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“Perfecting Sound Forever”: great book on history of recording

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I’ve written a bit here about the curse of over-compression in recorded music:

For those of us already unhappy with the music industry’s bungling of the transition to digital distribution, here’s another thing we can blame them for. Seeking to have their products “stand out,” they entered a sonic race to the bottom… The irony is that we can only perceive loudness through contrast, so the contemporary recordings sound miasmic, not punchy. When you crank up all the dials to, as Spinal Tap would say, 11, everything sounds the same, your ears get tired, and you wonder why music doesn’t sound as good as it did when you were younger.

So when I discovered, belatedly, that Greg Milner has written an entire book about the birth, history and present plight of recording, I grabbed it. It’s called Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music.
If, like me, you have always cared about sound quality but never had much of a vocabulary or structure for discussing or understanding it, it’s a wonderful read.

Milner’s tale starts with Edison’s famous “sound tests” (where they’d pit live vs. recording in front of an audience) and carries through to our MP3-muddled present. It’s fascinating to see how certain threads follow us from the days of sound cylinders up to the iPod era. Each successive generation of technology promises — and, for everyday listeners, seems to deliver — the utopia of perfect, life-like sound, sound captured so well that you cannot distinguish the recording from reality. But you soon realize a truth that Milner elegantly excavates: this “reality” is a chimera — an unobtainium of the ear. Our norms for “realistic sound” are hopelessly subjective. If Victrola recordings that crackle in our ears today sounded like “reality” to 1920s listeners, what will music-lovers of the 2120s think about the over-compressed recordings our culture is now producing?

There’s so much that’s fun and unexpected in Perfecting Sound Forever: the early religious wars between the proponents of acoustic recording and believers in the electrical approach that won out (presaging today’s analog vs. digital argument); how the advent of recording tape began to move us from the notion of sound reproduction to the idea of composing in the studio; how competition between radio stations upped the compression ante until we reached the point where the Red Hot Chili Peppers became “the band that clipped itself to death”; and much more.

Music criticism has fallen on hard times today, what with the fragmentation of the audience and the collapse of the industry. But Milner’s book is one case where writing about music most certainly isn’t like dancing about architecture — it’s more like dancing with ideas. Here’s a taste:

We never fully agree on what perfect sound is, so we keep trying, defining our sonic ideals against those of others, playing the game to the best of our abilities, in whatever position we occupy on the field. We add more reverb, we pump up the bass, we boost the treble, we compress dynamic range, we send the band back into the studio because we don’t hear a single — and we then remix that single, we press the song on vinyl, on disc, as a ghostly collection of ones and zeros that we send around the world. We do what we can to make it sound right and then we hear the sound flow from the speakers and we call it perfect.

With this post I intend to begin more regularly reviewing the books I’m reading, right here on Wordyard. Because, as my friend Laura Miller keeps reminding us, readers are scarcer than writers — or, as Gary Shteyngart was just saying on Fresh Air, “Nobody wants to read but everybody wants to write.”

Well, I intend to keep doing both! And, just so you know, I will also be wiring up my links to Amazon with partner codes; these will funnel a tiny bit of change back to me so I can keep buying those books.

More songs about whistling

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There is nothing quite as catchy as a great pop song that deploys whistling. I was reminded of this truth last night at a show by the New Pornographers last night at Oakland’s majestic Fox Theater, where the band’s generous set included “Crash Years” — a song from its new album, Together, that features an infectious whistling chorus.

(I have to admit that the whistling volley loosed by the NPs last night was so solid, indeed so flawless, no stray sibilance or wobbles offkey, that I did wonder if it was live or sampled. I mean, the band members were whistling into their mikes. But these days, who knows?)

I was all set to write up a post about other great whistling songs, but soon discovered that it’s been done already.

The Spinner list is a pretty good one. But it’s heavy on songs that use whistling as a drop-in solo or a bridge or an outro. Those are great, but this aproach neglects examples in the grand “Colonel Bogey March/Bridge On the River Kwai” tradition — where the whistling carries the entire tune of a refrain.

My own favorite in this genre is Brian Eno’s “Back in Judy’s Jungle” — the missing link connecting the world of Colonel Bogey with that of “Crash Years.”

As for the rest of the New Pornographers show? With eight, sometimes more, people on stage, they have turned into indie power pop’s equivalent of a Big Band. Indeed, at times, with their tight harmonies and deep catalog of songs that feel like instant classics, they made me think of our era’s equivalent of the Band — with roots dug not in the country-folk tradition but instead in the now-long history of eccentric smart pop. Great, complex music: we’re lucky to have it.

