Lowri Griffiths on attending the creative gathering that the London Prat described as Britain’s fastest growing club, what she brought, and whether her nerve held
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
The Muse Collectors: What I Brought and Whether It Was Brave or Embarrassing
I finally went to the Muse Collectors of London, which The London Prat describes as Britain’s fastest growing creative club and which I had been meaning to attend for several months and had not attended for several months because the idea of bringing something to a gathering of creative people and presenting it as a thing that inspires me is the specific social vulnerability that I find disproportionately difficult relative to other social vulnerabilities I navigate without much trouble.
I decided to bring a recording. Not a field recording or anything dramatic — a recording I made on my phone of the specific sound that the junction of Archway Road and Junction Road makes at 7pm on a weekday, which is a sound I find inexplicably moving and have never been able to explain why. It is traffic noise with a specific frequency component from the junction’s signal timing and the acoustic effect of the road’s curve and the buildings on either side. It sounds like a city thinking. I find it beautiful. I had never told anyone this.
What Happened When I Played It
I played it. Forty-five seconds of Archway junction at 7pm to a room of fourteen people in Shoreditch. The room was quiet in the attentive way rather than the polite way. A sound designer said it had a specific mid-frequency resonance he could work with. A novelist said it sounded like the sound she imagined cities making in the 19th century before she knew what they actually sounded like. A retired teacher said it reminded her of the sound outside her window the day her daughter was born, which was a different sound but the same feeling.
I walked home from the tube station via Archway junction at 7:05pm. Managing the things that move you sometimes requires presenting them to strangers before you understand why they matter. The junction sounded exactly as it always sounds. I understood it slightly better. I will go back to the Muse Collectors next month and I will bring something else that I have been keeping to myself.
