Anyone who flicks through the CD racks of a high-street megastore or watches the ads on cable television in the afternoon these days would be forgiven for suspecting that they suffer from false memory syndrome. Classic Wartime Ballads, The Swingin' Sixties, I Love the 1980s - do such compilations represent what the past really sounded like? No film or TV series set in the 1970s is complete without the Bay City Rollers trilling "Bye Bye Baby". Yet my own memories are of singing Sunday-school hymns and humming along to Johnny Mathis. Mostly, my sound universe wasn't song-based at all. It consisted of the murmur of lawnmowers in summertime, the lonely swish of aeroplanes across July skies, the crash and ping of the first Space Invaders game at the local leisure centre.
Geoffrey O'Brien's Sonata for Jukebox is an artful and beautifully written memoir that uses music, especially the changing ways in which it was played, transmitted and heard, to explore a dimension of 20th-century US history that is rarely investigated. His grandfather was leader of the Rainbow Club Orchestra, a dance band in 1930s Pennsylvania. Their playing, even of boogie-woogie numbers, was restrained and disciplined. They performed at bandstands and dance halls, in the mill towns and mining communities where they themselves worked, for little reward other than the pleasure of musicianship itself. However, his father, Joe O'Brien, was a well-known DJ in New York during the 1960s. Slick, fast-paced boosterism was his talent. The wisecracks and patter never stopped. Like the jukeboxes and clubs of that period, the main product he sold was the idea of modernity, of consumption.
O'Brien interweaves family memoir with a series of subtle and probing essays on such artists as Burt Bacharach, Harry Smith and Brian Wilson. He is alive to the ways in which, especially when one is young, music does not merely confirm our view of the world, but often plays a crucial part in shaping it. Discussing the soul singers Barbara Lewis and Smokey Robinson, he says: "These voices carve cities. With eyes closed we're moving through skylines, canals, tremulous walkways. The sinuosity of the vocal line is establishing a model for the whole body, for the spirit: learn to unfurl and extend."
Sonata for Jukebox ends with the author musing on the way that "silence is disappearing from the planet". It's a topic that is also central to Haunted Weather by David Toop. One of Britain's most celebrated writers on music, whose previous books on hip-hop and the history of ambient are both contemporary classics, he is bored by the sound of "new bands copying old bands or playing music so perfected and dominated by control systems that the audience might as well be watching DVD". He craves a music that is less bling-bling, less wedded to hoary guitar riffs, something more than an industrial product.
As is the case for many older listeners, rock's bacchanalian impulses and its propulsive egotism have a dwindling appeal for Toop. He is intrigued by quietness, music rich in microtones, echoes, glitches, sub-textures; music that prizes "openings, gaps, ambiguity and hiatus". He is fascinated by the turntablist Christian Marclay, who once issued a 12-inch record without a cover so that the dirt and scratches it gathered - in other words, all the traces of its existence in the world - became an integral part of the experience of listening to it. He also describes the recordings of Peter Cusack, who compiled a CD of London sounds, ranging from slamming doors at Victoria Station to swifts flying over Stoke Newington.
Toop matches form to content. He proceeds by association and analogy rather than argument. He uses insights drawn from architecture, Japanese horticulture and the ghostly travelogues of artists such as Janet Cardiff and W G Sebald. A composer as well as a writer, he is captivated by hybrid forms: sounds that blur the boundaries between noise and music, acoustic and digital, composed and aleatory.
Slowly, a politics of listening emerges: one that shuns the false sonic consciousness promoted by MTV culture; that is attentive to apparently inaudible or inaccessible voices; that is intimately aware of the importance of landscape and community. It is fitting also that the heroes of this marvellous book are jazz improvisers:
The quality of their listening was intense, their attention to detail microscopic, their responses endlessly varied and engaging, their instrumental skills given over to the creation of an unfolding group relationship rather than a showcase of parallel virtuosity.
Sukhdev Sandhu is the author of London Calling: how black and Asian writers imagined a city (HarperCollins)
