Production
One thing I’d meant to use this blog to talk about is the technical side of music, something reviews don’t often make space for: the nuts and bolts of playing, writing, recording, mixing. I’d nearly forgotten. But yesterday I found myself writing about this stuff on a message board, talking about the big weird thing that gets me with the band Los Campesinos!.
It’s a general rule of recording music that you want to make sure all the different sounds have a coherent spatial relationship with one another. That relationship can be realistic, or it can be artificial in some conventional way people are accustomed to, or it can be weird and unique — but you definitely want to have one. You generally don’t want the drums to sound like they’re booming from the back of a massive cavern while the guitar sounds gently finger-picked in a bedroom and the vocals sound like a basement show. (Unless you do. For effect.) This isn’t some stodgy hidebound convention, just a basic of how to create recordings people’s ears can make sense of. It’s sort of like the visual language of films: you can shoot stuff in a way that feels real, or tap into that vocabulary where we all know a wavy dissolve means “fantasy,” or do something completely new and weird — but you don’t want your camera angles randomly jumping from one side of people to the other, from near to far, with no plan.
Los Campesinos! have a problem with this convention: up until recently, they’ve had two very different singers. One of them, Gareth, is energetic and yelpy and strong-voiced, and backs up off his microphone like a rock signer. The other, Aleks, was small-voiced and soft, and needed to be recorded with a very close mic. Neither of them can jump into the other’s space. Either of them would sound perfectly normal on an indie record — there are loads of guitar bands with soft, close-miced singers, and it’s particularly conventional when it comes to indie. But together, they’re weird. Gareth starts yelping energetically, suggesting the space where the vocals sit. Then Aleks tosses something in, and suddenly she’s close up, whispering in your ear, from a space the production never acknowledged before. It’s like listening to a rock band get interrupted, occasionally, by a voiceover. It’s like watching two people have a conversation in a movie, except one is shot at medium range and the other is filmed only in close-up. The band actually use that dynamic pretty well: Gareth freaks out and Aleks talks calmly down at him like she’s the narrator.
Thinking about this small thing made me wonder about some bigger ones, though: it got me trying to identify what, over the past decade, has struck me as an actual substantive new thing happening with production. I don’t mean the top-level aesthetic stuff, the gloss or texture or feel of it. I’m thinking more of the really core stuff: the method of it, the way sounds are arranged, the base philosophy of it. The first two things to mind, interestingly enough, had to do with compression, in two very different directions.
There’s that whole loudness issue, which really does carry an aesthetic along with it: a lot of modern rock music has started framing itself with this overloaded, face-against-the-glass production, trying to make it sound like the music itself is too much for your speakers, and is all clawing and bursting its way out wherever it can.
There’s also indie hip-hop (and, to an extent, stuff like dubstep), which has done some pretty odd things with the arrangement of sounds — often making electronic, sample-based music that feels somehow woozy and corroded and rich. One good example, compression-wise, is Flying Lotus’s “Tea Leaf Dancers,” which works the hell out a common effect — whenever the kick drum sounds, it occupies so much room in the mix that everything else ducks beneath it. On this song, that hits an extreme of weird, unnatural pulsing — everything, vocals included, peeling back and ducking the kick, as if someone’s standing around futzing with the volume knob on your stereo — to a point where I often find it difficult to listen to: I get the feeling lots of people who’ve tried to learn how to use compression “correctly” would have an uncomfortable, seasick reaction to this track. In smaller applications, though, it’s an effect I love, and one that seems genuinely new: that lurching, watery, blunted feel in a lot of Madlib productions seems to come from a similar place.
There are plenty of other things, some of which I’ll probably write about later; right now it’s interesting to think through quite how deep or significant they feel to me. (One that feels more meaningful than it might sound is the embrace, in a lot of British dance music, of the sounds of software synths — the really grainy, unadorned, slightly hollow tone of them in things like funky house, and the particular modulations, slides, wobbles, and filter changes that the software around them leads musicians to.) For the time being, though, I’m curious if anyone else thinks much about this, or has any artists or genres they’d suggest were doing interesting new things in this realm. Anyone?
Reblogging in full because everyone should read this, and because I wonder if anyone has good answers to the question at the end. I have to admit I’m not used to thinking about recordings in quite this way— perhaps because of my limited visual vocabulary— although as soon as he explains it, it all makes perfect sense to me, especially the Los Campesinos! example. I’d be interested to hear where Deerhunter/Atlas Sound or the Sincerely Yours crew fit into this, but I’m not sure I can come up with any examples of my own I’d be confident saying are breaking new ground here (Sleigh Bells, maybe?). I’ll keep thinking. And I hope to be reading other people’s responses.
I’ll admit a certain fascination with records as macro canvases that can kneecap any in-depth discussion on the quality of brushstrokes used, and I think this imbalance speaks directly to the node of music history we’re straddling right now. To further the imperfect painting analogy: what if a computer program gave you the ability to make your oils and pigments resemble anything you wanted? If you were able to achieve Seurat’s pointillist style through artificial means, the way a hopeless drummer could design a solid rock rhythm on GarageBand? Well, for one, the art critic’s focus would change. No longer do we much care about the physical process—if you had some randomized fractal-generating software that churned out perfect Pollock forgeries, we’re not likely to picture you hunched over a laptop the way we see Pollock leaping around his shed/studio with a toothbrush.
Suddenly the artist’s vision dominates interpretation, and the age-old intentional fallacy is dragging us down by the ankles into serious muck. Why else would something as innocuous as autotune yield such blisters: we don’t like to think of our pop stars as people who need to have talent created for them, because then we’re wondering what gives them the right to celebrity status in the first place. The only tolerable explanation for such injustice (why not me?) would be that these people are essential auteurs whose next-level pop ideas are somehow limited by their performative skills, and though that may be Kanye in a nutshell, it’s a tough pill for many to swallow.
Or is Kanye even limited? Maybe he can’t sing without autotune, but nobody said he could, and it’s not like autotune masks its artifice—quite the opposite. Does the current state of recording and audio technology honestly misrepresent the state of musical talent and innovation today? Of course not; it only misrepresents how the band will sound in a live venue. But I think we feel that dissonance keenly. We feel that if a group can’t faithfully recreate their sound in person, there is deceit floating somewhere in the album mix. That’s a wrongheaded and instinctual response in the era of recorded music, and plenty of music critics (guilty) want to escape the messiness of recording and production since it calls into question these tangled issues of ownership and teamwork and elusive alchemy that subjectivize our opinions. If a band I love makes a terrible album, it’s all too easy to blame a new hot-shit producer they brought to the table or their decision to record in a barn in Quebec.
These details incorrectly come to be seen as distractions in our effort to get a handle on the finished work, ones that will elicit all sorts of rock geek arguments that are insoluble precisely because we’re only guessing at the control Frank Black has over Art Brut, or whose idea all the overdubs were, or what exactly that not-quite-a-vocoder instrument is. This is the can of worms that “the nuts and bolts” present. Most of us would rather say: “Here’s how it came out, and here’s how I responded to it.” To make it sound less like criticism in a vacuum, we draw comparisons, we sketch genre arcs and career trajectories, we bring personal experience to the songs. No doubt we also do this to obscure our unwillingness to touch the technical side, our hesitancy to own conjectures instead of assured, comfortable and presumptuously written historical narrative. Advanced technology gives us just another excuse to bypass that whole creative process angle: we throw up our hands as if to say: these days anyone can code these sounds—all that matters is how they’re used, and in the service of what. When it comes to framing music, critics find the big picture coziest.
