reading sound

Whilst of course not a simple march of succession, the shift from vinyl to compact disc and now to MP3 represents a kind of arc to an increasing impenetrability of the musical format, as music’s physical form becomes less and less clear through the recording device:

  • CD obscures the particularity of the grooves for an unreadable surface sheen, that is nevertheless read by laser in a spiralling movement. We cannot see it but we can still hold it. (with burnt cds you get the unique phenomenon where one can ‘gauge’ the amount of data or length of recording via how much of the original surface has been burnt a slightly darker colour)
  • MP3 quite stubbornly hides the process of its encoding/decoding within the player (be it mobile or computer terminal), there is nothing to penetrate or read or look at beyond the file, which of course can be constituted as a sequence of code, but only at great effort and still completely indecipherable.

What does this mean culturally? For music?

What about the sense in which this impetus to obfuscating stands in inverse relation to the quality (conceived of as 'fidelity') of the recording? Is it true, as Adorno argues, that the better a technology gets at reproduction the less 'real' the music sounds? This is attached to notions of authenticity and aura, which themselves are fraught with the danger of privileging the original artifact, something that cannot possibly be done in terms of sound recording (this is a positive thing, in my view).

Just some thoughts...



Why I hate iPods #143

Amongst my biggest problems with these devices, or any other portable digital music players, is they way in which they structure a social tautology - the individual no longer moves to the rhythm of the urban soundscape but to their own daily schedule, continually modulating external events' affective states by bringing them in line with what's inside. Eg. I'm on the train, I don't like the sound of these people talking about whatever, I'll put on my iPod and listen to x because it will put me in the right mood for what I need to do when I get off the train, and then when I'm walking to there I'll put on y because it's good walking music, and so on and so on. Rather than attunement to whatever sonic textures surround one, the digital player allows you to continually collapse bodily and mental movement so that the only thing your listening practices mirror is yourself. Not even does the iPod force you to at least sit with a particular piece of music (say, a cassette or a disc), but at 'touch' you can switch things around endlessly, shuffle them up until all that's left in meaningful, affective, material terms is whatever you want it to be. Sure, this isn't some kind of liberated freedom rather a form of micromanagement of the self, post-Foucauldian control in action. Just what about the music though, at least? Does it even matter anymore? Is a politics of genre (or artist, or period, or any other identity of actual songs) even possible under these conditions?


"Frances Densmore, collector, with Mountain Chief of the Blackfoot tribe, 1906. On behalf of the Smithsonian Institution's Bureau of American Ethnology, Densmore made many field trips using Edison's recently invented wax cylinder recorder, as pictured here. [T]his photo, taken in Washington, D.C., reflects the special aims and conditions not of the "oral poetry act" but rather of what might be called the "photography act." For the benefit of the photographer and posterity, Mountain Chief has donned his ceremonial native dress (his own?). At his side are emblems of the vanishing Native American culture that Densmore was doing her best to document. The collector adopts a non-assuming pose, eyes lowered on the machine. Mountain Chief gestures as if declaiming, although any sound that he is uttering at this moment would not be registered, for he is seated before the listening horn of the machine, not the recording horn."

I can't even begin...


No Age - Nouns

This will hopefully find it's way into Beat but of course you never know ... and reading over the review it struck me that it seemed more at home in the knotty intellectual domain that is (con)temporary, so here you go!

No Age - Nouns
(Sub Pop / Stomp)

A reactionary evaluation of the debut proper from No Age might go like this: so they're signed to Sub Pop (after releasing a string of totally indie vinyls that were collected into Weirdo Ripper), therefore they had lots of cash to make Nouns, so how come it sounds like shit, like they just chucked the tape recorder in the middle of the room and pressed play? I want to hear the KILLER tracks underneath all this crap! Well sure, No Age do pile things on, it's rough, distorted and their tracks are buried under a certain mulch, but this itself is a subtle reconfiguration of the traditional lo-fi aesthetic that one might initially angrily attribute to Nouns. Because the very thing is, Nouns undoes the ideology of lo-fi the says it can only emerge from tape recorders and the dole, just at the same time as they trash the notion that studio production itself must aim for a kind of perfect sound. It's clear from a little closer listening that No Age truly didn't just set up the mic in the middle of the room and then bash around it, but that its lo-fi grain is actually as much an addition of production - they use overdubbing, looping, resonant atmospherics and so on that take what might actually have been a fairly crisp punk track initially and cast it in some kind of mystical, elemental aura. This itself also delays the orgasmic excess that your traditional punk listener might want from his tracks, as if music were reducible to ejaculatory actions - Nouns says 'fuck that', asserting that we MUST bury things under mulch, make the ears work a little harder and recognise the duality of things - that punk itself can be ambient, and that ambient can be punk. It doesn't let you hear it kicking, even though it clearly is busting out of its seams of that grainy, tactile cloth that lays over it. This sound is punk as an environmental force, not one that works to charge you in force and politics but that works through bodies and envelopes of noise until it reaches something like a scuzzy nirvana. As such, Nouns ceaselessly seems to extend beyond itself, reaching past its initial hearing to emanate beyond and take primal flight - it makes sense that this band have played at the foot of canyons and gorges in their American homeland.

Their mixture of studio production and what you might call field recording (live music or otherwise) also flies in the face of what might be a positive evaluation of lo-fi as some kind of pure sphere of 'press record and play' musical creativity that lends recordings a life-giving and totally authentic force (case in point: Springsteen's Nebraska, “OMG he actually sat at his kitchen table to record this and that’s exactly what we’re hearing!”). No Age more subtly understand lo-fi itself as a form of engineering or trickery, not the beginning and end of production but one means among others to arrive at a particular recorded sound. This particular recording also smashes the two-piece mentality, which amazingly is what No Age are - against that whole ‘what you play live should be what we hear on album’ bullshit, the endless layering and marks of far more than just four hands that pervade this sound force you to hold this album as its own material entity. We're not evaluating what they should sound like here (which the reactionary review might ask for), this isn't sheet music and it isn't a gig. It's Nouns, and it’s the sign of something great happening in music when it can steer a smooth course through knotty, ambient complexity and fuzzy, unbridled fun.