Rain Rain – by Indigo Bailey
ISLAND | issue 168
Taps trickle without flooding the bathroom. The washing machine, a whirring ouroboros, persists on an endless cycle. Outside is a thunderstorm without lightning – just a rumbling that seems to deepen but never will. You layer 3D Rain with Rain on a Tent in an attempt to reveal a fourth dimension of sound, a place to sleep where you won’t be woken by your heartbeat. Curating Earth’s sounds makes you feel at once small – a tiny, submerged animal – and omnipotent. The app is called ‘Rain Rain’ and this name captures its greatest strength: repetition. Or: incantation.
This is the summer when you shiver through the nights regardless of the heat and hungrily seek new rituals. Your mum tells you that it takes sixty days to form a habit, so you loop up the street and back through the bushland over and over. The same goat stands on the same patch of hill. You watch his mane clot a little more each time you pass. You borrow mantras from ASMR artists with perfect eyeliner and briefly break a twenty-year streak of agnosticism, filing a virtual prayer request to be posted on the corkboard of a nunnery somewhere in Virginia. (On their YouTube channel the nuns sway through rippled static, a golden retriever nudging their knees.)
This is the summer when fires rage across the Bass Strait. Your dad raps the water tank with his knuckles and it’s a husk. And, in your room, it rains.
With the recent surge of apps and videos offering rain ambience, something as amorphous as ‘the weather’ can be remixed in our bedrooms – halted, intensified, dulled. Rain becomes a private experience over which one has total control: a customisable therapeutic tool. ‘Consumers’ of rain sound YouTube content – videos that can span twenty-four hours – often experience them as a salve for isolation. Meanwhile, these comment sections form their own worlds, celebrating collective relief and attesting to the existence of a devoted virtual community. ‘I pray that whatever is hurting or whatever you are constantly stressing about gets better,’ someone writes on a ten-hour video called Pleasant Sounds of Rain and Thunder Near Medieval Stables. ‘May peace and calmness fill your life.’
As ‘content’ proliferates in the form of apps, advertisements and products, ‘attention’ is increasingly described as a commodity. Still, French philosopher Yves Citton questions the concept of an ‘attention economy’. Instead of edging us away from these exchanges (‘Go outside!’), Citton redefines attention as an ecology in itself, spore-like and utterly social. ‘Even when I think I am gathering on my own,’ he writes, ‘it turns out that we are gathering together.’ Listening to rain ambience, my attention often leaks into the comments. When I scroll back up, the rain is transformed by new knowledge of childhoods in Florida, the entrails of Pacific monsoons.
In Mary Ruefle’s poem ‘Rain Effect’, ‘the effect of the rain on the bridal / veil’ becomes the rain wetting the horse’s mane, becomes the gloss on the groom’s patent leather shoes, becomes the sea, becomes the rain over a bridge drawn by Hokusai, again becomes ‘the sea cold as love, the sea swelling / to a tidal wave, at the tip of the wave white.’ Rain is the membrane between the couple’s austere ceremony and the eros of the universe. In movies, too, rain dissolves stuffiness, manoeuvring bodies into secluded corners and coaxing them into damp, ecstatic embraces. Rain ambience also brings bodies together, even merging them. The looped sound makes sure that my experience can only ever be seconds away from another listener’s, culminating in a synchronised pulse, a shared breath.
Rain sounds send us further within ourselves, reaching towards an internal rhythm and morphing with our own histories of rain. But they also signal interdependence. More than two hours into Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia (1999), a convoluted cast of characters (including Tom Cruise’s proto-incel and a grief-addled Julianne Moore) are brought together by a shower of dead frogs. Transcending human agency, rain reveals the links between us.
Rain ambience reminds us not just of shared climates, but of global webs of labour and transportation, as rain nourishes soil to produce food purchased by faraway consumers. Rain ambience echoes this interconnectedness, in part because listeners share an absence: rain is inaudible when you live on the second floor of an apartment building; rain itself is becoming more sporadic. But it also replicates this in virtual space, forming a tenuous international community.
On YouTube, rain ambience videos are called Heavy Rain for Sleep, Study and Relaxation, Meditation or Rainy Jazz Café – Slow Jazz Music in Coffee Shop Ambience for Work, Study and Relaxation. The two core reasons for listening to rain sounds are to attain peace and to achieve productivity, to self-soothe and self-optimise. Commenters describe the power of repetitive rain sound as akin to hypnosis, lulling them into a deeper state – of sleep, of concentration.
