csua.org/u/fp1 -> www.stylusmagazine.com/articles/weekly_article/imperfect-sound-forever.htm
And I was going to go on to detail how much, well, detail my wonderful new cans had rung out of this fantastic record, about how I'd noticed the sound of rain against the window of the building they recorded in during a few seconds of what I had previously considered to be near-silence at the start of "The Rainbow." I was going to witter on about the timbre of instruments, about how when I listened to Mark Hollis' eponymous solo album from 1998 I could hear the creak of the stool he was sitting on during recording. I was going to talk about how those little details, the accidents, the colourations of sound that remind you that people made this music, are almost as important as the music itself. I got distracted because it suddenly dawned on me that an awful lot of recent music, much of which I adore, sounds horrible.
The new Flaming Lips CD is the kind of cod-metaphysical psychedelia (there's a reason actual philosophers don't take acid--it stops them from thinking properly) that's bound to garner glowing reviews from broadsheet critics to whom all music blends into a homogenous morass and to whom cosmic platitudes equal great spiritual insight. you could argue that they're running out of ideas and melodies and are compensating by being weird for the sake of it, and that Coyne's voice, never strong, is now so shot that you fear for his ability to even talk, but it's not a bad record. So it might as well be bad because I simply cannot stand to hear it. I don't mean that it's lashed with savage, Angus Young-esque guitar riffs or grindcore percussion, because it's not (it's the kind of luscious, unpredictable-yet-lucid-dream futurist collage that Yoshimi... predicated, occasionally punctured with some rowdiness and energy); I simply mean that the CD itself when played back bashes out of your speakers at a massive, wearing volume. It's more dynamic, more exciting, you can hear more detail, you get a better sense of space as instruments and sounds surround you and involve you (like a Taoist says, the space between the spokes is the most important part of the wheel--as it is with music), and the physical pleasure of feeling a ripple of bass run through your body simply can't be beaten. Surfer Rosa by The Pixies is an old CD that seems daintily quiet next to At War with the Mystics, but if you nudge the volume dial up and then up a little more and maybe up a little further, it gets better and better, louder and louder, the juxtapositional leap from whispered, undulating verse to hammer-attack chorus getting more and more exciting and visceral, guitars and bass and drums and Black Francis' yowling curses all clear and vibrant and dangerously realistic. It could maybe do with a little more bass now that we're more able to reproduce low-frequencies than we were in 1988, but that's a very minor gripe. At War with the Mystics, on the other hand, just gets painful and messy and starts "clipping" when you turn it up.
thousands of pounds over the years on stereos, headphones, hi-fi separates, portable audio systems, and even (in my more gullible moments) biwired speaker cables and limestone slabs to position my speaker stands on, all in pursuit of the "perfect" sound: slightly more sparkle and physical *ping* in the treble (hearing the stick hit the hi-hat, perhaps, rather than a vague *splash*); a more rounded and tighter bass sound that doesn't bloom like ugly bathwater and overwhelm the song; more realistic vocals that put the singer right in front of you, spittle-filled lips and all. It's like when serious wine buffs talk about being able to smell diesel or orange peel in a bottle of Shiraz: it seems like nonsense until you immerse yourself in the sensations of the discipline and find that you too are scrabbling for ridiculous metaphors to describe how something tastes or sounds or smells when you suddenly realise there are more nuances than you ever imagined. It started when I was about sixteen and listened to "I Am the Resurrection" through shitty headphones out of a shitty boombox while trying to write an essay for school, straining to hear all these sounds buried in the song that I could faintly perceive but had never heard before when wheeling around my bedroom air-guitaring like a delirious fool. That moment planted a seed in me, made me want to hear everything possible, every detail in every song, soak it in and lose myself in it. For the last eleven years I've been trying to find that sound, and the equipment that will make it for me. I'm not about to claim that you can't "properly" enjoy music unless you're running it through some multi-thousand-pound Naim system with enormous -L-900 Epos floorstanding speakers, because we all know that you can get a kick out of a great tune running off a crappy C90 cassette in a bog-standard car stereo. Or by playing the new Flaming Lips album through your iBook speakers, or through the earbuds that came with your MP3 player. But that's not the only way to listen to music, and certainly not the best way to listen properly, and I doubt anyone would disagree for long if you confronted them with even a modest hi-fi set-up that can really play. I think music journalists have a responsibility to listen to records on at least half-decent equipment--film critics wouldn't (I hope) review a film based on viewing it on an iPod Video during a train journey, and film studios would be aghast if they did. Certainly you could ascertain the plot from that, but film is about more than just story in the same way that music is about more than just song. Sadly very few music journalists appear to be concerned with the nuts and bolts of actual sound quality though--possibly because it "gets in the way of the music, maaaan," but more likely because they're scared that they'd look as if they didn't know what they were talking about if they tried. I know more than a few people who've reviewed albums based solely on MP3s--I've done it myself in the past, to my shame. An art critic wouldn't evaluate a painting based on a black & white Xerox, and while some people will be up in arms saying it's not the same thing with music, I disagree--MP3s lose colour, space, and depth, all of which can affect your relationship with a song. The reason At War with the Mystics is so punishingly loud is because of how it's recorded, mixed and mastered, how the components and levels of the music are arranged and set in the processes before it gets put on to CD. A quick lesson from someone who doesn't fully understand (and I am very much a novice learning this stuff on-the-job as I research this article)--in basic, layman's terms "producing" gets the music out of the musicians; "mixing" arranges the elements of the music on that tape; and "mastering" polishes the songs up to a cohesive shine and sets the final levels for the finished whole--it makes a bunch of "songs" into an "album," if you like. Record companies these days (and I don't just mean nasty behemoths like EMI or Sony--your favourite indie are probably just as bad) are eager to make CDs as loud as possible because they think, with some justification, that this is what people want. In order to get CDs to be consistently loud, they get compressed--essentially this means that the quieter moments are made louder in relation to the, um, louder moments, to make the entire CD a consistent, and high, level of volume. During the compression process, the tops of signals can be cut off, or "clipped."
There are two ways to measure "loudness"--peak levels and average levels. The former refers to the loudest part of a piece of music or sound; The difference between the highest and lowest points makes for the average level. Sadly, the science of psychoacoustics suggests our ears generally respond to the average level rather than the peak level of volume--hence we would perceive a consistently loud piece of rock music as being "louder" than a piece of classical that reaches the same or even a higher volume level during a crescendo, simply because the rock song is "loud" all the way through. "Loud" records grab our attention (obviously--being louder they are harder to ignore on first impression) and in...
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