I received an interesting email a few days back from Don Rosler of New York. Don had wrapped up a project involving Recordios and had come across my site. He congratulated me on my research as documented online, and offered to send me a copy of his project on compact disc. True to his word, the recording arrived in short order. I listened to all 53 odd minutes of it and here are my impressions…
The package Don sent, which included a sheet of press buzz, is attractive visually. The cd label is an over-sized print of the labels that once accompanied the results of stepping into a recording booth atop the Empire State building, the very spot where once King Kong fought for life and love on celluloid so many years ago. The results were vended after depositing a quarter and following the instructions. These instructions are reproduced amid Rosler’s comprehensive liner notes. The notes offer detailed information about the artists, designers and engineers on each track, as well as the text of each song.
“Watch for starting signal.” A green light went on in the booth in days of yore that indicated that an acetate blank was being inscribed with the sounds recorded by the microphone in front of you. I’ve never been inside one of these recording booths, but I did manage to win a Wilcox Gay disc cutter (called a ‘Recordio’) on Ebay. My own research, available at the hyperlink above, resulted in a small pile of recordings on a variety of media. Decent dub plates (blank lacquer discs that are not quite perfect and not suitable for ‘mastering’ – the term has shifted in meaning slightly since the heyday of the lacquer blank) can be had these days only from one source, Apollo Masters. Following the email path will get you in touch with Misty Hamby. Misty will be happy to get you lacquered up. She’ll also sell you a cutting stylus for whatever you own by way of antique disc cutting gear. Should you experiment with alternative media, trying your styli on Solo plastic, you will find yourself shortening the life of your styli considerably. These things ain’t cheap! I advise the bricolageurs to pony up for some dubs!
But I digress: none of this has to do with the work of Don Rosler in any direct way. Don’s notes make reference to the difficulty of winning disc cutting gear on Ebay. Don mentions losing in bidding wars to someone he eventually enlisted as a collaborator/provider of gear. I gather that at least some of the material that ended up on the cd as set ups and segues for the songs were recorded on vintage equipment and some of it was ‘found’ material in the sense that it was edited from actual vintage disc recordings.
The cd contains what is in fact a ‘song cycle’ in the Schubertian sense. Here is Rosler’s ‘Winterreise‘ in synopsis: a man enters a recording booth and records a message for his distant lover. “Baby, I love…” The message stutters as it would on a stuck groove and the journey proceeds as in a dream. The songs are recorded with contemporary sensibilities both in audio design and musical idiom.
The musical idiom is elusive, though certain songs refer to known, definable, describable idioms. Some of the songs echo ‘Lost in the Fifties,” and some are bluesy shuffles without being either ‘blues’ or ‘shuffles.’ The harmonic language is also elusive: the progressions are simple but not consistently, deliberately static. There are occasional moments of dissonance, but the dissonance is not structural. Rosler does not use harmony to build tension. He relies on his text to tell the stories. He is neither classical nor classicist. He is a label ducking devil, staying away from classification. He has evaded major label labels.
Is the visual beauty of the package matched by beautiful songs?
Song writing is personal. This is true even if you pursue it in a way that confines the expression to known chart worthy categories. The immediacy of the song is inherent. Part of the intimacy developed by ‘popular’ (as opposed to ‘art’) song has been shaped by the very technologies that Rosler wistfully explores in this project. The song started out unlimited. Lung power and attention span set very arbitrary boundaries. The song forms, strophic and narrative, evolved in tandem with unaccompanied poetry and the other forms of story telling. At the moment that sound recording became possible, not as a concept or gimmick in 1877, but as a practical fact in the late 1880s, the music drama had developed to a very voluptuous level in terms of length and expressiveness in the work of Wagner. The phonograph reversed this trend. The recording time was limited to a little over 2 minutes. You had to get close to the machine to hear its nuances. The voice was heard more clearly than much of the accompaniment. The banjo and harp made better records than the piano. Drums and brass instruments recorded very clearly. Don’t these features still dominate the popular song forms? By the very early twentieth century, making records was clearly important economically for both artist and everyone else associated with the production chain. By the time electrical recording reversed the direction of the intimacy, another 20 years had passed and the pattern was fixed in the human psyche. The microphone made it possible to forget how to project. Whispers into a recording microphone come out as shivering and close-up seeming when reproduced. The narrative structure of the song, truncated and refined for short duration, has not yet been abandoned or improved.
To try to get back to making a song cycle, to get back into the through composed feel of Schubert with all of the idioms of the contemporary artist, to marry Hugo Wolf and Captain Beefheart, which is what I think Don Rosler is up to here, is to think so far outside the box (and the booth!) that it takes some serious listening and contemplation to establish the validity of the concept.
Yet, I have used up more than half my time…
I can only relate the songs and the song cycle to my own taste in songs and attempts at song writing. I have been enchanted with The Beatles catalog since before it was considered complete. There is a sense in which certain Beatle albums are ‘concepts,’ and may in fact be ‘cycles.’ I never heard the Beatles records that way. I was more enchanted with the idea that they investigated forms they liked, imitated them, and tried to improve on them. John Lennon in particular was both attracted and repelled by this process. He speaks with pride about how early they did Ska on a record, “conscious and deliberate.” He also went through a period of rejecting the polish that he had himself sought. Nothing about the Beatles’ saga put me off working inside established categories. I always think of the records as sets of polished imitations. This is not pejoritive. What put me off doing any of that successfully or seriously was lack of ability. I could only succeed (if partially) at non-serious song writing. Rather than do parody, which requires all of the skill that doing the thing straight requires, I learned to lean on deliberate and mostly textual outrageousness. My harmonies are simple, but I do strive for contrast, form and progression. I’m trapped in the box.
Don Rosler is not burdened by any of that. His 53 minute cycle is very integrated. He demonstrates how disparate sonic material can be welded together into a seamless whole. He is free to be fanciful: he is an impressionist. He evokes the recording booth without emphasizing its sonic limitations. He is interested in the booth as a metaphor more than an evocation. For this reason, I am amazed that he did so much research into the realities of disc cutting. He does not really lean on its flavor very much.
By contrast, I will write a “bad song” (because bad songs say so much!) – and I should point out that what I mean by that is a politically incorrect faux generic piece – and record it complete on a Recordio using a crystal mike, and then master that to digital. I’m working at bricolage, but I’m staying inside the box.
Rosler shows the other way. Some of Rosler’s songs are not so much beautiful as ‘pretty.’ Neither Don nor I are in command of a commercial singing voice. (Though neither are Neil Young or Bob Dylan, and they’ve made plenty of money.) I wonder about the connection between pretty songs and uncouth voices. Is there one? Don ducks the problem by hiring other singers, but some of his chosen vocalists are also uncouth. This suggests a deliberate tempering of the sweet with vinegar.
The red light draws close: I like some of the songs in this cycle better than others, but I love the ending. The Recordio (or whatever vintage machine was employed) sounds finally like one imagines it – its scratchy self. The voice takes back a promise. There will be no song.
Recording completed. I wish it all the best in the marketplace.