amplified heart
Music: And Also the Trees: Evening of the 24th (1987) "Haunted Voices," the book in progress, opens thusly:
"Today there has grown out of and around the spoken word a vast network of artificially contrived media---writing, print, electronic devices such as sound tapes or computers in which the informational content is implicitly or explicitly tied in with verbal explanation far beyond the experience of early man---and other complex contrivances. These media are a great but distracting boon. They overwhelm us and give our concept of the word special contours that can interfere with our understanding of what the word in truth is, and thus can distort the relevance of the word to ourselves."
But what if distortion, like "grease," is the word?
My mother gave me disks.
I remember I was seven and the tone-arm was white plastic; the chassis was a box of cardboard with a faux-plaid paper laminate, a sort of working-classy mélange of pinks and blues that bled into a swath of pretend blue-jean (very 80s, the era of Mead notebooks and pencils with real, chew-worthy erasers). I could close the lid and latch the box and take it with me to the next room by toting a clear, plastic handle; I would coil the chord improperly inside and inevitably I couldn't get the lid to shut without the plug dangling. A small plastic volume knob controlled the voices that came out of the box.
In retrospect, there was a subtle homology between the faded and scratched black paint on the plastic volume knob and the tinny voices that came out. But, sound quality matters little to a seven year old, and most especially because my most prized records were once my mother's, recorded in mono somewhere in Memphis over a decade before I was born in 1973. I was obsessed that kind of writing, always perplexed by the way in which the grooves on record could conjure voices from no-place: out of this needle-machine came the most transformative spiritual effects for me. I remember listening to the phonograph and dancing on my bed, jumping, collapsing and pretending to weep when a mournful ditty changed the mood. I remember boredom banished by the impassioned pre-pubescent sign-a-long. I remember praying to some deity or another (sometimes the Dark one) that one day I might be able to sing and move and amplify hearts, that I might become a rock star. For me, listening to my records was like going to church.
Today there is little magic in music, or at least, in the shift from records to compact disks and, today, digital encoding formats like the mp3, something has been lost. There was something hallowed in the touchability of the vinyl record that left its mark in sound. Erik Davis recalls that, for decades, the record drew "living spirit into matter" in a way that musicians and their fans recognized as enchanting---so much so that in the 1970s many rock records became the literal embodiment of magical spells (as was the case with Led Zepplin and other concept album rockers).[1] Experimental musician David Toop notes that the magic of the phonograph, like the nostalgic heart, has swelled in our new century: "Frozen in time within the grooves, a voice, an instrument, a sound, becomes the living dead and is worshipped in the way that a loved one, deceased, may be adored for years by the bereaved."[2] Owing to the fetishism of vinyl, now coupled with the mystifications of nostalgia, in the last decade vinyl records have made a modest come-back, with a number of contemporary artists pressing records again alongside their digital disks and Internet music files.
My early encounters with the writing of sound were religious and largely obsessed with the voice of a mysterious man: Roy Orbison.