Notes on production, reproduction

[imomus]

You know, one of the things that makes cold Hakodate (and tonight it's forecast to dip to minus 13 centigrade) just that little bit warmer is the knowledge that in two weeks I'll be back home in Berlin with the two mammals I live with, twin bunnies Hisae (below) and Topo. Keep the igloo warm, mammals! I will be wild and fleecy when I return, wearing pelt of bear and sounding a mighty horn!



I'm supposed to deliver a lecture at 4.30pm this afternoon at the Future University. I guess I'll just extemporize about sound and music, the raw and the cooked. Maybe I could do a John Shuttleworth-style workshop choc-a-bloc with tips on mic technique and production. If I do, maybe I'll project Ariel Pink's video for Kate I Wait (Paw Tracks) and use it as an example of good production.

"What, Ariel Pink, good production?" I hear my audience expostulate. "How can that be when his sound is muddy and murky, his channels aren't clearly separated, he doesn't stay in time or in tune, and his 80s string machine is mixed so loud? Put him in a good studio with lots of outboard! Never mind that whacky label Panda Bear runs, sign him to a company that'll get him a nice professional producer like Nigel Godrich! Or at least buy him one of those electronic guitar tuners!"

My dear friends, you have understood nothing about production. Good production is about character, personality, intrigue, flamboyance, charm, fascination, license, not about levels, channels, separation, clarity, normality or competent engineering! It's about ravishing the ears by all means imagineable! It's about creeping out of shadows and repositioning conceptual frames, not about synching to SMPTE frames! You'll be telling me next that The Mountain Goats and Devendra Banhart are better now they've thrown away their hissy cassette recorders and employed session musicians! You'll be telling me that everyone should sound just like everyone else! That there are 'objective standards of recording quality'! You'll be agreeing with Shuttleworth that Johnny Rotten should have taken a few minutes before each Sex Pistols gig to adjust his microphone stand to the correct height so he didn't have to do that Richard III hunchback thing! Stooping like a hunchback isn't just great actor's business, it's great production! They don't teach you this at singing school, but there's no better way to project "No future".

More Ariel Pink here and here.

Comments

[imomus.livejournal.com]

A good song is a good song, no matter how you play it

That's pure Platonism, I couldn't possibly agree. Songs are incarnated in musical robes of flesh, and cannot be separated from what Eno called "the vertical colour of sound". They are not mere scripts privileged with objective qualities. If they were, there'd be fewer rotten cover versions.

[jimyojimbo.livejournal.com]

Exactly, the point I was making. Or, perhaps not making, more waving my arms in the general direction. I hate the idea of the perfect song (script as you call it).

What I was trying to say (not actually addressing anyone else's point in particular) is that big studio recording isn't necessarily bad as long as the people in charge are the ones with the ideas. That is, if a band sat at home and made fantastic 8 track recordings, perhaps if they are in control they might make fantatsic recordings in a big studio - and utilize the technological benefits in the same way they utilized the more limited technology of the 8 track.

If they go in to the studio, being able to call the shots, and then turn out stuff with *add your pet over-production-hate here*, then that's their fault. Mind you, it's obviously more likely that if a new band goes into a big studio, they'll be under the "control" of some other producer. Which is bad too.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

As I get older, I get more and more convinced that most of the things I consider virtues are in fact just necessities which people consider compromises and abandon at the first opportunity. That fits bands 'cleaning up their sound', and it also fits people moving out of virtuous high density urban environments (yes, slums) to spread and sprawl in the suburbs. I suppose another way of putting this is "Protect me from what I want". Poverty is sometimes the only protection people get from what they want.

[jimyojimbo.livejournal.com]

Then would it make more sense to stop considering the sounds in terms of lo-fi / hi-fi or dirty / clean, and consider it more in terms of the sound you want vs the sound you don't want? This might be more in keeping with "songs [that] are incarnated in musical robes of flesh". The terrible cleaned-up-second-album syndrome is like Nip/Tuck on the robes of flesh, administering expensive plastic surgery in an attempt to mould the unique into the universal "beauty".

[(Anonymous)]

i dream of making a porn crossover of fellini and jan svankmajer films set in a japanese high school and in osaka restaurants,but poverty totally protects me (and the rest of the world)from doing it

superanonymous mario