At first it was the fuzz on the record player’s needle. How’d that get there? I seriously don’t even know. I guess from carpeting in the living room. Sure. That was what it was. It made records not play at all, then play in kind of a muffled fashion, then hiss and scratch, and finally the sound was as clean as it was going to get, the way my parents liked it.
Next it was the AM radio in the car. All newscasters had static-induced lisps – S’s became fuzz crackles, especially when near tall structures. Under bridges, the signal died out to pure static. FM signals fell prey to fewer of these quirks but still were not entirely without boundaries. And when FM stereo boomboxes came out, I spent hours trying to nail down the red light so I always had the signal through two speakers. That was sweaty work.
Walkmans were the next wave of equipment to fail the music. Either batteries died – leading to the slow decline in tonality until the thing just quit working – or the plastic switches would snap off after the 17th drop. (Same things, incidentally, happened with boom boxes when we brought them to Mesilla Park Elementary to blast the Shout at the Devil album.) So the music either had a slow death or a sudden one. Slow death meant you at least got to hear the music several pitches lower and several beats slower – a completely different perspective. Never intended but part of how I’m sure many experienced it within the limits of 1983 technology. Vince Neil never sounded so good.
The media themselves were almost as often at fault. My first cassette ever was Synchronicity, and those of you who owned it may remember the cassette version contained “Murder by Numbers,” a song unavailable to those unlucky enough to have the vinyl version of the album. I was so taken by the idea that I had something others didn’t that I played the song as often as I could. The result was a munched end of the cassette. So “Synchronicity I” on Side 1 and “Murder by Numbers” on Side 2 got swallowed and garbled temporarily. Sting never sounded so good.
I could never take care of CDs, especially once I got a car. My first few CDs, I suppose, were as precious as diamonds with their shiny novelty but once they became commonplace, they became as floor mats. Lots of skips were in my future – even the ones that didn’t get scuffed had fingerprints, jelly, beer, who-knows-what all over them. Unfortunately, the skips never really allowed me to hear the music in a new way. More often they just created a near-accident in the car when I had to try to wipe off whatever was causing the skip.
That was where I began to see a decline in the means of the natural “breakage,” or the number of ways in which a medium or piece of equipment could scuff the lens, create a skewed picture of what a musician puts forth. We began to get CDs that either worked or didn’t. We began to get satellite radio and then eventually digitized music and a movement away from the ability to create artifacts – the Vince Neil moment I reference above, the continuing memory of Sting gargling on the words “one, two, three” and the nervous palpitation of my heart as I wonder if the tape will actually make it through the mechanism and not finally snap – that made the music maybe a bit more real.
So I’m left wondering what is left to break. Those of you paying attention to your public radio airwaves lately may have noticed a story based on this blog entry, where the writer laments the perfection inherent in the music creation process these days and the overall homogenization of music quality. Moments like the Beatles’ “Rain” may in fact be lost to many listening to today’s airwaves. Combine that with the loss of equipment that can create artifacts of breakage and you are left with fewer possibilities that resemble the very human rock’n'roll so many have come to understand and love.
I’ve found it, fortunately, in a couple of places, recently, where the artist intent is to create initial breakage that can, in fact, lead to the sort of individual artifact that people can hold onto as a musical experience, an imperfection that lasts. I start with what I think of as my first experience with an artist who actually cultivated the sense, post-cassettes, that your equipment might be breaking:
I was in college and sitting on what passed for a balcony at the dorm, about 9:30 at night after another snoozer of a shift at the circulation desk of the library. I just about fell out of my lawn chair. I looked at my Discman four or five times to make sure it was running right. And then I just sat back and enjoyed what the tremolo bar and the mind of Kevin Shields had laid down.
Shields had a particular sound in mind that he cultivated over the course of a couple of albums, so this isn’t a situation where I simply ran into static or a screwed-up reel of tape and created a musically relevant artifact from that. This was an intentional skewing, a breakage of tonal convention initiated by artist and understood by listener first as a potential malfunction of equipment, then as part of the art. And yet understanding the intentional nature of the breakage does not put it in a different category in my mind. It does remain on the same continuum as the cutoff at the beginning of the taped-off-radio SilverSound-brand-generic-cassette version of “Running to Stand Still” I obtained during the local station’s first playing of The Joshua Tree or the garbled Sting lyrics during “Murder by Numbers.” Is that because of the very first association in my mind with the notion that this CD had screwed up my player? Perhaps. But I find myself unable to separate the association from the reality of artist intent. So in that way, I’ve become attached to the notion of artist, equipment, atmosphere acting in concert rather than as separate entities to create and reinforce the imperfections, the breakages we cherish.
