Box Ghosts

 

minimal synth cassette release from 1980s Holland

via the Archaic Inventions YouTube channel and blog 

cassette nostalgia and lost purity

An interesting, and interestingly self-contradictory, "meditation on the merits of the cassette tape," by Nick Sylvester, originally posted at Pitchfork on the eve of Cassette Day.

Although Nick vows not to bang on about the lost tactile tangibility of the format, or its analogue-smudgy "warmth",  he does nonetheless assert that "there’s no format more human than the cassette. No format wears our stain better. I have not encountered a technology for recorded music whose physics are better suited for fostering the kind of deep and personal relationships people can have to music, and with each other through music. This sounds like nostalgia... but I don’t think it is. I’m talking about new music, on cassettes, in 2013. No audio format keeps me more focused on listening to the thing itself, without the distraction of having a web browser right in front of me, without the baggage of an ersatz music news cycle, the context upon context, the games of the industry. Music released on cassettes doesn’t feel desperate or needy or Possibly Important. It tends not to be concerned about The Conversation. It resists other people’s meaning. That’s what I like about the cassette. It whittles down our interactions with music to something bare and essential: Two people, sometimes more, trying to feel slightly less alone."

So it's the idea of a format that, while stained with our individual humanity, is uncontaminated by the Larger Discourse About  Music (including, but not limited to, the game of hip). A longing for a pure form of listening and direct, unmediated response to music.  Unmediated not just by the Music Media, but by the distorting prism of one's own self-reflexivity and self-consciousness.

This becomes even more clear when Nick reflects on his career in music reviewing (which started in 2002) and how that rapidly led to disenchantment.

"In hindsight, I underestimated how much the simple act of writing about music would rewire my brain and alter my relationship with it. I listened differently than before. The euphemism was “I was listening smartly.” But all that meant was I listened for good sentences. I read music like a text, but wasn’t exactly hearing it anymore. Deliberately misunderstanding something often made the writing better, and I did that a lot too. I abstracted music into ideas about music. Slowly the latter became more important to me than the music itself. I also became an incorrigible asshole, but that’s for a different piece. I never hated music, and I only loved writing about it. But I came to resent how I was listening."

I can't really remember a time when I didn't "listen for good sentences". Perhaps as a child listening to pop on the radio or my parents's classical records like Holst's The Planets or Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony. But certainly long before I started writing professionally I was writing about it in my head, through being such an avid reader of the music press. And I do doubt that this "pure state" of response to music, even if it once existed, can be recovered. Sooner or later, some kind of rudimentary ideas about What Music Is, What Music Is For, "good music versus bad music" enters into one's consciousness and intervenes between one's ears and the sound-waves.  You acquire some sort of system of judgement and an apparatus for placing things.  And the only way to turn that mechanism off, once it's lodged in there, is through extreme states of intoxication. 

Certainly even in my most casual, leisure-time, non-reflective states of musical enjoyment, sentences - good, bad, or indifferent - seem to  form themselves whether I want them to or not, regardless of whether I'm trying to form them. And they don't interfere with my pleasure, they are inseparable from it. A lot of the content of these blogs (well, mainly Hardly Baked) since we moved to LA comes from sentences sparked by songs, old and new, heard randomly and without purpose or agenda on the car radio. I don't experience this stream of involuntary thoughts and partially-formed language as a deformation of response;  it feels much more like an enhancement.

Sylvester's issues with self-consciousness got worse when he started making music, playing in a band that started to get somewhere.

".... I felt anxious pretty much all the time. Everything seemed to matter, down to the shoes we wore on stage. I became intimately aware of all the ugly industry machinations.... If music had once been a writing exercise, now it was a hunger game, with strategies that changed by the hour and a never-ending supply of supposedly make-or-break moments that might–might–one day land us a mid-afternoon slot at some gobots music festival. The entire setup of the music industry-- from the gross amount of power publicists had, to the convenient myth that musicians need to tour tour tour, next level next level next level-- seemed to benefit everyone except the people making the music. I only saw the wires now. I felt myself becoming cynical."

