Long Days, Long Months: 25 July

Read more of Waveland, listened to a lot of music [see the Listening Log], and read chapter 8 of Repeated Takes: "The Record and the Mix":

The book's peak - split in two: a brief introductory philosophical exercise and a longer history of the relationship between musical artistry and recording capabilities. The first portion both fascinates and annoys this reader. The nice semantic duality, of photography-phonography - which I'd often savored myself - leads the author, perhaps not on the best intellectual grounds, toward a discussion of differences between them of greater significance than a mere letter. Music's abstract nature lies at the crux of the matter. "There is no equivalent, for example, to the photographic negative, as if the recording does not so much copy the original sound as recreate it." This sentence - though it hints at the right direction - is pure bunk. The original recording - the magnetic tape - is indeed an equivalent of the photographic negative. Both photography and phonography copy and recreate, simultaneously, in constantly-shifting proportions, both within themselves and in comparison to each other.

The bias toward the visual manifests itself time and again: specifically, a tendency to think of what's seen as more stable an entity than what's heard (very likely an acceptable position). The waves of sound seen in the digital era on the interfaces of computer programs like Pro Tools and Cubase indeed do not "represent" music. Music is not visual, it's aural. The very question of what could represent music, or what music could represent, is probably best left moot. Indeed, once you get beyond such concerns, music begins to refer to so much more.

However, Chanan gets back on track by pointing out that, "In phonography [...] the purely documentary vocation of the medium, its mimetic objectivity, completely predominated. And in its most naive form - as if photography and film had not turned documentary into a highly poetic artistic genre." He laments, rightfully so, that "phonography had been captured by music and non- or extra-musical uses were downgraded and marginalized." This capture by music, demoting recording to the task of "overt mimesis," of course ironically comments upon the non-representational reality of music. Apparently we were all terribly frightened, too busy even to begin the ponder, the extraordinary worlds opened up by phonography.

Chanan is unfortunately also intrigued by another duality, music-noise. Chanan seems to understand the problem: "if non-musical sounds were to acquire the potential of becoming artistic symbols, then by the same count they became music - unless music were to change." But he defers to Douglas Khan on the concepts of both noise and "Audio Art" (apparently what we now call "Sound Art" - it was the 1980's, yuppie culture was young, not as clever). Published in 1995, we hope that recent shifts toward "noise" as the hip social construct of the moment would make the author see the nonsense at work: dithering about the revolutionary potential of "noise" only reinforces stringent understandings of what constitutes music. Kahn hadn't even published Noise Water Meat yet [it came in 1999], and we've gone on a long decline since, resulting in the mental doggeral of Paul Hegarty's Noise/Music [2007].

The history part picks up where "Of LPs, EPs, DJs, and Payola" left off: the producers became less like conductors of classical music, more like film directors (or, more literally, less like screenwriters). As advances in recording technology arise, they let the artist handle the traditional compositional tasks and focus on newer tasks, in the process usually finding themselves further removed from the management side of the equation (ideally). The discussion of mixing takes the reader up to Dub and Hip Hop: "not so much recordings composed for the medium, like the studio albums of art Rock groups, they are rather composed out of it" (perhaps better to say, though, that they - or Dub at least - offers both).