‘Complete attention is like unconsciousness,’ wrote Simone Weil, the French revolutionary and mystic. Weil was sceptical of ‘concentration’ as a sort of tightening, as a rigid gaze fixed on an outcome. She argues for ‘complete attention’ as total receptivity – the opposite of hypervigilance. Weil’s statement is eerily prescient in a world where our attention constantly ricochets. Creating stillness through repetition, rain sounds can nurture an attentive unconsciousness, undeterred by social media’s fervent pace. However, rain sounds are both a respite from action and a way to sheath anxieties in order to do more.
Weil seeks a mode of attention that revolts against a hierarchy of doing over being, refusing to screen out errant pleasures, while ambience listeners often gather to celebrate efficiency (‘i finished my 2 weeks of assignment in 3hrs listening to this Thanku’). Rain sounds transport us into a primordial fantasy – a watery, rhythmic haven – yet we still retain control. This contradictory appeal recalls the polar drives encouraged by late-stage capitalism: apathetic consumption and tireless labour. In virtual space, these states are becoming increasingly blurred. To consume is also to generate information, collected to predict our tendencies and to assess in which directions they might be coaxed. Rain ambience is no escape from these loops of extraction and consumption. Rather, it reminds us that profiles about our behaviours can be curated even as we sleep. Resisting the embryonic pull, our avatars stay awake, awaiting diagnoses.
Following the advice of your psychologist, you section your days into twenty-minute blocks. Rain Rain helps you to complete tasks. The dappled drone lends everything a naturalistic tenor – knotted posture, Outlook inbox, and aching jaw becoming earthly and inevitable. When the sound stops, you try to locate your body in the world by counting pademelon silhouettes or the eucalypts moulting white bark like lashings of warped papier-mache. For Weil, attention is a form of prayer. This thought guides you as you pass the stiff ferns, again, again, trying to patchwork a feeling of solidity out of repeated action. Still, you wonder about the difference between devotion and compulsion.
John Cage cobbles together the sounds of rushing water, clambering bodies and clanging metal. In a famous 1960 television performance of his piece ‘Water Walk’, Cage releases steam from a simmering pot, places a plant into a bathtub to water it, and pours champagne into a flute. The audience laughs as ordinary objects are brought into the scene. Cage was an instigator of the Fluxus movement: an avant-garde tendency towards gestures of the everyday. Another predecessor of today’s ambience is the Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto. In the 2017 film Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda, Sakamoto dangles a recorder affixed to wire through a gash in the ice. He tells us he is fishing for sound. The sound he catches is dynamic – a writhing creature. Like Cage’s soundscapes, it isn’t regular; it crinkles violently, gasps in and out of being.
Focusing on the rhythms of the ‘mundane’, Cage’s and Sakamoto’s works are keen to decentre the artist as a singular genius detached from the world of common matter. The spread of ‘ambient’ sounds online – rain but also laundry, ocean waves, brown noise – seems to reflect this. But Cage and Sakamoto’s work is not so much about repetition as it is about ceasing. ‘I don’t need sound to talk to me,’ said Cage in an interview in which he celebrated silence. His favourite ‘sound experience’ was traffic: a constant iteration which is nevertheless suffused by pause, tension and frustration. ‘If you listen to Beethoven or Mozart, you see that they’re always the same. But if you listen to traffic, you see that it’s always different.’ Perhaps rain is traffic, or traffic is rain – a rhythm that contorts, a chaotic rush suddenly pooled.
‘Ambience’ comes from the French ambiant, for ‘surrounding’. Ambient sounds must be powerful enough to conjure a world that ‘surrounds’, immersing and encompassing us. Yet they’re also meant to be subtle, surrounding like breath or blotted light. In the liner notes for his 1978 album Music for Airports / Ambient 1, Brian Eno describes ambience as ‘a tint’. He distinguishes ‘Muzak’, a ‘lightweight and derivative’ form of background music, from ambience. The latter refuses to conceal the ‘acoustic and atmospheric idiosyncracies’ of our environments, instead preserving a sense of ‘doubt and uncertainty’. Eno’s ambience doesn’t pander for our serenity. Keys and marimbas wander on tiptoes. Kids mess with breathy heirloom pianos, fingers withdrawn as if from fire. Choral synths are layered, their ghostly exhales quickening, calming, quickening again.
You pack fistfuls of valuables in a plastic briefcase and shove it into the back of Dad’s Subaru. It rattles and slides as he drives. It waits. Meanwhile, you circle the dam’s crumbling rim, imagining it’s a crater. Meanwhile, you loop an empty football pitch, following the dried footprints of swarming bodies. Meanwhile, the plovers surround you in a feeble ring. ‘God is a circle whose centre is everywhere,’ wrote Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, a seventeenth-century Mexican nun. Listening, a circle. Silence, a circle. Waiting, a circle.
