Reading the Politics Of Recorded Sound
Just released this past month, Social Text 102: The Politics of Recorded Sound is the latest special issue to take the temperature of the field of sound studies. Answering the provocative question posed by Michelle Hilmes in a 2005 review essay for American Quarterly (which will soon have its own special issue on sound), “Is There a Field Called Sound Culture Studies? And Does It Matter?” with a resounding “yes! and yes!”, the issue elegantly captures both the rigorous possibilities and the vexing challenges of this now-emerged interdisciplinary field. ST 102 is edited by Gustavus Stadler, Associate Professor of English at Haverford College, and the issue curates interdisciplinary essays by David Suisman, Mara Mills, Jennifer Stoever(yours truly), Stadler, Alexandra T. Vasquez, and Jayna Brown that challenge traditional technology-driven narratives of recording history by excavating the multiple, conflicted, and sometimes generative ways in which sound recording is tangled in networks of power like an old cassette tape gone wrong.
Given space limitations and my own vested excitement over the issue, my writing here will be more preview than review, slicing you off a tantalizing tidbit rather than chewing it all up for you. It really is something that critical sound studies heads will want to mull over on their own, and toward that end, I include links to each piece that take you to Social Text’s newly-revamped website where you can read the abstract, listen to hand-selected audio supplements, and download the article if you have an institutional subscription. My analog peeps can order hard copy of the issue here. Readers in the New York area can celebrate the issue’s release on Friday, April 30th @ NYU’s Tisch Center.
Gustavus Stadler’s “Introduction: Breaking Sound Barriers” takes the supposed transparency of recording technology to task and asks readers to consider not only what recording has enabled but what it has foreclosed. Eschewing technological determinism, Stadler writes, “what matters here is learning how to hear what power, history, culture, and difference sound like. Those categories are, ultimately, the ‘technology’ of sound recording” (10-11).
David Suisman’s “Sound, Knowledge, and the ‘Immanence of Human Failure’: Rethinking Musical Mechanization through the Phonograph, the Player-Piano and the Piano” recounts the forgotten history of the player piano, which once battled it out with the phonograph for the title of sound playback technology du jour. After reading Suisman, the ways in which scholars have tuned out the player piano will seem utterly surprising, given its importance as a forerunner of digital modes of reproduction.
Mara Mills’s “Deaf Jam: From Inscription to Reproduction to Information” tackles the complex history of the telephone, arguing for a more prominent place for telephony in media studies and exposing the submerged history of the use of disabilities within technoscience. Though deaf participants were invaluable in the quest to make speech more “streamlined,” scientists and marketers eventually redacted deaf populations themselves in the name of “efficiency.”
My “Splicing the Sonic Color-line: Tony Schwartz Remixes Postwar Nueva York” introduces readers to Tony Schwartz, sound artist and audio thinker, and reads his 1955 Folkways recording Nueva York as symptomatic of the ways in which listening experiences both reflect and generate ideas about racial difference and American citizenship. Using archival methods to reconstruct the soundscape of 1950s New York, I theorize the presence of what I call the “sonic color-line” in the U.S., linking sound and listening to bodily codes of race.
Gus Stadler’s “Never Heard Such a Thing: Lynching and Phonographic Modernity” explores the quiet-as-its-kept rumors of on-site lynching recordings made in the nineteenth century, using archival methods to expose their falsehood even as he notes how the presence and circulation of lynching (re)productions reveals another edge of the centuries-long white obsession with black voices and the marketability of black pain. Stadler very powerfully connects the “cheapness and tenuousness” of cylinder inscriptions with the “cheapness and tenuousness of black lives as shaped by the white supremacist turn-of-the-century United States” (103).
Alexandra T. Vasquez’s “Can You Feel the Beat”? Freestyle’s Systems of Living, Loving, and Recording” takes us into New York’s recording studios in the 1980s to amplify the suppressed experiences and unsung professionalism of Freestyle’s leading divas: Nayobe Gomez, Judy Torres, Cynthia. Vasquez’s critical labor enables us to hear these singers anew, exploring their work as theorists of the everyday, crafting pleasure, pain, and experience into a set of “bad ass armaments” for their listeners (122).