He posits making music for cassette release and listening to music on tapes as an escape from ideology into immediacy, freeing music from both ambition and the ever-more entangled web of discourse.

"Cassettes are my detox. A way for me to sidestep everything about music that isn’t music. To get back to the very basic propositions of why I make and listen to music in the first place."

The very inconsequentiality of limited edition cassette releases is liberating:

"I tell my friends I’ll record their music and we’ll put it out on cassette, and it changes the entire energy of the session. There’s less pressure. It’s less of an event than a vinyl release. It’s “just” a cassette... There’s a feeling of impunity. It’s not going to cost anyone too much money. Everybody goes for broke."
 

This all sounds quite, well, ideological, to me. The acts of listening to music and making music framed in very particular ways. And this becomes fairly blatant by the end:

"... I like to think that people who adore cassettes are at least partly like me: Enormous fans of new music, overwhelmed by the speed and context and game of it all. People who want a community, not a social network. People who want the music, not the meaning. Cassette people, I like to think, want romance and fantasy. A person in a room, making music, putting it in cassette-shaped bottles for no other reason than these cassette-shaped bottles tend to find the people who need their music the most. Total romance and fantasy, all of this, I admit it. But music could use more of both."

Nick doesn't really want music in some putative state of purity, stripped off all the extraneous meanings and projections. (If you did want that, you could find perhaps most easily with the mp3s and streams and so forth of digitized net-circulated music, where sounds can be totally decontextualised and virtually authorless).  Nick actually wants music enwrapped in "romance and fantasy." The supplement of discourse, far from being superfluous and damaging, is actually a vital enchancement. Theory as the spice of pop life.

And the long, interesting, interestingly self-contradictory piece he's written is the proof of that. Because music has moved him to form sentences. A whole bunch of sentences.

Wow, what a great piece on the afterlife of the Grateful Dead at the New Yorker... by Nick Paumgarten...  and particularly interesting from a retromaniacal point of view because of its focus "on the Dead’s transformation, over time, from living thing to library", all the paradoxes entailed in "something intended to be spontaneous and ephemeral" becoming "a curated body of work"

 In one of the best passages in this long, long feature,  Paumgarten gets escorted by the Dead's official archivist Dave Lemieux to visit the Dead's tape vault, now in the custody of Rhino and just one zone within the vast cenotaph of sound maintained by Warner Bros up in Burbank:
 
“Are you ready to enter the holy portal?” [the Warner Bros archivist/guide] asked. We passed through a door into a vast climate-controlled hangar of shelves loaded with boxes containing the reel-to-reel multitrack recordings of studio sessions and concerts of hundreds of artists. There was a smell of vinegar—the disintegration of old magnetic audiotape. We wandered the aisles, tunnelling through music. Ray Charles, Wilson Pickett, Gene Autry, Yes, Coolio, Jean-Luc Ponty, Teddy Pendergrass, Winger. “Three-quarters of this place is unissued,” he said. He pointed to a rack of reel-to-reels: Otis Redding, live, 1967, never circulated. Another set of shelves contained hours and hours of Aretha Franklin songs that have never been released.

“Drool,” Lemieux said.

The Dead’s section was toward the back, surrounded by a chain-link fence. It was a vault within a vault—a Holy of Holies. The funny thing was that the Dead’s stash, sealed off from the rest, had long been by far the most porous of all. Every year, new old music gushes forth. “That’s what makes the Grateful Dead unique within this building,” the archivist said. “David is using it all.”

He opened a padlock. We stepped inside. There were two long aisles, with a line of bays on either side. There were fifty-four bays. Each bay was about four feet wide and nine shelves high, with as many as a hundred tapes per shelf. There were big reels and small ones, cassettes and digital audiotapes. The arrangement wasn’t strictly chronological. The system was arcane."

