Ubiquity is the abyss

[imomus]

Music is a good thing. Of course it is. I'm a musician, I've dedicated my life to it, and I know few better things. Music can be sacred, mysterious, otherworldly, intimate, moving, extraordinary. But, increasingly, music is the opposite of those things. It's profane, banal, public, shared, irritating, ordinary and ubiquitous. It's in every restaurant and every cafe and every car and every office and on every computer and on every website. It's in each ear, snaking in on a thin white wire. You listen to music all day, every day. Time without music is downtime. It's the triumph of music! Or is it? Maybe ubiquity signals quite the opposite; music's defeat. For music, ubiquity is the abyss.

Thank you, Steve Jobs, and thank you, Rupert Murdoch! Your marketing ingenuity has spread 42 million iPods across the world, each capable of holding weeks and weeks of music. There are almost as many MySpace pages, 37 million, each one loading up a piece of music as soon as you hit it. Of course, Steve and Rupert aren't leveraging music into our lives because they love music, or even because they love us. They're doing it because it's a key to massive profits, because we love music. Music, after all, is a key to so many other things. It's an index of taste, a measure of social class, a way to bond with others in a social network.

But for whatever reason, Steve and Rupert and the others have squeezed music into every blank bit of space in our lives. We are rapidly reaching the limits of our own ears (tinnitus, my headphoned friend?) and the saturation point at which music becomes utterly unremarkable, and thus, effectively, inaudible.

As usual, Brian Eno was the first person I'm aware of to sound a warning note. In an interview he gave around the time he moved to St Petersburg, he said (I quote from memory) "I'm beginning to be dissatisfied with the idea of CDs, the way they make all music so available to us, the way that all musical experiences are supposedly able to be shrunk down to fit this little plastic disc. I'm beginning to think it should be as difficult to hear music as it was in the Middle Ages. Imagine just hearing a concert once a month, how amazing it must have sounded!"

One good thing about iPods, though, is that they privatize the bad taste of others. When not plugged into speakers or streaming wirelessly to sound systems, iPods shrink other people's music choices (and for me 95% of other people's music taste is unbearable, sorry, other people!) down to little white buds of semi-silence. It's a start in the great work of music removal we must now begin to undertake, we who love music and want to save it by making it scarce again.



On Friday evening I attended a party celebrating Lord Whimsy's birthday at a flock wallpapered bar called The Dove on Thompson Street. A Californian dandy called Doran Wittelsbach was there, and I found his Robert de Montesquiou-esque image admirably extreme. He told me he'd been catcalled on the street by ruffians who pronouced him a "douche". "It sounds very clean, a douche," I remarked, refreshed and impressed by his capacity to antagonize the bridge and tunnel crowd merely by walking down the street in a top hat. Clothes, these days, are clearly more subversive than even the most aggressive music.

Unfortunately, the inevitable moment came. "I also make music," Wittelsbach confided. "I'd like to give you a CD later." I made hasty excuses and left, sneaking off with Karin Komoto to Japanese cafe Hiroko's Place further down the same street. I'd love to tell you we dined accompanied by the ambient, arhythmic sounds of running water, voices cooing conversational Japanese, and clattering pots. But no, Hiroko was piping in Ayumi Hamasaki. Another hour, another 15 songs.

Comments

[cap-scaleman.livejournal.com]

Have there ever been a period of your life when you looked for just... New sensations of musical styles, Momus? I am having such a period right now... Since a few years back.

[cap-scaleman.livejournal.com]

Wait a minute... The middle ages?! Of all ages you pick THE MIDDLE AGES?! Then I wonder, LATE middle ages or EARLY middle ages? Because there is a differnce between the two (which you probably already know).

[cityramica.livejournal.com]

are you familiar with Komar and Malamid's survey regarding and creation of the "most wanted" and "most unwanted" songs?

from this American Life (http://207.70.82.73/pages/descriptions/98/88.html):

"Alex Melamid and Vitaly Komar hired a polling firm to investigate what people want to see in paintings. Then, using the data, they painted what people want. It turned out to be a landscape, with a mountain and a lake, and deer, and a family, and George Washington. Then they applied these techniques to music, with composer David Soldier. They surveyed audiences about what kind of instruments and topics for they liked most in their songs. Then they produced one song based on what people most want to hear--and one song based on what they hate the most. The one people hate includes bagpipes, children singing, lyrics about holidays and religion, wild volume and tempo changes...."

the most wanted one sounds like a dispicably radio-worthy r&b song.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Yes, I even bought the record of that project at Printed Matter, when it was down on Wooster Street (god, I miss that store, and its fabulous silence)! It was unlistenable tripe.