Breaking and shattering things always conjures for me this album, and specifically this track off this album:
I read some brief notes about Dirty Projectors, enough to get vaguely intrigued by some of Dave Longstreth’s previous projects both under this name and under his own, but what I thought was perhaps less apt to my own musical background than someone else’s was the comparison in terms of guitar playing to Ali Farka Toure. What I heard in this song in particular was the riff Steve Howe wishes he’d played at the beginning of “Long Distance Runaround” (a past love of mine that sounds less the worse for wear than I originally expected, to be perfectly honest). But that’s not the breaking point. It’s quite subtle, right at the :15 mark during the song, where Longstreth hits a time signature snag that refuses to go away for the rest of the song. And suddenly what starts as a 6/8 time signature shows signs of wobbling off course and becoming a more-standard-rock-yet-slow 4/4 time signature.
And it’s here that the name Dirty Projectors begins to make sense to me, because the visual image that is the artifact I bring along with this breakage is a wobbling image of an ancient film running through an ancient projector. At 1:15 when the “chorus” breaks in, the wobbling image only increases in volume, with the continuation of the shaky 6/8 guitar riffage over an adamant rock drum beat in 4/4. It’s the kind of thing I can see a younger Josh imagining when the car passed under the bridge and a song faded from the car radio. (“Were those rock beats I heard or just other people’s signals?”)
At the 1:39 mark again the lens gets scuffed due to an unexpected and noticeable velocity increase. Again at 2:23, the entire song shifts back a gear from 6/8 to 4/4 and slows significantly. The shifts happen relatively frequently and unapologetically and yet are backed by such attention to detail as to make these anything but accidents. They are intentional blurrings of the lines between equipment failure and the failure of conventions we all hold dear whether we know it or not. It surely cannot have entirely been Longstreth’s intention that the first four times I heard “Cannibal Resource,” I was unable to pick out the time signature for any part of the song nor understand exactly why the drummer had not called in sick that day. Yet the effect wasn’t much different than it may have been for me trying to figure out what key “Shout at the Devil” was in. Or what key this song goes into at the 3:10 mark:
It’s a point at which this entire song, which is built on some sort of electronic house of cards to begin with, seems to be shifted by electroshock down about a half-step in pitch. That it eventually evolves back into the original tuning and song form (at the 5:18 mark) is perhaps even more disconcerting. Surely none of it is subtly done. But if the purpose is to break from those conventions that can easily be reinforced through the modern technology so often wielded with disregard as well as through an overall industry slouch toward a commoditized, homogenized product, subtlety doesn’t seem to be the move.
A combination of the more subtle and the less subtle is here:
Middle Cyclone is a huge reason for me to say mea maxima culpa to Neko Case for previous statements I have made about her work with the New Pornographers here in this blog. Yeah, uh, Ms. Case…sorry. My bad. In my defense, if I’d known this album was in you I wouldn’t have said nothin’. Seriously. I didn’t know. Forgive me?
Subtly, “This Tornado Loves You” reminds me of a local guy up here named Mark Johnston (originally from South Boston with the most amazingly unique accent to boot), who relies not so much on song structures as on song cycles and patterns, repeating things from memory and putting them together with other pieces in different puzzle-like shapes every time he plays. Songs often don’t sound the same from Mark Johnston performance to Mark Johnston performance.
Neko Case does something fairly similar here from a songwriting perspective, though surely you can pick out something of a pattern. What’s not so obvious is any of the standard structure you’d expect to hear in a country/rock/pop song of any kind. It appears in the process of writing, she may have simply strung together lyrical ideas with musical ideas that made sense in the context of those lyrical ideas and come up with something akin to a song cycle. The pattern continues in other tracks on Middle Cyclone, which is probably the singer-songwriter album of the year if only for the off-kilter wallop each and every one of the songs packs in an almost-without-exception 3:20-or-less package.
