There was a time when I was 16 and I really needed money, but there was no work.
It was winter, there were no vacancies, plus I had to combine work and study.
And out of hopelessness I started working as a loader in the Pyaterochka store on Mayakovsky Street. The work shift was 12 hours and I was paid peanuts. The duties included laying out food, dragging various heavy things and unloading cars. Cars were rare, but I had to go around the store and do something all the time.
I constantly caught arrogant (and sometimes pitiful) glances from visitors. It was constantly awkward. I was trying to distract myself and think about something else, playing different games in my head – counting the tiles on the floor and the like, coming up with various concepts and micro-studies, trying to find a new meaning in advertising slogans and so on. In 12 hours there was enough time to think and come up with a lot.
But most of all I was interested in listening to the sounds of refrigerators and air conditioners. Their noises, mixed with the sounds of the cash registers, voices of people and the beating of grocery trollies, formed into some kind of full-fledged track in my head. I realized that I can adjust the volume level of certain objects by moving around the store. For example, when I was moving farther from the cash register closer to the refrigerators, the sound of the refrigerators was heard more clearly, or when I moved closer to the carts they sounded louder than anything else.
Time flowed slowly and I was saved only by dreaming I was in other places, but of course I always came back to the store. I worked there for about a month, and then everything went back to normal and I found another job, but this professional deformation, if you can call it that, stayed with me.
So one day I recorded this track, based on the droney tone of the refrigerator and various other sounds. According to the idea, this is something like the inner world of a loader who is in his thoughts and dreams. At the end he leaves his workplace and it starts to rain. I'm writing this just to explain approximately what my vision of sound is and what it means for me, using the example of this track. It's the same with various radiograms, Morse code, drones, and noise synths – it's like their sound takes me to some other state, helps me to get distracted, or something like that.
Here is just an example of this. This is just based on the recorded drone of the refrigerator from Pyaterochka store and other sounds from the same place.