[hunchentoot.livejournal.com]

Let's have silence as a series of holidays. April 33rd will be John Cage-themed.

[bricology.livejournal.com]

I also make music. I'm putting together a collection of remixes of John Cage's song 4'33" by various celebrity DJs. (DJ Spooky's version is KILLER, but it goes on for almost 12 minutes!) I'll be podcasting it soon, and it should be available through iTunes by summer.

[dangoldman.livejournal.com]

Very astute; I've been an avid and constant love of music most of my life, but with the near-saturation-point being almost constant the last handful of years, my near-silences are becoming more and more precious.

Sitting at home with the window open, listening to the tree branches brush against each other outside and the occasional horn-honks of Flatbush Ave, bark of dog and squeal of child... this uncomposed ambience is my creativity engine lately. I'm not even turning to Eno's quiet music to cocoon me when I write in the mornings anymore, I am listening to his quiet philosophy instead.

Cheers.

[niddrie-edge.livejournal.com]

is this why about three years ago everyone was going to buy DAT's and MD Walkmans and capture the soul of the environment with field recordings?

[jermynsavile.livejournal.com]

You missed a treat with the offer of a CD, his music sounds like a party one wishes one had an invite to.

[framework.livejournal.com]

Yeah, what's goin on with that?

If you like the music then you've got a great find, and if you don't like his music, you could always tell him that you don't like it... but at the same time, it probably gets tiresome when people are trying to use you as a stepping stone to a "big break" especially when you're busy, eh.

food

[(Anonymous)]

As you mentioned in a Wired article, there is still nothing like the experience of live music. A record is just that- a record of the sounds made from physical action that actually happened at some point. Food is the same- people will go to great lengths to eat at some specific place in order to experience "live food", even though food, even tasty food, is everywhere.

Joey
www.joeyroth.com

[bugpete.livejournal.com]

"One good thing about iPods, though, is that they privatize the bad taste of others."

There's a worrying trend in the UK at the moment of "young people" loading their phones with music and playing it through the speaker, notably on busses. Not only do you have to suffer their bad taste but it sounds like it's coming from a broken transistor radio.

I wonder if this idiotic behaviour is because they've grown up in a world where music is, like you say, ubiquitous so adding a little more isn't going to make any difference. On they other hand, they might just be morons.

I've just realised that despite having 17,000 mp3s on my computer I often work with no music playing at all. Hmm...

[honeychurch.livejournal.com]

strange - I remember when I was in college (doing my second major in Literary and Cultural Studies [College of William & Mary]) we read a book about the Walkman as a cultural phenomenon - I can't recall the name of it, but I remember that one chapter was on the case of a man who was fined or taken off the Tube for listening to his Walkman too loud - the passengers could hear the music, and it became a big issue. (I also remember distinctly that he was listening to The Housemartins.)

[dickon-edwards.livejournal.com]

I knew things had changed when I overhead two young people in a cafe discussing 'gigs'. I thought they were talking about concerts, but as the conversation progressed, I realised they meant gigabytes, as in iPod memory.

[dickon-edwards.livejournal.com]

Actually, I've just remembered. I bought your last album but still haven't gotten around to listening to it yet. I mainly bought it as a gesture of approval. Um, that's what you want, isn't it...?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

No, I want people to get lost in an album of mine, and find the whole world in it, as if they only had one album, like those people who only have one book and read it again and again (in my grandfather's case, "The Pilgrim's Progress").

[cheapsurrealist.livejournal.com]

It's a start in the great work of music removal we must now begin to undertake, we who love music and want to save it by making it scarce again.

If only filmakers would resist the urge to "score" thier films we might begin to see the beauty of a soundtrackless life. Most of us alive today have grown up with films and television where the image must be accompanied by music. It's for this reason, I believe, that we try to pipe music into nature.
Tecnology is to blame for the availability of music but why do we feel the need to always have music in the background.