The defining aspect of today’s ambience is its stability. On YouTube, rain sounds will cycle for up to twenty-four hours, while the ones on Rain Rain will go on forever, creating a convincing microclimate of repetition. The loops are short and are designed to repeat seamlessly. Like the sounds of early ambience pioneers, rain ambience emulates familiar textures. Yet its creators subtract the discordance, replacing it with surety. They urge faith not only in our immediate spaces – like ‘Muzak’ does in a dentist’s office – but in the whole world. All is dimmed to a wet glow.
Plenty of artists have experimented with perpetuity. In his 2021 documentary, The Velvet Underground, Todd Haynes explores the band’s early obsession with drone sounds. They whip and surge throughout the opening credits, collaged with clips from Velvet Underground mentor Andy Warhol’s archives. The images glitter with static, jolting between different subjects’ gazes. Repetition was instrumental to the American avant-garde, as we can see in Warhol’s own obsessive reproductions. By silk-screening images from the press, creating a sea of mutations, Warhol lent celebrity culture an absurd air of permanence, denaturalising it with brutal outlines and blows of colour.
These artists’ impulses were bent towards excess and erosion. Warhol’s prints were deliberately misregistered, quivering as they multiplied. Meanwhile, drone sound presses upon the boundaries of its vessel, speakers nearly collapsing under its weight. In Haynes’s film, these ‘limitations’ are mirrored by dancing bodies – mod silhouettes slowly turning limp, heels digging into sticky linoleum. Repetition eked out vulnerability – in people, objects and networks. By contrast, contemporary virtual ambience seems to gain force by being invulnerable.
When it does come, the rain will make you impatient, as you wait for the drops to seep into a solid mass. At home, the rain is either feral, etching everyone’s driveways, or achingly delayed. ‘Artificial’ rain has begun to feel more real than actual rain. With repetition comes sedimentation; with sedimentation comes permanence.
‘What a notion it is, after all – these small / shapes!’ writes Anne Carson in her poem ‘On Rain’. ‘I would get lost counting them. Who / first thought of it? How did he describe it to / the others?’ Rain is atomised by Carson’s wonder. Each drop is a being, the rain’s clarity sending us – the people, ‘the others’ – into its background. When the rain arrives you will supplement it with Rain Rain, smoothing the sound back into shapelessness.
Rain sound compels us towards a meditative stillness, a recalibration of body and mind amidst the rigid schedules of modern capitalism. YouTube algorithms link rain sounds to forms of ASMR urging a more direct connection between sound and embodiment, portraying scalp massages or invoking box breathing and body scanning. However, this integrated ‘mindfulness’ depends on our unflinching trust in algorithms, our belief that they will always nourish and soothe.
Rain ambience assimilates rain into a familiar way of interfacing with the world: scrolling. In ‘So Much This: The Sameness of Internet Culture’, Cher Tan writes about the cyclicity of algorithms: ‘flesh experiences inform screen experiences and loop back again, forming a groundswell of aesthetic and taste.’ As we move through virtual spaces like Instagram, our existing attachments – memorable events, friends’ photos, favourite tattoo studios – are mimicked, evolving into targeted ads and seeding fresh desires to consume. While much of rain ambience is freely available, there are also paid rain apps, and even Rain Rain has a premium membership option. Many ambient rain videos on YouTube include ads, often buried past the hour mark, burger patties sizzling as we sleep.
It’s as if rain has become information – a theory supported by a growing yield of uncanny AI-generated rain sounds – just as information has become rain, ‘content’ a frenetic outpouring. This statement resonates with the work of Berlin artist–academic Hito Steyerl, whose multimedia productions engage with questions of art, justice and capital within a world increasingly intermeshed with the virtual. In her 2014 video installation Liquidity Inc., Steyerl reveals how a watery vocabulary – seemingly innocent and innate – can be deployed to reinforce the values of late-stage surveillance capitalism. The viewer of the installation is invited to lounge upon oversized pillows, witnessing a soft flurry of rain. This rain revisits us throughout the piece, alongside flashing pop-ups, notifications and browser windows. It punctuates the story of Jacob Woods, who turned to MMA fighting after losing his job in finance during the 2008 recession. (‘You don’t want to be frozen,’ Woods advises, ‘that’s the kiss of death, so you’re always being liquid, and moving, whether you’re striking, faking fainting, or doing take-downs.’)
‘Being water’, then, can be a parable for adaptability and compliance in the face of economic precarity and excessive surveillance. Steyerl reminds us that our personal information is stored in a ‘cloud’ – a vocabulary that allows tech companies to naturalise themselves, slotting data collection into a serene ecosystem. A cosy reunion with nature’s rhythms is not a foolproof mode of resistance against the technologies of late-stage capitalism.