“Failsafe” is an oxymoron: BP’s Gulf spill and the St. Francis Dam

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I listened to this interview yesterday with BP director Robert Dudley on the News Hour:

ROBERT DUDLEY: …The blowout preventers are something that are used on oil and gas wells all over the world, every well. They just are designed not to fail with multiple failsafe systems. That has failed. So, we have a crisis.

…JEFFREY BROWN: Excuse me, but the — the technology — the unexpected happened. And so the question that you keep hearing over and over again is, why wasn’t there a plan for a worst-case scenario, which appears to have happened?

ROBERT DUDLEY: Blowout preventers are designed not to fail. They have connections with the rig that can close them. When there’s a disconnection with the rig, they close, and they’re also designed to be able to manually go down with robots and intervene and close them. Those three steps, for whatever reason, failed in this case. It’s unprecedented. We need to understand why and how that happened.

The failsafe failed. It always does. “Designed not to fail” can never mean “certain not to fail.” There is no such thing as “failsafe” — just different degrees of risk management, different choices about how much money to spend to reduce the likelihood of disaster, which can never entirely be eliminated.

Two different social attitudes conspire to lead us to disasters like the Gulf spill. On the one hand, there is the understandable but naive demand on the part of the public and its proxies in the media for certainty: How can we be sure that this never happens again? Sorry, we can’t. If we want to drill for oil we should assume that there will be spills. If we don’t like spills, we should figure out other ways to supply our energy.

On the other side, there is what I’d call the arrogance of the engineering mindset: the willingness to push limits — to drill deeper, to dam higher — with a certain reckless confidence that our imperfect minds and hands can handle whatever failures they cause.

Put these two together and you have, rather than any sort of “failsafe,” a dynamic of guaranteed failure. The public demands the impossibility of “failsafe” systems; the engineers claim to provide them; and everything is great until the inevitable failure. Each new failure inspires the engineers to redouble their efforts to achieve the elusive failsafe solution, which lulls the public into thinking that there will never be another disaster, until there is.

I wrote about these issues as they relate to software in Dreaming in Code. But at some point the need to understand this cycle demands a more artistic response.

May I suggest you give a listen to Frank Black’s “St. Francis Dam Disaster,” a great modern folksong about a colossal engineering failure of a different era.

The decade in tunes

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I’m not interested in the argument over whether this new year’s marks the end of the decade-with-no-name. Since we celebrated the end of the millennium 10 years ago, I think we’re stuck. And you can bet that when 2019 rolls over to 2020 we’ll do the same.

My list, for your pleasure, is the decade in music — my personal bests. It will be no surprise to longtime readers here. This is the stuff that stuck with me through the years, that kept my body moving, my mind working and my heart opening. I’ve made most of these entries in pairs (or more) — because I can.

RUNNERS-UP:

  • Beck: The Information (2006)
  • The Decemberists: The Crane Wife (2006)
  • The Gaslight Anthem: The 59 Sound (2008)
  • Richard Thompson: 1000 Years of Popular Music (2003)
  • Wrens: The Meadowlands (2003)
  • XTC: Wasp Star (Apple Venus Vol. 2) (2000)

TOP TEN (IN ELEVEN):

(11) Garage Band and Rock Band: Apple’s software put remarkably high quality basement-taping music-making tools onto every Mac. Rock Band may be a toy, but it’s irresistible, and it schools young minds and bodies in the notion that music is to be made as well as consumed.

(10) Pernice Brothers: The World Won’t End (2001); Discover a Lovelier You (2005) — Definitely the sleeper in this bunch for me. When I first heard Joe Pernice’s work in 1998’s Overcome by Happiness I was impressed but a bit bored. Over time I came to appreciate, then crave, the combination of lush pop arrangements and astringent lyrics.

(9) They Might Be Giants: No (2002); Here Come the ABCs (2005)– For me this decade was all about raising a pair of twin boys. TMBG’s forays into children’s music were that process’s soundtrack — and frequent tonic. “No” offered my three-year-olds an early introduction to absurdism, and its charming animations proved an endless diversion. (“Robot Parade” introduced them to the term “cyborg” — and gave them a chance to misremember it as “borg-cy,” which we will never forget.) And even though, by the time “ABCs” came along, the alphabet had long been mastered, the music (and great accompanying videos) won over kids and grownups alike.

