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March 01, 2005
Dynamics
The car I drive is a dark green 1995 (or 1996?) Citroën Ax, best summed up as basic transportation. 165K km, 1.0 liter; I can no longer get the driver's side window to open; the locks don't work too well anymore; it's loud on the highway. This is the environment where I'm free to listen to music.
So maybe it's the cheapness of my listening environment, but I was listening to the first disc of Great Deceiver, which is a compilation of live King Crimson from the 1973-74 lineup. It sounded so awful, I wonder why I bought it years ago.
Probably because the two studio albums from that period I have on CD are so good. Starless and Bible Black came out in 1974, but the brilliant one is Larks' Tongues in Aspic. Unfortunately I cannot actually hear some of the good parts of Larks' Tongues in my Ax on the highway.
Larks' Tongues features wide dynamics, a whole palette of sounds. My impression is that when it was put together, in the studio, these guys were listening to the sounds they made on good speakers or headphones, concerned primarily with creating the kind of performance you'd sit and listen to in the same way you might read a book or watch a film. With most if not all of your attention.
Several years later, bands like Van Halen were listening to tunes on their car stereos when mixing them down to make sure they sounded good under those conditions. Lo-fi music, road noise competing for your fickle attention as you swirled through the radio stations looking for something distracting. Dynamics disappeared. Even a lot of Frank Zappa stuff sounds compressed into a narrow range.
A long time ago, people used to sit and listen to performances that took hours. The average pop song lasts how long? Less than 3 minutes? In the future, it'll all have to be over in the time it takes to surf to the next channel. An entire performance in a fraction of a second.
At the other extreme, the reaction is going to leave other people searching for the richest hues, the widest dynamics, the most involving performances, the musical equivalent of Borges's story about Nolan's work on Fergus Kilpatrick.
Posted by Mark at March 1, 2005 09:45 PM