Listen: On Music, Sound and Us by Michel Faber review – bum notes

The author of Under the Skin’s eccentric take on music fails to reverberate

Listen! These days everyone is telling you to listen, how to listen, why it’s important to listen. Active listening, deep listening, the art of listening: for a fee – sometimes a large fee – life-body-spirit magi will teach you how to refine your ears. Listen to your gut, they say. Your breathing. To others, too, the excluded. Listening is not just self-care; it’s ethics, social engagement, imaginative reparation. Often listening is more cant than action: it’s what every other politician promises to their constituents, what CEOs vow to do when their employees get uppity.

Listening is a passion of novelist and short-story writer Michel Faber. In his house, he reveals, there’s a whole room devoted to cassettes, vinyl, archived MP3s; when he goes round to other people’s homes he often squats down to peer at his hosts’ CD collections. An early novella, The Courage Consort (2002), followed an experimental vocal ensemble on a concert tour of Belgium, and featured riffs on auditorium acoustics, allusions to composers such as Cathy Berberian and Karlheinz Stockhausen, and outbursts from the group leader in which he complained: “I didn’t cast my boat out on the dangerous sea of a cappella music to sing Obla-di, Obla-da to a crowd of funny philistines in funny hats.”