Rawes launched the London Sound Survey (LSS) in 2009 as an online platform for his field recordings of London street life, which he had started making the previous year (the first was at Petticoat Lane Market in London’s East End). “I wanted to do something to understand this city,” he said in The Wire 341, “to produce my own version of it that other people could read or respond to.” Over the next ten years he maintained the site single handedly, building it into a unique multilayered sound map of the capital, embedded with his own recordings made at multiple locations across the city, as well as historical recordings and texts drawn from a variety of sources, including the BBC archives.

By 2020, when Rawes stopped updating the site, the LSS housed more than 2000 recordings, listed under categories such as Waterways, Estuary, Edgelands, Sound Actions, Street Cries, Unhealthy Noise, and more, all annotated with his dry descriptions and often wry commentaries, and from which could be gleaned an impression of London as a vast teeming metropolis whose population and built environment were diverse and in a state of constant flux.

In 2019 Rawes, who was born and grew up in West London, donated copies of the site’s recordings to the London Metropolitan Archive (LMA). To mark the donation he was interviewed by the LMA’s Paul Skinner. The interview provided an insight into his methods and philosophies as a recordist. It was one of a number of interviews with Rawes that were published online as interest in his recordist activities and the LSS grew. He was also an entertaining and erudite public speaker, appearing at many events to talk about his approach to field recording.

That approach was essentially quotidian. He was interested in the sounds of the day to day lives of working people, and the changing nature of the places in which they lived, and their interconnected histories. As he explained to Paul Skinner, discussing the origins of the LSS: “I wanted to do a website about the aspects of London that appealed to me most, which tended to be the more humble down-to-earth things, such as street markets, junk shops, old man’s pubs, canals, odd places and so on. A kind of ‘worm’s eye view’ of the city.”

This approach took him all over London, making recordings in locations all the way from the Thames barrier to the North Circular. He also wanted to capture the sounds, the atmospheres as he put it, of such places and the audio footprints of the people and wildlife that occupied them. He disavowed any attempts to politicise or philosophise about his work. He was a social historian of London whose chosen medium was sound (“It pulls you into a sense of place more effectively than a photograph does,” he once said). He had an acute knowledge of the city born out of an innate fascination with the people and places that made it and that were in turn made over by its often hidden forces. As he wrote on the LSS website: “Pleasure and curiosity have been the most reliable motivators, more so than a desire to 'document' the city, which just sounds pompous. It was also my way of capturing fragments of everyday experience so they could be reproduced in the minds of others.”

Thanks to an increasing interest in field recordings and sound art, in the 2010s Rawes became an active figure in London’s experimental sound and music community. In 2012 he spoke at a Wire Salon on sound maps. In 2013 the Vittelli label released These Are The Good Times, which compiled 21 recordings from the LSS and was mastered by Graham Lambkin with sleeve notes by Resonance FM’s Ed Baxter. Writing in The Wire 357, Nick Cain said of the recordings: “Some sound how you’d expect them to: customers in a cafe, a car wash in New Cross Gate, the River Lea waste depot at dawn. The best highlight the city’s diversity — a Caribbean Sunday service — or discover unexpected sound environments in liminal locations: refinery sirens in Canvey Island or a bat sonar in Catford.”

Rawes formed a working relationship with the composer and label runner Iain Chambers, who integrated Rawes’s field recordings into his own compositions, and in 2019 released Thames on his Persistence Of Sound label, another collection of Rawes’s recordings this time all made at various points along the capital’s river. Reviewing the record in The Wire 424, Ken Hollings wrote: “Rawes has a great feel for the drama of sound and knows precisely when to end each sequence to the best, most evocative effect, giving the listener just enough space to focus their attention on what’s happening.”

Rawes’s interest in people’s historical relationship to the soundworlds they inhabit was underlined by the publication in 2016 of the book Honk, Conk And Squacket: Fabulous And Forgotten Sound-Words From A Vanished Age Of Listening, which he described as a “collection of over 1500 forgotten and obscure sound-words found in Victorian county dialect surveys and a host of other old sources from across the English-speaking world. Taken together, they make the case that people in the past paid more attention to the sounds around them than we do today.”

Rawes's involvement in sound and music started in the early 1980s when he became active in London’s burgeoning industrial and anarcho-punk movements. Then calling himself Ian Slaughter he published the Pigs For Slaughter fanzine (‘The Fanzine For The Militant Anarchist Punk’), and was an organiser at the Autonomy Centre, a DIY space in London’s Docklands which had been part-funded by the “Bloody Revolutions”/“Persons Unknown” split single by Crass and The Poison Girls. In 1982 he contributed sound collage backing tapes to four tracks on the Topics For Discussion demo by the experimental anarcho-punk group The Apostles (he shared a squat with the band's founder). In the mid-80s he moved to Scotland, living in both Edinburgh and Glasgow, where he managed the Barrowlands venue and opened his own smaller venue next door, The Revue, booking groups such as Jesus & Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine and Savage Republic. Later in Edinburgh he worked on the door at the techno clubs Pure, Soma and Sex Beat.

Having moved back to London in the 90s, in the mid-2000s he started working in the storeroom of the British Library’s National Sound Archive, maintaining its collection of LPs, 78s, CDs and cassettes. It was there that he first became interested in the idea of making field recordings. As he explained to Paul Skinner: “I became curious about much of the material that I was handling – what was on these tapes? You could read the tape box covers and there were some surprising things. There was somebody who recorded the sounds of foghorns around Britain. There was a very strange character from Bradford who had recorded the sound of all the bus journeys it seemed you could take in Yorkshire, and he would write very meticulous notes on the back of each tape box. And I began to think that I too could make recordings of London.”

In 2014 Rawes left London and moved to Cambridge. At the time of his death he was working on a new field recording project, The Listening Trail, which consisted of soundwalks made in the areas around Cambridge and which he intended to publish as both a series of podcasts, and as a field recording diary on The Wire website. A number of Rawes’s friends and collaborators now hope to complete the project.

Discussing the LSS in The Wire 341, he stated: “So much of what goes on in the world is concerned with transient or ephemeral matters, it seems almost a revolutionary act to think in the long term: to say that this is something beyond me, that will outlive me… that someone in the future will hopefully be listening to it, but that they are unreachable, unknowable, and you are to them as well. Yet somehow you can transmit some sort of information to them.”

Tony Herrington

Thanks to Chris Low