to trace the origin of the voices; my gaze is met with a void. There are some pieces of corrugated iron attached to its sides that open like a set of lips. I follow the tube with my eyes; it is almost like a throat. It reaches up toward the ceiling and splits into several red-ribbed plastic pipes. Again, I trace it with my eye, each tube seems to feed into one of the areas of amassed objects in the room.

‘This is for you’, a plastic tube is handed to me.

Holding the plastic tube, I press it to my ear to hear the fragmented sounds and voices of others. The tube vibrates and becomes warm in my hand. I move the opening to my mouth unsure of what to say. 

There is no task or instruction.

I cannot see the faces of my interlocutors suspending any ethical responsibility to make sense or construct a relation. I am unsure of what I might want to say, my self-interest suppressed in this setting.

My attention is focused on the possibility to either speak or to listen; I cannot do both simultaneously but must choose between one and the other. If I speak into the tube, I cannot hear the sound of my own voice. I put words out into the tube with little or no notion of where they go, what they might sound like, who they might affect and how. Iiiiiii speak into the ssspace in front of me. I listen, sounds emerge from the red plastic tube in my hand. I listen. I hear my own heartbeat and become increasingly aware of the space my body takes up. There is no pressure to participate or to speak.

I linger inside the structure, content to receive and emit sounds, using my voice as an instrument, without any particular need or want.