"The public wants what the public gets."

[niddrie-edge.livejournal.com]

Don't you think incidental soundtrack music in isolation from images can at times be some of most intriguing music?

[grande.livejournal.com]

ok this post was brilliant. thank you.

[fandarzelig.livejournal.com]

I work in a grocery store and a consequence of this is that I have to listen to their piped in music all day. After eight hours of being brutalized with Phil Collins, Whitney Houston and Aerosmith, when I come home in the evening, I can’t enjoy music that I actually admire. All I want is to sit by the window and hear the subdued outside ambience.

Brian Eno should start a national chain of his quiet clubs. They would be as ubiquitous as Starbucks but without the sound of espresso machines and Jack Johnson.

[bricology.livejournal.com]

But wouldn't that force the patrons to actually to carry on conversations? Might that not lead to the development of verbal wit, the sincere expression of opinions and the revaluation of good manners? No, I doubt that people would know what to do in such circumstances.

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

Of all your recent posts, this one hit home. I recently realized I have hundreds of CDs, most burned to the new Mac; yet all the jewel cases are stashed in milkcrates unalphebetized for the first time in my history, and I often sit at the computer without even powering the speakers.

Would this be indicative of saturation, or worse, a tipping point? A Darned Fine Question.

[scottbateman.livejournal.com]

So Eno wants to return to a time when music was only available to the elites who could afford to have musicians on the payroll? Yes, please take this joyful thing away from the unwashed masses. Yay.

[beverlyhillscop.livejournal.com]

That's certainly a very literal interpretation. I think he was simply stating that music was once a more scarce commodity, rather than the almost worthless 'something' used to fill in gaps nowdays.

Imagine if the only way you could listen to music was to actually seek out musicians yourself? You might certainly value it more. (Depending on the musicianship of your locals...)

[lyrane.livejournal.com]

I don't think the dandy's clothes were subverting anybody or anything. That he was yelled at by the "bridge and tunnel crowd" doesn't prove he was challenging the worst tenets of society. They yelled at him because was flaunting his wealth and his own self-satisfied sense of ingenuity and hip whimsicality.

Classism is never cool, and never okay.

The music you like, experimental and independent musicians, still exists in the form you're talking about, playing concerts that are genuinely rare and special to hear.

Everybody should get to listen to music whenever they want, even if you don't like their specific taste. I think if people appreciate music less on the whole because they hear it more, that's fine, because they choose to listen to music more, because they like to.

[bricology.livejournal.com]

Would you even recognize "classism" if it slapped you with a dead fish? What's more "classist" than an iPod, a $200 pair of jeans and a new BMW? OK, ever seen anyone yelled at for sporting one of those things?

Indeed, have you ever even seen a wealthy person? They don't dress like Doran Wittelsbach; most of them dress like middle-class, middle-brow consumers with expensive designer loyalty. And by all means: let's be careful to avoid any appearance of "ingenuity and hip whimsicality". T-shirts and jeans, everyone, and you with the combed hair: muss that up right this minute!

[butterflyrobert.livejournal.com]

At times I feel this way (I agree that most people have awful musical taste - not me, of course), but I enjoy silence in large amounts every day and only rarely listen to music when I'm not in the mood for it. Quiet meditation is easy enough to have and when it isn't, get a pair of these (http://soundproofing.org/sales/ear_muffs.htm). A tragic issue quickly and easily solved.

worthless music

[(Anonymous)]

When I was in middle school and high school, the music I loved listening to I now find totally insufferable. I remember listening to Casey Kasem's top 40 every Sunday when I was 9 and 10 years old, I would record the songs onto a tape and think think these must be some of the best songs coming out. With that being my musical upbringing, the bands I loved in high school were Matchbox 20, Creed, Stone Temple Pilots, Counting Crows and a slew of other phony, arrogant, platinum selling, awful bands. You are bombarded with all kinds of disingenuine, awful music that is fighting for your attention on radio, tv and just about anywhere you go. I remember one of my friends was into bands like Stereolab, Butthole Surfers and other bands that I thought were bizarre and awful because I was unacustommed to music that didnt fit the mold of a hit band. I slowly came to enjoy bands like this because they were a break from the norm. They werent another hit group off the assembly line and on the 'top songs' countdown. It's like I had to untrain my ears to enjoy music that actually had its own identity and something to say.