And finally, Jayna Brown’s “Buzz and Rumble: Global Pop Music and Utopian Impulse” reimagines both “world music” and “utopia” in her provocative essay on digital music’s newfound (and decentered) possibilities: to subvert national boundaries, evade corporate control, and heal bodies torn apart by capitalism and seemingly perpetual war. Tracing the complex links between Congotronics, Buraka Son Sistema, M.I.A. and kuduro music in Angola, Brown’s essay is not only a resonant reminder of the liberatory potential of music, but of scholarship as well.
JSA
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Autolux and the Appeal of Noise-Rock
“But noises effect is not primarily negative. One hears also a positive effect of noise: to give force to music, to provide the implicated reserve of sense.” – Aden Evens, Sound Ideas: Music, Machines and Experience, 2005.
For quite some time I have been a fan of a quirky musical genre called Noise-Rock. For years my friends and I sought to understand what it was about this music that made us such huge fans of its atypical form. Why did we enjoy the sound of something that others would classify as ‘wrong’? With the two sentences above Aden Evens managed to thoroughly explain what exactly I enjoy about Noise and Noise-Rock. It is the intensity with which Noise is delivered purposefully that makes it so appealing. It is the force and raw emotion that this genre contains which draws it’s fan-base.
On the evenings of September fourteenth and fifteenth I ventured down to New York City to see one of my favorite bands, the Los Angeles based ‘Noise-Rock’ trio Autolux. Autolux had not made their way East for five years and my friends and I could not be more excited to experience the music of a band that really no one has ever heard of. We made our way up to the stage to ensure the maximum amount of sound was hammered into our skulls. Part of Autolux’s style was, and still is (although significantly less), a mystery to me. They utilize so much technology and eccentric playing techniques that I was intrigued just as much to see Autolux as I was to hear them. I find this counterpoint between seeing & hearing a band is the reason why I still frequent so many concerts. Watching the re-construction of what I have heard so many times on recording is the most valuable tool a musician can harness. A non-musician friend echoed my own beliefs when he told me that he enjoyed watching the deconstruction of conventional music within Noise-Rock “..to a level where it somehow regains melody.”
Bassist Eugene Goreshter actually carries most of the melody with his punchy and distorted timbre. As Eugene strums chords on his Bass and hammers away on the strings with his fingers, it is epic to watch Guitarist Greg Edwards envelope the lower register in a shroud of layers and loops. Tying all this chaos together is the traditional and extremely syncopated Drumming of Carla Azar. Together, these three individuals blew my mind. Afterwards I could not understand how only three people managed to create such a sonic assault. “This is the way they think,” I recall saying to my friend, “it is incredible that when they sit down to jam and flesh-out ideas this is what pops into their minds first.”
So what draws us to this ‘Noise’ concert and the aesthetic of ‘Noise-Rock’? This is a concept friends and I have been carefully questioning for some time now. The rumble of the Bass churns your stomach and slaps you in the face. The higher frequency spectrum screams and hurts at times. The vocals are nearly unintelligible. So why did we pay twenty-five dollars each to be attacked by sound?
First, I think we chose to be ‘attacked’ by sound because this is not an opportunity which frequently presents itself. Attacking our senses of sight or taste is simple. It can be achieved with a strobe light or the taste of rotten food, but sound is unique. Your body is the resonant chamber which becomes part of the show. Your own form will distort the sound waves and shape them differently. Your very being at a concert asserts your aural importance to the event.
To get to the root of this issue I consulted some friends on their opinions. It seems we all agree, for the most part, about which attributes draw us to the excitement of Noise-Rock. It should be noted that no friends saw the Evens comment until I showed it to them. With this being said it is eery how Evens’ comment applies to not only my love of Noise but other fans’ preference as well. One friend said that, “for me, there’s a certain rush associated with it. and there’s thrill in the challenge of finding a melody under the sheaths of feedback.” Another friend expressed that he “liked the attitude of noise,” and that “I can just imagine someone getting really frustrated with their instrument and just pounding on it.” Once I presented them with the Evens comment there was no dispute from any of them. Everyone emphatically agreed that the force of this genre is what calls them to it. I imagine if Autolux were presented with Evens’ statement they would agree that the intensity of Noise is what drives them to create it.
Here is Autolux performing a song called “Reappearing” from their forthcoming album Transit Transit at the Music Hall of Williamsburg on September 15th. Enjoy!
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