The Foghorn’s Lament – The Disappearing Music of the Coast – Jennifer Lucy Allan
The Foghorn’s Lament: The Disappearing Music of the Coast by Jennifer Lucy Allan / ISBN 9781474615044 / 296-page paperback published by White Rabbit (UK)
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‘A truly unusual and strangely revealing lens through which to view music and history and the dark life of the sea’ Brian Eno
‘As memorable, pleasurable and irrational as all the highest quests’ John Higgs
‘A perfect example of the power and beauty of industrial music’ Cosey Fanni Tutti
What does the foghorn sound like?
It sounds huge. It rattles. It rattles you. It is a booming, lonely sound echoing into the vastness of the sea. When Jennifer Lucy Allan hears the foghorn’s colossal bellow for the first time, it marks the beginning of an obsession and a journey deep into the history of a sound that has carved out the identity and the landscape of coastlines around the world, from Scotland to San Francisco.
Within its sound is a maritime history of shipwrecks and lighthouse keepers, the story and science of our industrial past, and urban myths relaying tales of foghorns in speaker stacks, blasting out for coastal raves.
An odyssey told through the people who battled the sea and the sound, who lived with it and loathed it, and one woman’s intrepid voyage through the howling loneliness of nature.
“Now that so many things can be – and are – recorded, I had forgotten that sound could also become extinct. The massive melancholic sound of the foghorn – the sound of safety and loss – is one of these and this colorful and detailed requiem tells the many interlocking stories of people who love it and try to preserve it. This has become one of my favorite books.” –Laurie Anderson