Subject matter helps to achieve breakage, and the personification of a tornado is a genius stroke. Evocatively written as a contrast between savagery and the tenderest of affections, the song makes real a weather phenomenon with a severe case of heartbreak.
One further piece of evidence that Neko Case is thinking about the creation of broken art:
Listening to the beginning of this song, you hear something akin to (but not exactly like) what happens on the aforementioned Beatles’ “Rain” – this song could easily have been cleaned up. Instead, we have a beginning that kinda falls together rather than starting together. An opening guitar meanders in rather than clearly stating tempo; the drums start to gallop away. All, again, could have been subjected to digital trickery or at the very least a series of takes until everyone got on the same page.
So why leave it as is? Perhaps simply in this case because it is rock’n'roll. Or at least it’s music made by people for people and deserves to be heard as such. At a minimum, it reinforces the notion that Neko Case is not a song machine but a singer practicing her art/craft.
That art or craft should always include imperfections, should always include the very human and broken so that, whether or not those imperfections and breakages are part of a master plan or not, they offer us further possibilities to dig and to interpret. Anything short of that and I may never again hear an album will make me question the aim of the lasers in a CD player. Nor may I be nearly as interested in what went into that obviously broken product.
—
Initial thoughts recorded, further discussion needed. While I anticipate commentary from the key agitator in my life (probably offline commentary, though I lay down the gauntlet that said agitator will bring comments to the blog), I had to include this compare-and-contrast, perhaps partly as a further mea culpa for my previous statements about Neko Case:
Letterman. National TV. Crazy makeup. She has four backup singers. Four. And everyone’s all dolled up. Perfection. Yet as amazing as this performance is, check this one.
This is the non-done-up version. Bush Hall, Uxbridge Road, London. Out-of-tune guitars. One backup singer. Less-than-perfect surroundings.
You tell me which one I like better.
(One further note: at the end of the song, when she hits the high “d” on “What would make you believe me?” – notice the lack of effort needed. She nails the note each time without so much as lifting a toe slightly. You, uh, think she needs a bass player?)
That was definitely worth the lack of sleep, I’m thinking.
It’s incredibly cathartic, no matter how late I go, just to get it done. It’s almost that it has to be a painful experience to rip out a blog post. That’s the only way I feel I’ve earned my spot. So, uh, I hope you like zombie Josh on Sundays.
Nah, I don’t think that qualified as zombie Josh. I do get the bust-ass-at-the-last-minute experience, though.
You’re making the rest of us look bad.
You really are.
Well, thanks – I think the idea of this is only to make myself look bad. I’ve at least done a little of that, right?
Perhaps if I showed more skin I could start to make myself look bad. Ooh, or write another paean to Starland Vocal Band. (jotting down these ideas in my orange notebook)
It’s a very serious crowd, this, and I try to make it personal but…analytically rich? I don’t know. I’m increasingly inclined to spitball my way to 2300 words. But I thank all for the love.
To preface any comments I have to admit that I am a non-musician, and non-musical person in general…I can only bring to the discussion a viewpoint from the visual arts side of things.
I would argue that you possibly place too much power in the hands of the artist here. I feel there are two very distinct viewpoints at play – one of artist (and their process in creating the art) and the other of listener (taking in the end result of the art and adding to it with personal experiences and the “breakages” that occur). They are both valid but, I believe, very different.
To the artist – the process IS the art. The actual process of creation is, by nature imperfect. We are all imperfect – but that is the beauty of it all. I would argue that most art is just a happy combination of skill and luck. Sometimes the luck is good, a mistake makes sense and sticks – sometimes is sucks and is a note to the artist that next time…to not go that route. That is the process of creating art.
It’s all in the percentages. The most successful artist is as prolific “as a short order cook” (quoted from an artist I adore). By creating and creating and creating – the numbers dictate that (as long as you have some talent) you WILL produce at least one “good” piece…but that doesn’t make the crap less valid. You need the crap ultimately to learn from and move forward.
