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.