The world is awash in sound. Some sounds comfort us. They lift you up and make you smile. Others agitate us. They boil the liquid in your eyes and make your teeth scream.





Right now I'm sitting in an inner-city cafe and I can distinguish somewhere around a dozen sounds. There is the chatter of customers, the assured clink of cup on dish as the staff clean up another empty, the welcoming robotic pleasantries of the counter staff, the looping buzz of the fan above my head, footsteps ( high heels most likely ) from the floor upstairs, the 90s acid-jazz soundtrack from the speaker to my left and the crinkle of a crisp wrapper a toddler is fingering to my right.





When you think of sound like that you begin to wonder how people relax at cafes at all. Yet relax I do. As we all do. The modern world is so flooded with sound that we have evolved to ignore most of it unless we stop to pay attention.





Music can be noise. We all know music we consider aggravating. One person's Miles Davis is another person's Miley Virus. Yet it isn't something we can't easily tune out from as we can with other daily distractions. Music is more personal. We form opinions and setup roadblocks.





The music of noise is a curious thing. It's not really my cup of tea. It's a big thing here in Japan though and some of the biggest names in the biz can be heard playing at a bar not far from my doorstep. I ventured in there a few times - to that dark, angry basement. I always left feeling generally dizzy, disturbed and fortunate not to have payed an entry fee.





So when I was invited to listen to the latest offering of music from Australian ambient artist Closer ( Liam Daly ), who describes his music as using noise and tape-hiss, I wasn't exactly scrambling for my headphones.





Closer - Liam Daly

Imagine my surprise then when I found myself so intrigued by the sounds on his EP "Heartache/Lifted" that I immediately turned off the lights, lay down and hit the replay button. This was noise with structure - something just a little familiar enough for me to grab onto and yet something so new I felt a long forgotten childlike delight.