I think that the listener (or viewer in my case) must be gentle with an artist when looking at versions of the same piece, or, pieces in a series (even pieces over the course of an artist’s life) as they ALL are valuable to the process (or processes). The one piece you may be judging an artist on (or, performance in a musician’s case) might have been one that they messed up on but took away something from to enhance the next. All versions must be given their due – as they were all created. Period. Only the prolific will succeed.
From the listener / viewer point of view, I think internalizing that THEY also are a valid dimension in the meaning/purpose of that art is important. When listening/viewing a piece, that person brings into it all the “breakages” spoken of earlier plus they bring in state of mind, context at that moment in time (i.e. where is the piece being heard? or viewed? what was right before it, right after it…what is hanging near it, what color is the room, is your kid screaming at you to turn that crap off…on and on). It all goes to how that piece is received and what the end meaning of that piece might be – intended or not.
I think this is the cross section that is the most important – the intersection between what may have been intended by the artist (process) and what the viewer/listener takes away (the end result of that process + listener/viewer influence). The best an true artist can hope for (outside of fame/fortune which is a separate discussion all together) is to feed their soul while making an impression on someone – no matter what that impression might be – whatever “noise” might be in the background.
All that being said – I could be totally full of shit AND have made no point. But – perhaps that was the process I needed. Sorry to all of you who were along for my ride.
This is seriously interesting, the discussion of visual art vs. musical art. It is possible to give an artist too much power and perhaps I’ve done so, but it’s in context.
I think what I’m saying in the post, to an extent, is that technology has eliminated real breakages in how we take in art as created by the artist. It could be that those breakages and experiences are not shared by others, that there are more fundamental and less equipment-specific ways in which people’s hectic lives scuff the lens. But there aren’t as many natural ways in which that happens. Those are the interesting parts of our lives when things get messy, and because we don’t often use cassettes or even batteries so much, it’s not happening as often.
Together, the artist and the listener provide an expanding (I had hoped) universe of possibilities for happy accidents – associations, strange listening situations, speakers that fuzz out in peculiar ways. Technological advances often come in the form of whatever can remove some of those accidental situations and leave a clear as-intended-by-artist sound. So I guess I feel the trend is to take away some of the control from listener and lend it back to artist. It could be that these improvements in technology remove such a minuscule number of potential accidents that it really doesn’t matter. But somehow I don’t like the trend, even though I was quick to digitize my collection.
Beyond this, what I know about recording (because I know NOTHING about creating visual art) is that it can be a lengthy, exacting, and irritating process. That’s what’s interesting from the standpoint of artist intent. I haven’t yet really had the experience of going into a studio and just finding out what happens. That sort of thing can be expensive, so bands try to perfect before they go in, spend minimal time with multiple takes and screw-ups, and then spend the rest of the time trying to get it just right – mixing, re-mixing, considering, re-recording, smoking packs and packs of cigarettes, eating funyuns (this shit may have just been me…Marshall?) …it can be really boring.
Crap is produced more at rehearsals. isobell produces a lot of practice-induced crap. Believe me. The idea is to hone the crap until it’s good. It’s never quite the same piece of art, and too often I think we try to make it the same. We are working on taking a freer hand to our arrangements. But that process of being in rehearsal and massaging something for months, sometimes years, is definitely the art, no differently than the creation of visual art is the art.
It’s that experience that may make me lean on studio craft as a stronger influence on the appearance of breakages in the music, in the ability to craft something that’s both wobbly and heavily produced, like the DP stuff. I know that more often than not, it’s just not a matter of saying “good enough,” because studio space and time is as expensive as it is and the bands I’m in never make any money and lord knows we don’t want to walk out of there with anything short of perfection.
Expensive studios, I will say, are becoming less of a necessity with the proliferation of pro tools and other means of recording that can give you quality sounds in your own home. That would lead me to believe that even more of the control rests in the hands of the artist.
I’m not sure I can ever hope to make listening a situation people enter into with that understanding of their role in art creation. What’s most likely to happen is more a fragment here and an image there that ends up as an impression, a memory. There may or may not be recognition of their role or the role of the surroundings.