(8) The Long Winters: When I Pretend to Fall (2003); Putting the Days to Bed (2006) — Sharp tuneful alt-rock with an edge and a brain. My only complaint about singer/songwriter John Roderick? Low productivity!

(7) The Fiery Furnaces: Blueberry Boat — The Friedbergers, brother and sister, moved from the more forthright songwriting of their early tracks to the increasing obscurity of their more recent work. But along the way they created this masterpiece of baroque verbiage and extravagant music.

(6) Tobin Sprout: Lost Planets and Phantom Voices (2003) — Deep autumnal soundscapes and pop paintings from a maestro of gentle melody. The former Guided by Voices songwriter, far less profligate with his talent than that group’s leader, Robert Pollard, hasn’t put out an album since; he seems to be concentrating on painting these days. Too bad!

(5) Green Day: American Idiot (2004); and The Thermals: The Body, the Blood, the Machine (2006)– Two punk operas about Bush-era America. Green Day’s megahit album drafted Who-style song suites and hook-laden power-trio riffs in the service of a narrative about disaffected no-future youth; the Thermals channeled a Buzzcocks sound for their grim portrait of a young couple trying to escape a fundamentalist/fascist America.

(4) Mekons: Natural (2007) — These veterans kept producing challenging, creative work through the decade. Each album, from Journey to the Edge of the Night (2000) to OOOH (2002) to Natural, improved on its predecessor. Natural is the band’s version of pastoral — a contemplative, acoustic-heavy set of laments for the end of nature.

(3) Frank Black/Black Francis: Dog in the Sand (2001); Bluefinger (2007) — FB/BF has been as prolific with his songs as he is fickle with his stage name. These albums were his peaks of the decade. Dog in the Sand ranged from fierce Stones-style rockers to the almost unbearably beautiful “St. Francis Dam Disaster.” Bluefinger used the story of Dutch glam-rocker Hermann Brood as the spine for a memorable set of Black classics.

(2) The New Pornographers: Twin Cinema (2005), Challengers (2007) — I do not know how A.C. Newman and his cohorts do it, but each album adds to my respect for their genius. When I read somewhere in an interview that Newman is a big fan of Eno’s “Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)” it all made sense.

(1) The Mountain Goats: Tallahassee (2003), We Shall All Be Healed (2004), The Sunset Tree (2005) — Don’t think I’d have made it through these years without John Darnielle’s music. Thank you. Happy new year!

When MP3 was young

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In early 2000 I got a call from a producer at Fresh Air, asking if I’d like to contribute some technology commentary. Fresh Air is, to my mind, one of the very best shows on radio, so yes, I was excited. For my tryout, I wrote a brief piece about this newfangled thing called MP3 that was just beginning to gain popularity. We’d been covering the MP3 scene at Salon since 1998, but it was still a novelty to much of the American public. I went down to KQED and recorded it. As far as I knew everyone liked it. But it never aired. I had four-month-old twins at home and a newsroom to manage at work. I forgot all about it.

In a recent file-system cleanup I came across the text of the piece and reread it, and thought it stood up pretty well. The picture it presents — of a future for music in which its enjoyment is divorced from the physical delivery system — has now largely come to pass. But at the time I was writing, the iPod was 18 months or so in the future; the iTunes store even farther out; the “summer of Napster” still lay ahead; and the record labels’ war on their own customers was still in the reconaissance phase.

Here it is — a little time capsule from a bygone era, looking forward at the world we live in today:

The phonograph I had as a kid played records at four different speeds. 33 was for LPs, 45 was for singles. There were two other speeds, 16 and 78, but I had no idea what they were for — they made singers on regular LPs sound like they’d sunk to the ocean floor or swallowed helium. Later I learned that the 78 speed was for heavy old disks, mostly from the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s; I’m still not clear what 16 was all about.

These old-fashioned playing speeds represented what, in today’s era of rapid obsolescence, we’d call “legacy platforms” — outmoded technologies that are no longer in wide use. The phonograph itself became a “legacy platform” in the 1980s with the advent of the compact disk. Now it’s the CD’s turn, as the distribution of music begins to move onto the Internet.
[Read more…]

Richard Thompson’s work songs

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For the past few years I have been making a pilgrimage to Villa Montalvo in Saratoga, through what are inevitably cold December rains, for solo acoustic shows by Richard Thompson. (I wrote about the trip back in 2005.) This year I picked up tickets way in advance for a Sunday evening show, figuring the traffic would be lighter than on a week night. Only later was this night declared on the calendar to be a special “theme” night, billed as a “first time ever” event: Thompson would perform “Work Songs, Ballads and Rallying Cries.” A little like his show of “1000 Years of Popular Music,” the set ranged from Renaissance ballads to punk. It was a bit rough around the edges, a rarity for this supremely skilled guitarist, but utterly engaging, and repeatedly surprising.

