Mum’s letters bring unwelcome news of Gilderoy’s work on the Dorking Heritage Association’s short film, Local Perspectives No. Sound is a carapace within which he shelters, his recessive personality unravelling within its depths, much as the narrator of Franz Kafka’s 1931 short story, The Burrow, descends into a maelstrom of paranoia and hyperacusis as he digs deeper into silence. A letter from Mum informs him that chiffchaffs are nesting by his shed. As an act of self-centering within the maelstrom of auditory torture he refers to his notebook of recorded sounds: Mum’s footsteps, the doorbell, Len’s poultry. As played by Toby Jones, what he learns is that sound, like any object in a garden, can be turned over to reveal, beneath its attractive, seductive externality, a seething world, visceral, appalling, as putrid as the worst stench, as repulsive as a gaping wound. Gilderoy is not a ‘real’ person, of course he is a haunted creation, the central character in Peter Strickland’s film, Berberian Sound Studio (2012), within which fiction he is haunted to himself. A possible scene might show him poring over the Wildlife Sound Recording Society journal, Wildlife Sound, nodding with pleasure as he reads Margaret Redfern Smith’s article on the art of a tree wasp: “The artist realised now, after two days seeing a wasp behave like a bird, she was recording this and could listen with the help of the microphone to the work of one of nature’s greatest artists.” He reflected on this, thinking about tape hiss. He is at home everywhere except in the world and his own body. In quiet moments he reads either Terence Dwyer’s 1971 book, Composing With Tape Recorders, or letters from his mother. Gilderoy is a hobbyist, a technician of the sacred (to borrow poet Jerome Rothenberg’s term). Does the hole stay still within the fervency of the centrifuge or is the most intense point of the whirling mechanism its silent core? That cutting into flesh, that red-hot torment nothing but violence inflicted on vegetables. Like the hole at the centre of a tape spool, Gilderoy occupies the absent fulcrum of an auditory mystery, a mystery made more mysterious by its transparency, its bathos.
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