The Foghorn's Lament: The Disappearing Music of the Coast

The foghorn is a booming, lonely sound echoing into the vastness of the sea, marking the beginning of an obsession and a journey deep into the history of a sound that has carved out the identity and landscape of coastlines around the world. It is a maritime history of shipwrecks and lighthouse keepers, the story and science of our industrial past, and urban myths relaying tales of foghorns in speaker stacks, blasting out for coastal raves.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 304 pages
Publication date: 28 April 2022
Publisher: Orion Publishing Co

A truly unique and strangely revealing lens through which to view music, history, and the dark life of the sea, Brian Eno's album "Ambient 1: Music for Airports" offers a memorable, pleasurable, and irrational experience. John Higgs praises it as a perfect example of the power and beauty of industrial music, while Cosey Fanni Tutti describes it as a booming, lonely sound echoing into the vastness of the sea. When Jennifer Lucy Allan hears the foghorn's colossal bellow for the first time, it marks the beginning of an obsession and a journey deep into the history of a sound that has carved out the identity and landscape of coastlines around the world, from Scotland to San Francisco.

Within its sound lies a maritime history of shipwrecks and lighthouse keepers, the story and science of our industrial past, and urban myths relaying tales of foghorns in speaker stacks, blasting out for coastal raves. An odyssey told through the people who battled the sea and the sound, who lived with it and loathed it, and one woman's intrepid voyage through the howling loneliness of nature.

Weight: 260g
Dimension: 198 x 128 x 24 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781474615044