It’s an ephemeral thing, the flow of music; what sticks, what fails, what is kept, bought, sold.
Let’s take and follow the territories of a newly purchased vinyl record (vinyl, because it has a physical body to be inscribed with desires). It reads like the bands of a felled tree, letting us know it’s past.
Alright: 12″ single, black sleeve, minimal label info. Myra Barnes Re-edit, ‘Soul Sister’. Originally released late 60’s, re-edit is brand new.
Often the re-edit labels have NO info printed, not even a title: which aims to de-territorialize the music from its past, and re-hash it into the current. It doesn’t matter how much has been changed or re-mixed, its the very act of feeding it through the vinyl/dj machine that matters.
When i played it the first time last night at a bar, i was drunk, and knocked the needle straight across the vinyl, leaving a quiet pop every 1.88 seconds recurring across most of the 12″. It’s mine now. No other copy has that noise.
(Speaking of locked grooves, i have a copy of ‘jungle fever’ from the junglebook movie (disneyland), with a groove that loops, over and over. What were the types of Bodies without Organs again? Empty, full and cancerous? Well, a locked groove is cancerous, endlessly repeating the same thing over and over.)
As a record is played, needles, dust, dirt, scratches etc add to the sounds present, perhaps showing how the record is not petrified in its organisation (unlike cd’s). each time a record is played, the recording is brought into the current, into flux.
We have devices to stop these becomings: covers, dust cleaners, low wear styli. But we can reduce wear only to a certain point, whilst still creating music. It acknowledges music as a kind of becoming, and becomings are things that leave marks.
May 17, 2008 at 2:03 pm
Hmm … I do wonder how we could conceive of the body of a CD. Where does the music exist? It seems to be connected to the VHP in a way, the digitisation of something traditionally physical. But then, what kind of territorial journeys are performed by digital music files? The file can jump from a CD to a hard drive to an iPod to a torrent across the web to a listener on the other side of the world, onto a CD that they burn and give to a friend, which then, of course, can be scratched and drawn on with marker and recontextualised, reterritorialised. Maybe. I’m not sure.