The show opened with Thompson’s own stirring “Time to Ring Some Changes,” and included several songs from his album “Industry,” one from his “Hard Cash” collection, and “Genesis Hall,” his Fairport Convention classic. The rest were covers — and what an eclectic collection.

I’m probably forgetting a few, but here’s what I remember: “Buddy Can You Spare a Dime”; “Minority” (Green Day); “Joshua Gone Barbados” (Rick von Schmidt); “Strange Fruit”; a hilarious 18th century song about lying, cheating merchants; a solemn, stirring anthem of the Diggers, that brief-lived collective during the English Revolution; “Get Up, Stand Up” (Bob Marley — minus the lines about Haile Selassie); “War” (Edwin Starr/Temptations); “I Ain’t Marching Any More” (Phil Ochs); “Little Boxes” (Malvina Reynolds); “Beds Are Burning” (Midnight Oil). Harmonica player George Galt accompanied on several numbers.

Thompson added a couple of updated verses to the Ochs march, placed his own spooky spin on “War,” and busted loose like a one-man rock band for the Midnight Oil number. Beyond an opening crack about the late conversion of George W. Bush to socialism, he barely alluded to the current state of the world and the woes of the economy. He really didn’t have to.

Feelies redivivus

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I discovered only by chance that Glenn Mercer, one of the key figures in one of my favorite bands of all time, the Feelies, put out a new solo album last year. This led me on a whole rediscovery-tour of the post-Feelies bands: Wake Ooloo, Wild Carnation (just ordered their 2006 Superbus), Speed the Plough, Yung Wu.

If you don’t know them, the Feelies started out on their first album with a sort of jittery New Wave hyper-strum (one song was aptly titled “The Boy With the Perpetual Nervousness”). Then the original rhythm section (including drummer Anton Fier) left, and with a new lineup they took a more pastoral turn on album two, The Good Earth, and finally settled into a Velvet-Underground-meets-Television groove for a handful of further albums before breaking up.

I loved pretty much everything they did, and when I pick up a guitar and idly strum, more often than not it’s one of their tunes. Their choice of covers was always spot on: you can find live recordings from the ’80s of them playing Jonathan Richman’s “Egyptian Reggae” and Wired’s “Outdoor Miner,” and Yung Wu, whose lineup seemed to include the entire Feelies, even recorded that wonderful Brian Eno/Phil Manzanera ditty, “Big Day”.

I don’t think they were capable of recording a bad track, and at their best (as on “Higher Ground”) the exquisite guitar leads are like a flight of angels. But their vocals were always modestly buried in the mix (I think this heavily influenced early REM) and they never found the following they deserved.

Now, according to the Feelies Myspace page, it appears the Feelies are reuniting to play some dates in NY over July 4. Too bad I won’t be there.

Singing in Code

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OK, this one is just for plain fun: it’s the first Wordyard playlist.

When I was planning my campaign of global domination for Dreaming in Code I had visions of a multimedia onslaught. I’d pull together video clips that epitomized the nightmare of software scheduling, from A Brief History of Time to Groundhog Day to Lawrence of Arabia (that quicksand scene, of course), and music that similarly reflected the themes.

Didn’t get too far…but I did compile a list of songs that might be the book’s soundtrack. (Tip of the hat to Largehearted Boy‘s custom of inviting authors to assemble playlists for their novels, and to Josh Kornbluth‘s loving selection of apropos tunes to precede his solo shows.)

(1) “Put Your Hand On The Computer,” They Might Be Giants — ‘Cause that’s how it always starts.

(2) “Bill Gates Must Die,” John Vanderslice — Certainly, most open source developers aren’t obsessive sociopaths like this song’s narrator. But they have always harbored a certain animosity toward the founder of Microsoft, and sometimes it gets a little personal. (Bonus rationale: This song once fried my motherboard.)

(3) “Source Tags and Codes,” And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead — “Spend half a life deciding what went wrong / Trying to find out what took you so long.”

(4) “Dot Dash,” Wire.

(5) “Systems Crash,” Guided By Voices.

(6) “I Want to Live on an Abstract Plain,” Frank Black.

(7) “Information Age,” Damon and Naomi.