[spoombung.livejournal.com]

We are rapidly reaching the limits of our own ears
Probably the right time to follow Ivor Cutler's lead and buy yourself a good pair of bright yellow earplugs and join the noise abatement society.
I wish I'd done that before being subjected to Thin Lizzy's entire back-catalogue in a Waterloo pub on St Patrick's night last week.

[jimyojimbo.livejournal.com]

I wish I'd done that before being subjected to Thin Lizzy's entire back-catalogue in a Waterloo pub on St Patrick's night last week.

Christ, you'd think they might have just given "Whiskey in the Jar" a quick whizz then moved on.

[jimyojimbo.livejournal.com]

Hmm.  I kind of understand your argument and don't understand it at the same time.  Actually, I understand your argument in principle but don't understand in practice.  I love the ubiquity of music, I love the ease of access to it, I love the constant rubbish we're fed without our consent. Because without it, I don't think I'd ever react to it.  I think your argument is a perfectly understandable result of our "noise culture", but at the same time your argument wouldn't exist if we didn't have a "noise culture".  Speaking personally, it is the fact that I have this horrendous trash foisted upon me on a daily basis that I actually do react to it and start searching for something better.  "Cultural taste" or whatever can't grow in a vacuum, in my opinion.  The fact that I like to listen to Alvin Lucier or Clogs is probably down to the fact that I hate the diet of Girls Aloud or Eminem or what have you that I'm subjected to in public.  Would I be listening to the same stuff, would I actively seek it out, if I wasn't bombarded with drivel all the time?  Probably not.  I don't think any of us are born with "good taste".  Usually we just are drawn to a certain cultural path out of pure reaction to te rubbish.  We need the rubbish in order to have something to react against, to give us the impetus to say "nah, mate, this is rub, I'm going to look for something better."  Oh, we can, with the benefit of hindsight, say, "oooh, I hate all this rubbish", but without that rubbish to rail against you wouldn't be where you are.  What I'm saying is that we need the crap in order to know exactly what we don't want to be, innit?

[spoombung.livejournal.com]

What I'm saying is that we need the crap in order to know exactly what we don't want to be, innit?

Different music for different functions - one for childrens parties, another for a noodle house. Different vegatables - a carrot for the casserole, a brussel sprout for the baby's crib, veggies doing different things for him and her.

"Too much music" - it's an old complaint. Over exposure to water brings you out in wrinkles, over-exposure to anything will be numbing, just like correspondence from The Department of Work and Pensions.

[piratehead.livejournal.com]

You remind me of my wife, Momus. She also likes to make doctrines out of her inclinations.

[dzima.livejournal.com]

I think you're onto something here. And I have noticed Momus has been a bit whingey and snide as of recently.

Maybe he's just turning into Marxy.

[bopscotch.livejournal.com]

It's the sad truth. One time my instructor at my college was in a restaurant and he noticed that there was music playing over the establishment's PA system... backwards. He told a waiter and in turn, talked to the manager that their tape was playing in reverse over the PA system. The music that was being played over the restaurant's system was being played to the point of ubiquity that the manager didn't even notice that it was backwards, until my instructor told them so!

I also work at a 24-hour grocery store, where music is constantly pumped over its crappy PA system. Lately, they have even started playing music that has been either left behind in the 1990s (Marcy Playground, Third Eye Blind, Counting Crows, Train, Barenaked Ladies) as well as music that I have in my personal collection (The Smashing Pumpkins, Talking Heads when they worked with Eno, etc).

Not only do you have the lame music being played, but it's also being played on a horribly flawed sound system, making people used to hearing music sound like complete shit. Last but not least, it pains me that music that is a part of me is being played now in this establishment, turned into shit thanks to the crappy PA system, as well as being homoginized thanks to being on a looped set of songs meant to get people excited at buying crap they don't need from a store that doesn't have to be open twenty-four hours. ARG!

This post of yours, by the way, inspired me to remove a song from my MySpace page.

