Month: October 2011

Have you ever entered a long-abandoned space; a time capsule?

Not like a cave or a forest or a wood; those are natural places which exist independent of any time-keeping, in a vast seamless stretch.

I am referring instead to places touched and crafted by humanity, once; and then left, sealed up, like a pharaoh’s tomb.  How do you think Howard Carter felt when he first entered King Tut’s tomb? What do we feel when we enter these ancient spaces?

They are filled with unfamiliar objects, layers of dust (matter once organized and differentiated, now becoming undifferentiated), and what else?  Ghosts?  What is a ‘ghost’ if not the /voice/ of a departed individual that still /speaks/ to us through the discourse established by their abandoned objects/spaces?

Our bodies can move freely through the three dimensions of space, unless shackled by disease or coercive force; but most people intuitively feel that we cannot move freely through time.  This restriction on controlled movement through time is tolerated, at best, and suffered deeply at worst.  Most feel that we move forward through time, at a rate that does seem to vary with activity and age; but backward through time?  Can we access the past?  Do we ever feel that we are using the force of a prior moment?

The future holds possibilities, certainly; but the past does as well.  Just as we can chose our current actions from a certain set of possible actions, and therefore chose our futures to a degree, we can also chose our pasts.  We can chose which elements of the past we incorporate into our lives.  There is an essential difference, for instance, between filling your air/space/life with the music of Led Zeppelin and the Beatles vs filling your life with the music of Jim Ford and Pearls Before Swine.  While Led Zeppelin and the Beatles are certainly two of the finest musical groups to ever make a record, the great success that they experienced ensures that they will become part of the fabric of all subsequent musical culture.  They are already baked-in, as it were, to 99% of rock music that you might experience on any radio station or television show today.  This does not make them bad: but it does make them inevitable.  Experiencing the legacy of Zeppelin and the Beatles is not a choice; it is mandatory.  On the other hand, when we chose to heavily involve ourselves with forgotten, cast-off bits of history, we can actively re-shape our own contemporary reality.  Obscurity, as a preference, is not simply motivated by a supposed hierarchy of accessibility or a badge of time-spent-in-the-trenches; when we engage ourselves with the entombed, the brilliant-but-dead-end bits of history, aren’t we really crafting a unique present moment for ourselves?

The films of Quentin Tarantino are often described as post-modern because he mixes cultural signifiers of many different eras and subcultures in a non-heirachical way in order to arrive at a new and unique meaning.  Consider Samuel Jackson’s character in the clip above: The suit of a jazz musician from the 50s; jheri curl hairdo from the 80s; the highly charged speech patterns of the 60s civil rights movement; driving the 1970s sedan.  What year is it again?  Tarantino is making films for a wide audience, so none of these are particularly obscure references in and of themselves; he wants to entertain you, not send you to Google after the movie to look up what the hell was going on.  But the overall affect is still achieved through a kind of time-play.  This demonstrates that yes the past, as well as the future,  holds immense expressive possibilities.

When we’re working in the studio, and we record a vocalist with an ancient microphone, what exactly are we doing?  What effect are we creating?  It’s not likely that we’re trying to trick anyone into thinking that this pop song was recorded in 1932.  We’re generally not even trying to reference the historical period 1932 via the recording.  But we do have the potential to build a new space that exists along a different axis entirely.  Not a past-plus-present but a denial or refutation of single-vector linear time.  I don’t think this actually happens very often; we can use all sorts of audio equipment from the entire 100-year history of recording technology and still easily end up with ‘just a pop song,’ be it a genius one or a terrible one.  But there is real possibility in this.

If you are reading this website right now, you are probably involved in the recording of music in some way.  You probably own or admire antique or ‘vintage’ recording equipment, and use it in your work.  Why do you do it?  What is the benefit for you? What expressive power does it have?  Are you taking full advantage of those possibilities?