Last week, your psychologist asked whether you were afraid of the marketplace. At first you thought she meant the supermarket, but soon realised that she meant the world in general. Synthetic rain becomes a soundtrack for days spent under a weighted blanket. In bed, you play your favourite farm simulation game, Stardew Valley, where you move through predictable life stages – courtship, marriage, property development – in a tirelessly fecund landscape. Your dreams are no longer fragments. Drenched in ambience, they’re as indistinct as sodden tissue.
We are in the library of an Edwardian mansion. We are in a version of a Swiss cottage, where everything is still but a candle’s pulsing gleam. On YouTube, rain sounds frequently accompany historical scenes. While these spaces are highly specific, the rain makes them feel universal, enchanting them with a lived-in authenticity, like softly smeared mascara. Often, ambient videos have a touristic undercurrent, producing a feeling of intense familiarity and distance. We gaze at the Eiffel Tower from our animated penthouse interior, carefully strewn documents indicating our corporate success. We admire Princeton on a Stormy Night.
Listeners report being transported home by rain sounds, but they also reveal hazy desires for other worlds (to visit Europe, to safely inhabit a park bench at night). Rain ambience brings disparate memories into shared space; yet, through its visual language, it also reproduces a hierarchy of desirability. Despite rain’s (near) universal quality, only select locations have earnt its calming aura.
Rain ambience is the aesthetic of an enduring elsewhere. Reaching into, and decontextualising, our memories, it can forge a narrative link between our specific pasts and ‘desirable’ futures of privilege. Rain – ‘these small / shapes!’ (Carson) – becomes the sound of cohesion. Wrapped in wet sheen, places become so familiar that they are abyssal. This applies not just to the alien renderings on-screen, but to our own bedrooms.
There are sounds you can’t access, like Whistling Blizzard and Heavy Rainstorm. They are reserved for those with a premium membership, which would set you back $5.99 per month. You find that the more vigorous storms make you feel more secure, so it makes sense that these sounds are so exclusive. Surprisingly, Mars Wind – a chthonic croak with a current of wispy static – is available free of charge. You experiment now, layering Mars Wind with Purring Kitten, rendering the scorched landscape hospitable.
‘May the dark thoughts, the overthinking and the doubt exit your mind right now,’ commands one user on an ambient rain video with millions of views. ‘May clarity replace confusion. May peace and calmness fill your life. Rain lovers everywhere can sleep while waiting for the real rain to quietly soothe our souls and water our planet Earth.’ While, for some listeners, rain sounds might evoke the threat of incoming floods, for others the rain signifies mass catharsis – not only the nourishment of land, but the clarification of our minds, the cleansing of ‘our souls’. These users prophesise collective healing at a planetary scale, rain sounds conjuring a return to a mythically untouched earth, beyond guilt and grief. Of course, such prophesies neglect that colonising, capitalist systems of extraction (and their legacies) are not ‘natural’, and nor will they dissolve organically.
Despite the optimism of some listeners, rain ambience visualisers frequently take on an apocalyptic mood. You are always sheltering alone in dim, cavernous interiors. The ambience is never punctured by human or animal sounds. Unceasing rain only signals abundance up to a point, and these moody landscapes are further reminders of this: the fragile lines between prosperity and loss, solitude and isolation. Maybe it’s not just the idealism, but the quiet desolation, which makes this rain so comforting. Italian philosopher Paolo Virno writes of the sublime as the melding of ‘dread and refuge’ one feels when witnessing a snowslide. Caspar David Friedrich painted shattered earth, storm clouds haunting gullies. Even today, downloading them as pixellated jpegs, these paintings give me an anxious sense of relief.
‘I ask myself what it is that might keep me safe,’ writes Virno, ‘not from one given danger or another, but from the risk inherent in my very being in this world. Where is it that one can find unconditional refuge?’ Rain ambience creators do their best to find refuge in repetition. Yet, in the process, they forge a feeling of apocalyptic ambience which shares similarities with ‘doomscrolling’ – the practice of scrolling through news of (for instance) war, exploitation and species loss in such a way that induces numbness. Like doomscrolling, rain ambience can make peace and apathy almost indistinguishable, suspending us in a fantasy of a static planet. In this circle, we lose out on the brutal, tender catharsis of an ending. The mudslide. The mould. The wood stained green under slackened skin.
For the seventh time today, the water deliverer slides, languid, from his towering front seat. Your dad hands him a wad of cash, thicker than ever, and soon the pipes splutter into fullness. It’s always when the last of us have given up that the rain finally comes. First it settles into the clavicle of a roadside wallaby, then it soaks the crumpled spot where the animal’s body compressed the dirt before the flesh eased off. In the morning, you will walk, and the dampness of the grass will singe your calves. You walk, the dampness singes. You walk, the damp. ▼
Image: Ben Wicks - Unsplash
This essay appeared in Island 168 in 2023. Order a print issue here.
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This essay won the Island Nonfiction Prize, which was supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.