[(Anonymous)]

Actually, I think Erik Satie was ahead of Brian Eno in this sort of prediction by, what, 60 years? Anyway, it's hogwash - substitute "Gutenberg" for "Steve Jobs" when reading the piece, and try to imagine despairing that Ulysses will never be written because everyone gets to read a book. Duh.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

it's hogwash - substitute "Gutenberg" for "Steve Jobs" when reading the piece, and try to imagine despairing that Ulysses will never be written because everyone gets to read a book. Duh.

That's not an apt comparison, because literature is not a time-based medium that hogs bandwidth and restricts the other things you can do with sound while it's "playing". The comparison between an iPod and a book is a slightly better one, and I do note approvingly the iPod's tendency to "privatize" the listener's taste. Interestingly, in Japan discretion is so ingrained that people put generic patterned wrappers over the covers of their bunko paperbacks so as not to annoy others with graphic "spillage" or ostentatious demonstrations of their literary taste.

olden days

[(Anonymous)]

Imagine living in Leipzig in the 1720s or 30s, when Bach was producing new cantatas every week. But would you even have known what you were hearing?

Olden Days

[(Anonymous)]

But imagine living in Leipzig in the 1720s and 30s, when Bachwas producing a new Cantata nearly every week - but would you have known what you were hearing?
I have a book somewhere called something like Journey through Music, about a fellow discovering new music. It was written in something like the 20s, and this bloke is on about playing music - something I didn't really think about until he describes feeling knackered after a Chopin piece - and then, something in what he says tells you that he has a player piano, and the music he buys in on paper rolls. He didn't think of explaining that in any great detail, as it was all he knew.
Sometimes, this "making music special" thing has great appeal - only hearing a piece when you can see it performed, and having to make do with that, or the piano transcription that you might be able to play. But then I think, you would not get to hear very much, and hardly anything that isn't already popular.

Re: Olden Days

[bricology.livejournal.com]

"Anyway, it's hogwash - substitute "Gutenberg" for "Steve Jobs" when reading the piece, and try to imagine despairing that Ulysses will never be written because everyone gets to read a book. Duh."

I think you're conflating "medium" and "content". Gutenberg's invention was developed for the dissemination of ideas and information, not so that corporations could flood our mailboxes every day with junk mail.

Unfortunately, any medium eventually consists of more than 90% crap. We reached that point with print media by the early Victorian era, and with recorded music by the 1950s. We reached that point with on-line opinion-sharing in about 1997.

"But then I think, you would not get to hear very much, and hardly anything that isn't already popular."

I think you have that exactly backwards. Before the invention of the phonograph, when people wanted to hear music, they either went to listen to it being performed live by others, or they played it themselves. Most female members of the middle-class or higher were taught to play the pianoforte, lute or other instrument; even the poor might play the tin whistle, and most people enjoyed singing. People would play duets as part of normal social intercourse. There was more *active* involvement with music; not just the passive, consumerist mode of today.

[ashleyisachild.livejournal.com]

"That which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art."
-Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

[coconutswirl.livejournal.com]

Benjamin was exactly what I was thinking too.

[(Anonymous)]

I guess the value of music can inflate if supply goes over demand. Not just in quantity, but in frequency of hearing. It needs to be carefully proportioned if anyone is to feel its freshness. Proportioned like Japanese meals, or the real way pasta is served, not in huge mounds but as a side dish. Sometimes any garnering interest for a beat, tune, or aria is severely diminished because the sheer amount and frequency of music forces interest to collapse under musics own weight. It's like the old deutschmark, its not worth the paper its printed on.
Think of paying 90 coconuts for a ticket to a piano concerto, ballet, or opera. These are transient in duration but permanent in effect and demand attention. To incessantly hear it of a compact audible device is unfair to your senses and probably says a lot about the hearer's aesthetic standards.

a noticed difference...

[svenskasfinx.livejournal.com]

I'm glad someone has stated this: the music played via mp3 formats ARE not the fullness nor are they good for the senses due to a lacking in certain frequencies.

I read somewhere that the compression of music was really bad for the hearing and that some people actually develop even faster a loss of the higher frequencies and tinnitus. I was very skeptical, but now after even a short time of listening to music with an iPod, I realize that it was possibly not entirely fictional or made up by music "snobbs".

I've become a little more interested in sound collections via wav. file for a while before the gift of my iPod, now I realize it was a good idea to stick to such full-sound formats.

I am in agreement with seeing live performance of music as well.