To hear all the cars not honking

For Hamza Walker

On a Friday afternoon in February, while I was working in The Bows office across the river from downtown Mohkínstsis (Calgary), I heard an ungodly cavalcade of air horns almost directly above me. It felt like the building was going to collapse. I looked out the window and saw on the overpass running perpendicular to our building a convoy of Canadian flag-toting trucks rolling into downtown.

Every weekend, the convoy invades this city. I think the worst part of it isn’t being terrorized by a force from the outside; it’s all of the other cars on the street honking along in support. This is a terror you can’t unhear, even after the honking stops. For many of us, it keeps us on alert, omnipresently.

Conversely, the thing that we can’t hear is the sound of all of the cars on our streets that are not honking along with the convoy. For our emotional well-being, we maybe should try to hear that passive quietness.

In his curator’s introduction to the 2009 Renaissance Society exhibition Several Silences, Hamza Walker wrote: “Silence itself is a form of communication with many meanings. There are voluntary and involuntary silences—some comfortable, others not. There is [John] Cage’s silence, which calls for the distinction between clinical and ambient silences. There is silence as conscious omission or redaction. And then there is memorial silence.”¹

On September 11^th and 12^th, 2001, artist Matt Hanner recorded the sounds outside his home near Chicago, which was below a flight path to O’Hare International Airport. As the entire airspace of the United States and Canada was closed except to military, police, and medical flights on these two days, Hanner’s recordings—in the immediate aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center, Pentagon, and a fourth, missed target in Washington, DC—captured the sound of no jets.

Conversely, the thing that we can’t hear is the sound of all of the cars on our streets that are not honking along with the convoy. For our emotional well-being, we maybe should try to hear that passive quietness.

In No Jets, we hear the wind in two ways, both of which are indirect. As is common in field recordings, the wind registers as a scrapy rumble; its physicality forces the sound-sensing mechanism in the recorder to vibrate, generating a new sound instead of recording one that has occurred. The wind also takes on a more musical form, in the aleatory sounding of windchimes. How we hear—and furthermore, recognize—the wind in these recordings, one imagines, is how Hanner was hearing the sound of no jets. As we know from the very recent past, the sound of a standstill, a broken circuit, a total system shutdown is a sound that itself can’t be heard. We can only hear its effects, which often are very subtle. We feel these sensations as much as hear them.

As with silence, there are many kinds of passive quietness: gestures meant to perform kindness, care, grace, and empathy, not only absence; intensities, not only of aggressiveness and nonchalance, but also gentleness. Profundities abound in the range of passive quietnesses. But it is also important to remember that they all are passive and quiet.

This text was originally written in March 2022, to accompany The Bows’ presentation of Matt Hanner’s audio artwork No Jets III (2001/2014), which was installed as an open-air sound installation in The Bows’ reading nook and ran from March 17 to April 16.

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For a limited time, Matt Hanner’s, No Jets III (2001/2014) is available for listening online:

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Feature image: Matt Hanner, No Jets III. 2001/2014. Cover of limited edition LP, image courtesy of Stephen Lacy of Academy Records.

Image description: The clear cover of a blank CD with ‘No Jets’ hand-written in blue ink on the left side and ‘I 9.11.01’ on the right. On the top centre of the clear CD case, a yellow sticker that reads “AIR” in black and in all caps. Below the image of the CD is an orange banner with MATT HANNER type-written in the bottom right corner. 

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Godfre Leung is artistic director at The Bows.

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1. Hamza Walker,“Silence = Rose,” The Renaissance Society, 2009.