But I am completely with you on the idea. Too often people outright dismiss spaces as having “bad acoustics” and don’t recognize what good there might be in the way the sound is compressed or allowed to bounce. I value the experiences where sound seems to just flat out envelop you and you can pick out pieces from within that sound envelope and let the rest wash over you like a physical experience. Those are the best shows, the ones that leave you physically drained whether or not you heard a clear chord all night. I’m not saying I simply want to sit in a room with noise, but I am not averse to physical aural force occasionally overpowering pure melodic sense.
I think it’s true we are looking for the intersection where an artist and listener can share a space; however, rich and famous is entirely another conversation and specifically in the music industry is an increasingly elusive idea. The only thing of inherent value – not monetary value; lord only knows where you’ll find that these days – is the relationship between artist and listener.
On this and on most everything in your post, we certainly agree. I think, though, that this requires more conversation about the artist’s control in music vs. visual art. Will you agree to have that conversation with me? Doesn’t have to be here. But glad you
took the baitcommented.One other thing on the two forms: once music is made, it doesn’t necessarily have a visual print reminder that it exists. So for all the shit versions of music that sully the practice space, we may or may not have a reminder that they exist. If it’s not documented, did it happen? and did we necessarily learn anything from it? We do try to record more of our sessions, especially with two essentially new members in the fold, but those recordings don’t always make its way into all of our inboxes and therefore our consciousnesses. That doesn’t mean they’re not important. But they might fade quicker than something physically out there, visually out there. Too often we find ourselves trying to recreate the lessons of the past at a practice…
Hope none of this sounded in any way defensive or too too argumentative. It was meant to be a continuance of a conversation that should again continue. Rambly? That I’m OK with.
You make a great point about studio time being expensive. Despite this being a blog on music (a fact that places me wildly outside of my comfort zone)…I will also note that, depending on your medium, art supplies can be just as cost prohibitive. In my experience, this results in one of two things: the inability to begin a piece for fear you will fuck up your (insert medium of choice here) or the total lack of creative freedom and a reversion back to the safe tried and true for fear of fucking up your (again, medium of choice entered here).
I always forget exactly how much Heather’s favored oil pastels cost. They certainly are expensive. Thanks for reminding me. There is always a cost to making art. I guess the analogy here would be to the musician’s reversion to classic track recording structure – getting it all right, not accepting variances – in order to “make the most” of recording time. I wonder what I might have discovered had I let a few errors go here and there. I also wonder what I might have discovered if I had just experimented a little.
As far as recording rehearsals –I’m all for it, though it can get overwhelming. I do it in two ways:
if working on a proper song, recording it is a great thing to do when it’s just hit the stage where all the band members kinda have down the chord changes. then listen back to it. you only need to listen back once, preferably with all the band members to get some really valuable often unspoken information.
if you are doing more of a jam, and when done you really felt like the thing had at least a few minutes of greatness. listen back to it and highlight areas you like. this one I’m not sure if it really has any merit. it might simply be a fun thing to do. although i really feel everybody i do this with becomes a better musician in the process.
I’m thinking we are just at the stage where we’re remembering to hit record. But your examples make sense to me. I think we could all become better musicians if we listened to our jams; I also think playing for a very long time is often the only way to figure out how a song will come together.
I’m a Neko fan and feel oddly blessed to be in the shadow of her old Chicago community. Though I place her mentally in Tacoma.
The interesting thing about the digital revolution is the positioning of the happy accident front and center what with sampling and looping and all. Also the idea that bands must be more committed to the live show; which paradoxically is beloved not so much for the artist’s ability to deliver a more genuine message but for the happy accidents.
Until this week, I’ve always placed Neko in Canada because of the New Pornographers connection. Yes, all of Canada. Because it’s such a small and homogenous place, and my my American myopia has its day in the sun occasionally.
That is an interesting point with the samples; I suppose they, like other snippets, can be the germ for a song – an accidental kernel that makes its way into a song somehow. And on live shows, I definitely appreciate the point that that’s where you can discover more about a band than in any controlled recording environment. It definitely points out what bands see as “breakages” or happy accidents when you hear them on the recording, but it may be even more telling what happens to a band live. Or, as Maggi says above, what happens to the sound in particular acoustic environments.
Oh yay, finally a place to put this. I’ve always wondered why, and admired that, they left in the lyrics flub.