I have a particular fondness for songs that successfully embody the general zeitgeist of a location - songs that seem to encapsulate the essence of living, breathing and experiencing life in specific geography. Tracks like Men At Work's "Down Under", Restless Heart's "The Bluest Eyes in Texas", Houndmouth's "Sedona", Missing Person's "Walking in LA", and Stefy's "Orange County".
A global powerhouse and densely population urban metropolis like New York City has naturally inspired plenty of memorable music, from Frank Sinatra's 1979 cover of "New York, New York" to Jay-Z and Alicia Key's 2009 hip hop hit "Empire State of Mind". These tracks draw on the intoxicating idea of 'making it big' in the Big Apple, which draws thousands of hopeful migrants to its five burroughs from across the United States and the rest of the world.
And then there are the other songs - from artists like Paloma Faith, Sara Lov, and Milk & Bone - that draw upon the loneliness, isolation and heartbreak that also colour the lives of the denizens on this hectic, congested and uber-competitive metropolis. The narrative of victory and personal empowerment is gone, replaced by the drama and trauma of severed relationships.
Brooklyn-based singer songwriter and guitarist Peter Silberman's recently released track might just be one of my favourite 'sonic geography' tracks. While also deeply personal, it was inspired by Silberman's temporary loss of hearing and medical need for silence (due to sound stimuli becoming unbearably painful), rather than the death of a romance:
"“New York” is a lament for a relentlessly impermanent place. It’s a song of estrangement from streets that became unrecognizable in no time, and the end of a dissociation from sounds I’d come to ignore.
I’ve strung together this video from collections of footage archived in the public domain, from open-sourced memories of an obsolete city that maybe never was.
Through reorganizing these aimless images, I found a story of flight from crowded cacophony, a quiet struggle against New York’s stubborn gravitational pull, and a memory just beyond reach."
Source: Pitchfork
Against a minimalist backdrop of acoustic guitars, Silberman's uses mournful, whispery vocals ('...Like I never knew New York') to chart his healing process and renegotiated relationship with his sonic environment. The track works as a effective introduction to the 'concept' of his upcoming debut album Impermanence, which "goes beyond experiments in ambience" and "mimics the challenges in facing unexpected obstacles, charting a circular course between pain and peace, in which both are passing phases" (Brooklyn Vegan).
With the assistane of mix engineer Andrew Dunn, each song on the album was run through an aged tape, effectively achieving a timeless quality. The track could allude to contemporary New York, or to the New York of the 1890s, when the Statue of Liberty began welcoming waves of hopeful immigrants from distant shores. Without biographical information about Silberman's heightened sensitivity to sound and silence, the poignant song appears to evoke the flipside of the city's vaunted carpe diem ethos: the unfulfilled promises and expectations, alongside the perpetual longing for the unattainable.
