17 July 2004 · Placard Headphone Festival, State 51, London, UK · duo with author & lettering artist Geoff Sawers

Photos by Goober Fox

Jonathan Coleclough and Geoff Sawers perform at Placard in July 2004. The sound of Geoff’s writing is amplified and modified by Jonathan, who is also processing live sounds from a heated metal cymbal and a small metal bowl. The audience are all wearing headphones.

Review

The silent disco

It was early on Saturday evening. The weather was perfect. London was mine. And so, obviously, I went to sit on the floor of a darkened warehouse in the East End, along with around 80 other people, all wearing headphones, almost none of them talking, few of them smiling, and all of us listening to what sounded, at times, like geese being massacred beside a motorway.
If the London headphones festival had been any more avant-garde, it would have gone off the scale, back round the other side, and bumped into Billy Joel. For 14 hours this weekend, on a Hoxton back-street, festivalgoers arrived bearing headphones and plugged them into one of hundreds of dangling sockets. The groups whose music were being beamed down the wires had names like AMP Studio and Antenna Farm and SSetrieb/OST, and the sounds they produced invoked an intriguing range of emotions: relaxation; entrancement; edginess; and the feeling that maybe something had gone wrong with their equipment.
"Think of a festival in reverse," the organisers explained on their website. "Forget about background chatter: for once, it's a chance for some focused listening." Except they weren't really the organisers: the festival, they went on, was part of a "three-month, non-stop, self-organising festival of headphones listening taking place across the globe". The London event was the city's second; the concept originated in Paris.
It was all deeply earnest, and yet, despite everything, rather amiable. It was family-friendly, for a start - someone had brought their baby - and welcoming for non-aficionados, too: a huge projection of a computer screen counted down the seconds until each performance ended, so we knew when to clap. It might otherwise have been hard to tell.
A sense of the ridiculous wasn't lacking, however. One performer "had been dangling his contact microphone over boiling water", James Albert, one of the festival's non-organisers, told me. "But it started melting, so he had to switch to cold."
Of course, perhaps the truly avant-garde thing to have done would have been to smuggle my iPod inside, surreptitiously plug it into one of the main output sockets, and blast everyone with a bit of Puccini, or the theme tune from The Archers. But while that may have pushed back the musical boundaries, it would also have been a bit mean.
Oliver Burkeman, Tuesday 20 July 2004, The Guardian (review)