^^^^^^^^^^^^

C.f. the previous post on Lee Gamble's 'ardkore 'auntology using his old pirate radio tapes (or that Tape Crackers doc). c.f. also Ariel P's Worn Copy... howzabout this then on the oh-so-particular flava of Deadhead taper's recordings that then get copied and re-copied as they circulate among the community of fans...  

"Even the compromised sound quality became a perverse part of the appeal. Each tape seemed to have its own particular note of decay, like the taste of the barnyard in a wine or a cheese. You came to love each one, as you might a three-legged dog....

"Each had a character and odor of its own, a terroir. Some combination of the era, the lineup, the set list, the sound system, the recording apparatus, its positioning in the hall, the recorder’s sonic bias, the chain of custody, and, yes, the actual performance would render up a sonic aura that could be unique. Jerry Garcia claimed to be a synesthete—he said that he perceived sound as color. Somehow, I and others came to perceive various recordings, if not as colors, as having distinct odors or auras."


Despite being very much not-a-Deadhead, that certainly resonated with me as a pirate tape nut...  There's shows i've had for years recorded with dodgy signals onto poor quality album-advance tape, then heard again as a better quality recording that's someone's uploaded onto the internet.... and all the flavour, the aura, that I'd become attached to, it's gone...

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

 In the  Retromania section on the Deadheads and the inherent paradoxes of fetishising, decades after the fact, dodgy recordings of something meant to be experienced purely in-the-now, I speculate that the tapers are in some way missing the very thing they're so obsessed with capturing... they are not really fully present, because preoccupied with recording levels, microphone placement....   that sense is strengthened by the bit in Paumgarten's piece where he meets the taper responsible for a particular concert recording  [nicknamed the Fox after the Georgia venue in question] that he and his boarding school buddies were obsessed with in the Eighties...

"He sat throughout the set, holding a microphone in his hand. “I remember it being quite a pain. I can see the band and the house in my mind’s eye, from that spot,” he said. “The sound was so unique and wonderful. There was such wide stereo range on the P.A. It translated to the tape. You don’t usually get that on audience tapes. It’s Dan Healy who deserves the credit. Healy just went for it.” He was referring to the Dead’s soundman, and it occurred to me that his admiration for the Fox had more to do with the quality of sound than with the performance. Tapers listen differently."

Certainly the surviving members of the Dead do not understand the phenomenon at all, think the tapers and the tape-collectors (it's all on the Internet now, of course) have missed the point...

Phil Lesh, for instance, says, "recordings have always seemed to me, personally, to be kind of a fly in amber, which was contrary to the spirit of the Grateful Dead". Of the recent limited edition/sold out instantly box set of every single date on the Europe 72 tour (22 concerts, 73 discs, over 70 hours of music), Lesh says, "I have to admit, I have not listened to it"

Sensible fellow! He lived it, why would he want to relive it?

^^^^^^^^^^^^

Also Retromania-resonant is the section on all the tribute bands that the Dead have spawned.  One of them, the Dark Star Orchestra, "perform specific concerts from the Grateful Dead's vast library of past gigs. They reproduce the set list, with the particular song arrangements and sonic configurations that the Dead employed that night...  They have thousands of units of existing material to choose from, and they have yet to repeat one. D.S.O. does not, as some mistakenly assume, replicate the concerts note for note; instead, in the spirit of their progenitors, and in the interest of their own enjoyment, and of performative plausibility, they improvise, within the context of the era they are drawing from. It is a peculiar form of repertory."

In a delicious, vicious twist of irony, the D.S.O. finds itself effectively in competition with a post-Dead band formed by Lesh and Bob Weir, a battle that gets pretty nasty.  Paumgarten drily, mordantly notes that the D.S.O.'s rhythm guitarist Rob Eaton "treats the band (or its remnants) that has given him a living, a body of work, a style, and some measure of transcendence as a kind of adversary. “If you want to get off, you come see us,” [Eaton] said. “We have a bigger repertoire than the Dead ever had, at any one time.” They have the whole career in rotation. “We’re showing the kids what it was like."

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/11/26/121126fa_fact_paumgarten#ixzz2DP1dVVCs