(8) “Waiting for the Great Leap Forward,” Billy Bragg.

(9) “Raymond Chandler Evening,” Robyn Hitchcock — Chandler the software is named for the novelist. But the song’s last line (“And I’m lurking in the shadows / ‘Cause it hasn’t happened yet”) echoes my software epic’s in medias res ending, too!

(10) “Your Belgian Things,” the Mountain Goats — “The arteries are clogging in the mainframe / There’s too much information in the pipes.”

“Heretic Pride” from the Mountain Goats

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Earlier this week I received my (pre-ordered) copy of the new Mountain Goats CD, “Heretic Pride.” My enthusiasm for the music of John Darnielle now dates back four years, and this is one infatuation that has only grown deeper with time. I am, unabashedly, a fan.

And yet I think I’d love “Heretic Pride” even if I encountered it with no grounding in the Mountain Goats’ stuff. This is what passes for an upbeat album from Darnielle: it’s full of joy, but that’s joy in the face of terror. Heretic Pride, by the Mountain Goats The title track, for instance, is a defiant hymn soaring out of the throat of some unspecifiedly nonconformist protagonist who has been dragged out of his house and through the streets toward his doom. Of this song, Darnielle writes: “Spoiler alert: The main character here will not live long after he gets done lauding his imminent demise.” (This commentary appears in notes to the album that were apparently provided in the press kit; an artist named Jeffrey Lewis took them and illustrated them in tabloid-comic strip form — the style of those salvation-in-six-frames handouts that evangelicals used to distribute, and perhaps still do.)

There are songs here (you can sample them at the 4AD site) about Chinese sea monsters and pulp novelists, murdered reggae singers and imaginary cults. Titles include “Lovecraft in Brooklyn” and “Marduk T-Shirt Men’s Room Incident.” The pace is livelier and more varied than on the Goats’ somber last outing, “Get Lonely”; superb drumming from Jon Wurster drives the faster numbers, and majestic string arrangements by Eric Friedlander bathe the slower ones.

If the album doesn’t sate you, you can also enjoy the satirical ditty about this year’s elections that Darnielle knocked off for a recent public radio show. Titled “Down to the Ark,” it imagines the whole civic process as the triumph of a satanic cult. You can listen to it here.

Three Mountain Goats shows are lined up here in the Bay Area next weekend. I intend to be at all of them! Come say hello.

LATE ADD: Darnielle dissects the characters in five of his songs in this interview on Emusic.

Autoclave, by the Mountain Goats

Good music: Mekons, TMBG, Black Francis

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Some new music I’ve been enjoying from three artists/bands whose work I’ve been following since the mid or late ’80s:

The Mekons, “Natural”: Their last collection of new material, “OOOH,” was an exploration of religion and ritual; this new batch takes a turn to the pastoral. Rough-hewn even in this laid-back mode; mysteriously allusive as always; and worth heavy rotation as ever.

They Might Be Giants, “The Else”: I never fully warmed to their previous outing, “The Spine,” but “The Else” strikes me as a return to form. I’m enjoying it and — even though this is ostensibly a “grownup” album and not one of the band’s “children’s music” works — so are my seven-year-olds. Standout tracks: the patter-song “Bee of the Bird of the Moth” (is it an ode about genetic engineering? I don’t know, but I’ll remember the “Sleep of Reason Corporation”!) and “Contre Coup” (a song about phrenology, concussions and love), which introduced me to the obscure word “limerent.”

Black Francis, “Bluefinger”: Frank Black reverts to his old Pixies moniker for this new album, inspired (as the folks in the FrankBlack.net forum figured out and the official site confirms) by the life saga of Dutch glam rocker Herman Brood. Hard for me to see how all 11 tracks fit that template. But it’s easy for me to love the entire album, which marks a return to energetic form after Black’s previous duo of interesting but somewhat enervated discs recorded in Nashville. Standout songs: Beastie-Boys-style rave up “Threshold Apprehension,” in which Black shrieks and yowls like he hasn’t since Pixie days; “Lolita,” which sounds like one of the great numbers from the days of Frank Black and the Catholics (reminiscent of the Jonathan Richman tribute “The Man Who Was Too Loud”); the singalong “She Took All of the Money”; and “Angels Come to Comfort You,” which rises to the catchiest, sunniest chorus of death you can imagine.

I missed TMBG on their current tour — they swung through the Bay Area while I was out of town last week — but it seems that both the Mekons and Frank Black/Black Francis are performing over the next week at the Cafe du Nord. I expect to be there.