Les mots et les choses

I'm thinking of a new blog project. Here and there, when I find the time, I'll write a short essay about a song whose lyrics are really good. What motivates this is this 33 1/3 book I've had in my head that someday I'll start working on and propose to them. The album in question, which will remain nameless here, is significant to me for many reasons, but one of them is its explicitly literary character. Which, to me, makes sense for a 33 1/3 book, devoted to treating the old, dusty medium of the album like the old dusty medium of the novel.

(Sidenote: A couple of years ago, Chris Ott wrote to great acclaim that "Downloading Kid A was probably my generation's last novel, shared musical experience." I have commented on this quote myself in the old blog, but in the years that have passed, this quote has stayed in my head, slightly transmogrified, as "Kid A was probably my generation's last novel." What falls out—the downloading—of course also remains in a deeper, structural way.)

So the little essays to come will see me exploring how to treat songs on a literary level, hopefully without also losing what makes them songs and not, say, poems or short stories. I don't approach this little project without trepidation; done badly, this is basically NPR or McSweeney's: I See a Darkness and In the Aeroplane, Over the Sea as The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and The Corrections, John Darnielle as Jonathan Lethem. (Note: in this model, Colin Meloy is Chuck Klosterman.) (Second note: American Water is awesome.)

The Disintegration Loops and "Wordless Sociality," Metropolitan Museum of Art, 11. September, 2011

I never got around to posting this when it came out last Fall, so here it is. My article on the Wordless Music Orchestra's performance of Maxim Moston's orchestral adaptation of William Basinski's "dlp 1.1," from The Disintegration Loops at the "Remembering September 11" concert at the Met. Two non-consecutive passages from an earlier draft of the article:

As the performance drew to a close, all that remained was an extended drone by the orchestra’s cellist. Surely, this was now the sound of the bare analog medium that we were hearing. In true Minimalist fashion, that lone final drone did not determine the listener’s experience so much as it presented the conditions for our phenomenological sensation of time and space. The sound of that bow scraping against its lowest string, so expertly performed that one could not determine without looking when the bow changed directions, slowly faded into silence, and you could hear the tension in the enormous, packed room: the quiet stillness of not a single person shifting in her chair or soothing a lump in his throat sounded more than anything like the restraint and discipline of the musicians we had all been watching for almost an hour. The brute physicality of the performance before us, and our collective recognition of our physical presence at this performance, which indeed constituted an important element of this performance, restored to “dlp 1.1” the affective force that Basinski must have meant when he described his emotional experience recording “the death of this sweeping melody.” The uniqueness of the performance was not in the notes we heard—I have listened to a recording of the performance more than a dozen times in preparation for this review—but in the wordless sociality of this collective listening experience.

The full, untruncated last paragraph:

As the performance drew to a close, long after I had quietly migrated from my seat at the back of the Sackler Wing to the standing room by the rear door, conductor Ryan McAdams held the orchestra at attention in complete silence for two minutes and fourteen seconds before laying down his hands and accepting the audience’s rapturous applause. Or so I read in the New York Times the next day. The tension was too much, and I really had to run to the Neue Galerie, pick up Alex, and catch a cab to La Guardia. Breathless and with my heart pounding, I silently exited the Wing and then ran out of the Met. In those twenty seconds of silence before I left, I’d like to think that what I thought I was hearing was accurate and that everyone else in that room was feeling exactly the same way.

In My Room

As an addendum to the paragraph in my article on How to Dress Well in małakultura współczesna that goes:

Part of this, whether he intended it or not, draws from the tradition of “bedroom music” and the D.I.Y. tradition of lo-fi home recordings associated with Daniel Johnston, the Lou Barlow of the early Sebadoh tapes, Liz Phair when she was calling herself “Girlysound,” and the very early Elliott Smith. This music, usually recorded on 4 track cassette recorders or sometimes even the external microphones on cassette decks, presented extreme conditions of intimacy (the studio is a sometimes real and always imagined bedroom) that were circulated within a limited public. On one level, these recordings were a very muted cry into the abyss; on another, they were love letters to the very networks through which they circulated (social theorists would call these “social imaginaries”): the D.I.Y. punk subcultures and scenes that served as an alternative to the more industrialized and overtly public channels of musical dissemination. This publicizing of the intimate, and the attendant search for an audience while pondering the impossibility of communicating the conditions of privateness, also exists in How to Dress Well’s music. But where the punk tradition of the 4 track recording displaced the idea of a “live” and public musical event in its suggestion of an imaginary bedroom that is at once embodied in its intimacy and disembodied in its circulation as cassette, How to Dress Well has nothing of this embodiment, and accordingly none of its projected presence. How to Dress Well’s digital tracks, particularly in their intricate but incomplete-feeling layerings of vocals, project neither an imaginary space in the D.I.Y. bedroom sense, nor in the sense that what we are listening to once was or ever could be a live performance. The fabric of an original performance time that precedes musical time is ruptured here by the simultaneity of vocal fragments that are not only all delivered by the same voice, but moreover delivered in the same idiosyncratic manner. And with this rupturing of time comes a canceling of the listener’s imagining of an original space that this performance-which-is-not-one could exist in.

I really liked a line from Mark Richardson's Pitchfork review of the Sebadoh Weed Forestin' reissue from this week:

Part of the allure of home recording of this kind, which continues to this day, is the blurring of the lines between listening to music and making it.

I'd like to point also to Mark Richardson's excellent book on the Flaming Lips' Zaireeka, whose theorization of the social conditions of listening has been a huge influence to my current research project on different modes of listening in the analog/digital shift.

In Reverse Order: How to Dress Well, a Theory of the Baroque, and a Memory of Rochester

I just wrote an article comprised of three fragments (on How to Dress Well, the art historian Heinrich Wölfflin, and sonic spaces in Rochester, NY) that contribute to a theory of listening.